Faith Is Like Skydiving

And Other Memorable Images for Dialogue with Seekers and Skeptics

Rick Mattson

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780830879670
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

It can be hard to explain why you believe in God. But images and analogies can provide concrete handles for making the Christian faith more plausible. If someone claims that Christians make a "blind leap of faith, " you can respond, "No, it's not a blind leap. Faith is like skydiving. You check out your parachute beforehand and make sure it's secure. You follow the safety instructions. And then you jump. It's a leap, but it's not a blind leap. It's an informed leap." Experienced evangelist and apologist Rick Mattson has collected dozens of easy-to-use images for explaining Christianity. God's amazing design of the world? It's like getting dealt a royal flush over and over again. Why is there evil and suffering in the world? Because it's a broken world, and things are not how they're supposed to be.With practical tips on how to interact with your skeptical friends, this book provides a handy toolkit of memorable and instantly usable images for conversation. Find yourself better equipped to give an answer to anyone who asks you about your faith.

Part One

Making Your Case

  

1

Faith Is Like Skydiving

Look Before You Leap!

When Emily entered the room, she caught my eye but glanced away quickly, parking her lunch tray in the back of the room as she sat down. I was giving a noon-hour presentation titled “Faith, Evidence and Proof” at a private college in the Midwest. A dozen students and myself were jammed into tight quarters around an oblong table in a conference room off the dining center. Before long the conversation was sizzling, and Emily had no place to hide.

I called on her. She looked at me warily. She seemed conflicted—interested in the topic but, then again, maybe not wanting to be there at all. “I don’t know if I could believe in God without some sort of proof,” she said quietly.

“What kind of proof?” I asked. She shrugged. Her body language had me confused—it was a mix of “Don’t call on me again; I don’t want to talk” and a pleading manner, as if to say, “I want to be part of this community. I want to have my own faith, but I just can’t right now. Yet here I am, searching . . . ”

As it turned out, I would see Emily several times that week as I gave a series of outreach talks at her campus. And I learned that her faith struggles played out on two stages: emotional and intellectual.

Let’s start with the emotional.

That’s how I first came to faith. As a young musician touring the country with our family band (“The Mattsons”), I felt secure and important. But upon returning home at age nineteen, the bright lights were absent, my girlfriend had dumped me and I was truly a lost soul. Friends from high school shared Christ with me, and after several months of resistance I realized I needed whatever they had, whatever was making them overflow with vibrant joy and love—all of which contrasted sharply with my own overflow of sarcasm and despair.

So I went for it. In my pal Dave Musser’s parents’ living room, I asked Jesus into my life and vaulted forward into sheer euphoria. Gone was the burden of melancholy that had plagued me for months. Heaven itself had swept me up in its arms and for the next half-year seemed to carry me a foot off the ground.

What eventually brought me back to earth was the alarming question “What have I done?” That was followed closely by “Is Christianity even true?” I’ve spent the last thirty-five years working on that second question.

For many Christians, this is not a pressing matter. They feel secure in their faith, and if you ask them, “Why choose Christianity? Why not take a leap of faith into Islam or Buddhism or any other religion or worldview?” their response is, “I don’t know. You just have to have faith in Christ.”

For those who possess a simple faith born of their upbringing or their desperate need for Jesus or a kingdom community to belong to, I say more power to them. Some people seem to have the gift of faith, one that comes naturally. They don’t need a lot of logic behind it. We could put a negative spin on their experience by calling it a blind leap into darkness, but I’d say it’s mostly an instinctive move into divine light, an uncluttered response to the beckoning of God.

That’s not how Emily saw things. For her there had to be solid reasons to back up her faith if it were ever to blossom. And I’m not like that either. I realized I needed to know the arguments, the rationale, the history, the evidence for something before placing my faith in it. Are there well-founded reasons for thinking Christianity is true?

If there were no valid reasons, or if the evidence turned against Christianity, I’d be gone. Outta here. I’d have to give up my job as a campus minister, stop going to church, stop praying, look elsewhere for meaning and just play more golf, I guess. I’m not the type to hang on to a falsehood just so I can milk it for emotional security. There’s no true security in a fabrication.

Thus for many Christians like Emily and myself, faith comes in two stages: evidential and relational. The evidential stage is where we work through the rational case for Christ. It’s mainly a cognitive process that consists of sifting through evidence and examining arguments, as if our minds were a court of law coming to a verdict about Christianity. If the verdict is positive, we’re able to move forward with the relational stage, which involves making a personal commitment of love and trust in Jesus Christ.

Someone may object that the two stages of faith are not that neat and clean, and I agree. In the real world people move back and forth between the evidential and the relational sides of faith, similar to a budding romance that leads to marriage. When I was dating my wife Sharon, there was a period of two years when I was simultaneously falling in love while also mentally evaluating the evidence of her good character and loyalty (I admit, it sounds a little cold and calculating). It was all happening at the same time.

Nevertheless, even though the chronological order of the two faith stages is comingled, the logical order is not. Logically, solid evidence for Christ is a precondition for a relationship with Christ, at least for people like myself who are intellectually cautious and wish to avoid irrational commitments.

In the remainder of this chapter I will offer two concrete images that illustrate the evidential and relational stages of faith.

Evidential Stage Image: Skydiving

Certain stories have incredible staying power in my mind, such as an account told to me many years ago by a woman whose husband died in a skydiving accident. I don’t even remember her name (or his), but I’ve no problem recalling the details of the tragedy. It was in Florida. He leapt from a plane on a windy day, spiraled downward, pulled the ripcord, dangled under a full chute, appeared to be coming in for a soft two-point landing—but got entangled in power lines.

The image of skydiving illustrates the evidential stage of faith for several reasons. One is the risk of failure, as the above story illustrates.

How could faith possibly fail? Easy. If you place your faith in the wrong thing, it fails. After all, it’s logically possible that Christianity is false and another worldview, such as Judaism or atheism, is true. And even though I may affirm the person whose faith comes naturally without much evidential support, it’s only fair to acknowledge that such faith could in fact be misplaced.

I once asked a Mormon missionary how he knew his faith was true. He replied that when he was reading the Book of Mormon, God spoke to his heart, and he thus came to believe in the Mormon religion. This is sometimes called a “burning of the bosom,” a sense that God is revealing himself through the Mormon scriptures. I pressed the matter further. How did he know it was actually God speaking to him and not some other spiritual being or even his own imagination? He just knew. But how? He’d simply opened his heart to the truth of the scriptures and now he was one hundred percent convinced. But—

You see the dilemma of a faith-only approach to truth, which is sometimes called “fideism” by scholars. Choosing the correct object of faith is the crucial thing. I’ve met people of all different religions (not to mention the irreligious) who hold their beliefs in a natural, organic, almost effortless way. It hardly occurs to them that their views could be false. Yet they cannot all be true. Religions such as Christianity, Mormonism, Judaism and Buddhism make statements about reality that are in direct conflict with each other. For example, the Christian understanding of God as Trinity disagrees with the other religions just mentioned. Logically, someone (or everyone) is off base here.

But it’s not just fideism that can fail. Those of us who work hard at the evidential part of faith have no guarantees that our cognitive pursuits will pay off. We can be tragically caught in the power lines of intellectualism. We can mishandle arguments, misinterpret data or cave in to our prejudices and wishful thinking. The supposed objective “court of law,” which is our mind’s judge and jury, may not function properly. When we jump out of the airplane of faith, faulty thinking can land us in the wrong spot.

Still, I’ll take my chances with the evidence. To me there’s nothing like thoroughly investigating a case for something before believing its claims. That’s why I’ve spent the last three-plus decades asking the question of whether Christianity is true, digging through its historical, philosophical and experiential arguments. It’s been a fantastic course of study! Again, I absolutely do not want to hold to a position that is false.

And hey, did you know that skydiving is relatively safe? It’s easy to focus on the risk of failure, but what about the probabilities of success? Well, according to the U.S. Parachute Association, in 2010 only twenty-one fatalities occurred in its members’ estimated three million jumps. That’s a 99.993 percent safety record.

Before I’d ever jump out of an airplane, I’d read all the safety statistics and interview seasoned jumpers and check out every single piece of high-tech gear twice. That process is what I call the evidential part of skydiving. You look before you leap. You calculate the risks. And even though the evidence falls short of the high standard of proof, it’s still pretty convincing.

Notice that so far in this argument about the first stage of faith, we’ve emphasized how evidence and rationale are important to many thoughtful Christians, but we haven’t provided any evidence yet. That’s okay. That will come later. An important lesson for apologists is to build the case for faith slowly, one brick at a time. The small but significant claim we’re making here is that evidence matters to faith. That’s it. No need to present the whole deal at once. Let the larger case for Christ unfold incrementally, establishing each minor point as a foundation for additional points to be made in the future.

A skeptic may have several responses to our modest presentation at this juncture. A common one is that evidence as I’m defining it via the skydiving image is not applicable to religion. I hear this objection all the time. But here is where we must be strong. Notice my strategy in the following conversation:

ME: My faith in Christ depends on solid evidence and rationale. It’s like skydiving. There’s lots of evidence, such as the quality of the jumping gear and the statistical record of the U.S. Parachute Association, to suggest that I’ll live to tell about my experience, so I’m willing to risk my life for the thrill of it all. I admit there’s no proof of my safety in this sport, just as there’s no proof of the truth of Christianity. But the evidence and arguments for a leap of faith from an airplane are very convincing—enough, at least, to actually take the plunge.

SKEPTICAL FRIEND: That’s fine, Rick, but you can’t apply that same reasoning to religion. Religious faith, by definition, is purely subjective and is not supported by evidence. You’re confusing faith and facts, religion and science. Religion is the realm of feelings, values and personal faith. Science is the realm of logic, evidence and reason. Don’t get them mixed up.

ME: But my faith is supported by evidence. After all, it’s my faith, my way of doing things. I would never place my faith in Christ unless there were plenty of evidence and arguments for doing so. I’m interested in an “informed” faith, not a blind faith. And you’re not really in a position to tell me otherwise.

See what I just did? I’ve used a concrete image—skydiving—to make a memorable point that’s essentially autobiographical—my faith, my story. I’m the one who skydives and who draws the parallel to faith in Christ, and I must not allow my skeptical friend to declare such a connection out of bounds.

If the first common response from skeptics is to attempt to disallow the analogy between faith and skydiving, the second is much more hopeful. The person simply says, “Okay then, show me the evidence.”

This is exactly the response we’re looking for because it means our friend has agreed to the idea that faith can, in principle, be supported by evidence. Never take this point for granted. Though it seems obvious to most Christians, atheists sometimes relegate the whole notion of faith into an airtight compartment that is cut off from rational processes.

But again, it’s not their faith; it’s ours. And we cannot allow them to define our faith for us. If our faith is “rational,” that’s our business. In public debates and in private conversations with atheists, I’ve said many times, “Don’t impose your definition of faith on me. I’m not defending a version of Christianity that is based on blind faith. I’m defending faith that is shaped by reason, logic and evidence. I’m talking about informed faith, calculated risk.”

For the skeptical friend who is in fact wanting to hear the evidence for the truth claims of Christianity, we’re in great position to move the conversation forward in any number of directions. We can look at the historical evidence for the life of Jesus as presented in the four Gospels. We can talk about the philosophical, moral and scientific arguments that undergird the Christian faith. And most importantly, we can existentially demonstrate the love of Jesus to our friend and perhaps invite her to experience the supernatural manifestation of Christ himself, that being Christian community. These options are all fair game, and deciding on the right one(s) takes prayer and discernment.

Back to Emily. I remember my week at her campus. InterVarsity sponsored a talk on “The Problem of Suffering, Evil and a Good God.” She was there. Same ambivalence in her manner. “Christianity and the Challenge of Other Religions” also brought her out, and in this talk she actually raised her hand and asked a question. That was progress. “Atheism and the Existence of God” was the talk where I saw a real change coming over Emily. She was fully engaged in the argument I’d drawn on the board and had no problem looking me directly in the eye.

Afterward, she approached me. “Can we talk?”

I grinned. “I was hoping you’d eventually say that.”

She told me that Christianity was really making sense to her, that the reasons for believing in Jesus were falling into p...