Catholic Dads

Doubt

August 13th, 2010

I never wondered much about God’s existence. This wasn’t a virtue, particularly; I didn’t know how. I could do a thought experiment: what would it be like if I didn’t believe in God? But it was just an experiment — like imagining if 2+2 were 5.

Later, I got the rational foundations of the faith, largely thanks to C. S. Lewis’s popularizations. If I hadn’t already believed, I didn’t see how I could avoid it all: man raised from the dead with numerous witnesses. Were they insane — all of them insane about the same thing, at the same time? But if it was a scam, it’s hard to see what they hoped to gain other than what they got: exile and execution by torture, with plenty of opportunities to say they made it all up, but no one ever did.

So something surprised me recently. I was watching a movie I’d picked up when Hollywood Video went out of business: The Man from Earth. No, don’t bother; it turned out to be a bunch of characters who didn’t seem to belong together, sitting in a house and talking. I didn’t finish it. I can’t prove it but I am sure the big secret was going to be that the immortal caveman was Jesus Christ and he knew our religion, like all non-atheist perspectives, was (in his word) “hogwash.”

But along the way, when it came out that he was a religious figure, someone said (to build up to the climax I’m sure): Were you Moses?

He dismissed that with contempt. There never was a Moses, he said. Moses was based on Mises, a god in Syrian mythology who was found on a riverbank, and maybe had some associated plagues.

What surprised me was that I actually looked it up. Could the writer be right?

As it turns out, my Googling turned up anti-God blogs, and a quote from an angry atheist book published some time in the past century, I think. Couldn’t find anything scholarly, anything actually about Syrian myth that would confirm that Mises was a god washed up on a riverbank, who predated Moses, and therefore Moses didn’t exist.

But what would I have done if I had found out that Moses didn’t exist?

What would we do if we found out Jesus did not rise from the dead? St. Paul has his say: this is what we’re all about. ”If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain . . . we are of all men most miserable.”

And I don’t think this is a bad thing. If we maintained our faith regardless of whether it was sound, we’d be fools.

So I’m glad I got this little jolt.

But I won’t do an extensive study of Syrian mythology to make sure. Seriously: if someone could really prove Moses never existed, how would it be that I’d only just heard of it? As soon as it came out it would be world headlines.

Or would the media which brought us the hyped but silly lost tomb of Jesus documentary (claiming to have found Jesus’s bones) suppress this story to protect the church? Or would nobody but a few angry dissenters think it was worth noticing that the #2 man in Judaism was an alien god? At this rate . . . I could never be an atheist. I’m too riddled with doubt.

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