You can read the first chapter of The Possibility of Belief here.

The publisher and author draw your attention to the following. This sample of the first chapter of the book is made available not for resale. The sample allows you to Look Inside the book before you purchase.
To read more, visit Amazon and purchase the e-book or paperback.
Please note and respect the copyright notice below.

Copyright © Duncan H. Bayliss all rights reserved. The moral rights of the author are asserted. No unauthorised copying, storage or transmission permitted. Published by Pikeawassa Press.

Paperback ISBN           978-1-7397435-1-2

E-book ISBN                978-1-7397435-0-5

No rights of the author or publisher are waived in any form by permitting you to read this sample chapter.
No editing of this sample chapter is permitted under any circumstances. The definitive text of the chapter is available via a purchase from your Amazon store

The full book is available from Amazon as a Kindle e-book and a paperback.

———————————–

Chapter 1 Introduction

Will you follow the evidence?

In the late summer, before the clouds and rain come to dominate, the cold nights clear the air and the light in the alps has a special quality. A distant pinnacle seemed magnified, highlighted with a clarity beyond what ought to be possible and just beneath it was a refuge, small, made of the stone with a black metal roof, my next destination across a glacier. Mountains flowed without a cloud to interrupt the view in all directions away from Switzerland to Italy and France and it felt as though I could almost see to Austria to the east. The air tasted different. On the way up it was heavy with pollen from late summer haymaking, but here it seemed filtered, purified; the very essence of air itself.

To reach this point on a rocky ridge had taken patience, waiting for the right window in the weather forecast, but the views were worth the effort. Here on the edge of another dimension, the peaks and glaciers burned themselves into my memory. Taking photos seemed unnecessary, since they could never capture such a vast panorama and I knew I would never forget the scene. I climb up into mountains to be among them, rather than always to reach the top. I do it not for some abstract sense of achievement at conquering summits or from a romantic notion that I might climb a mountain and come down a different person, but because beauty is somehow essential. I feel the need to stock up on vistas to see me through the winter ahead, to recharge the mind’s inner eye and to let my thoughts roam freely unencumbered by the constraints of the daily setting.

Mountains are challenging to travel in. We may be drawn by their beauty, but their unpredictability serves as a reminder of our own fragility, our presence there tolerated but not entirely natural. Steep slopes, deep gorges, rockslides, avalanches, high altitudes and thin air, glaciers, and the roaring torrents of mountain streams all make travel in mountains difficult. In the great mountain ranges of the world, the valleys can be miniature worlds in their own right.

Later in that trip in the alps, while finishing off a generous serving of Raclette in a pleasant restaurant, I asked what I might find in the next valley. I was astonished to find that neither the owner of this small restaurant, nor his family, had ever been there despite living in this place all their lives. Just a day’s walk away, or three hours by car or bus, lay another valley full of possibilities, for me, redolent with the promise of new vistas and discoveries; only 10 kilometres in a direct line over the mountain and yet they had never been there! The next valley spoke German and they French, but that need not be an obstacle to curiosity. I climb mountains to clear my mind and my heart seeks out the next view and the next after that, always delighted to discover more natural beauty. Their apparent lack of curiosity about a valley so close by threw me, it was a completely different mindset.

Alain de Botton was onto something when he wrote,

“Journeys are the midwives of thoughts. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, ship or train. There is almost a quaint correlation between what is in front of our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts at times requiring large views, new thoughts new places. Introspective reflections which are liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape. The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do.” (Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel, page 57)

If you travel in the less developed regions of the world the isolation mindset in mountain communities becomes much more marked as the practical difficulties of travel between valleys increases. The people, language, culture, religion, clothing, diet and customs can vary dramatically from one valley to the next.

Now, picture yourself growing up in an isolated mountain village in one of the remotest parts of the world. Everyone seems to share the same values and beliefs. Everyone does things the same way, lives in the same kind of house, eats the same food, wears the same clothes, because that is just how things are done. All the houses are simple stone structures with stone slab roofs and walls around them, forming courtyards. Just about everyone is involved in subsistence farming and life is regulated and ruled by traditional practice and the elders of the community.

Then one day, rumours begin to circulate of a totally different world outside the deep valley where you live. In a community without television, or much in the way of books, or even radio reception it is exceptionally hard to imagine life in any other form than how it presents itself to you. The world around you is all you know. Occasionally people would come through selling metal pans and knives and ceramic bowls otherwise unavailable within the valley and they would tell stories and bring news from the outside world. A good story, told slowly and dramatically for effect, would be worth a meal and some hours beside the fire, as the community gathered round to take in the news and discuss what it meant. Many things might come up in the discussion, a new president, or a war in some far-off country, or worries about landslides further down the valley and rumours that maybe a wide track would be built up through the gorge to your village, with all the hopes and fears for what that would mean for your community. The tales they told seemed other worldly.

No-one in your family had been more that a days’ travel in either direction except for grandad who was called out to go and fight and rarely talked about his time on the dusty plain trying to stay alive so he could come home and carry on providing for his family. A mixture of intense curiosity and an underlying fear of the unknown framed all you heard. Sometimes the talk would turn to a land of wide-open landscapes where you can see vast distances, of endless greenery and trees and grass; an almost mythical land of plenty. The talk would be of customs, clothes, medicines, foods and entertainments unheard of in your valley and from an early age you were determined that somehow, one day, you would find out if it was all just myth and legend? Was it too good to be true, or was it a real place that you could visit? The question would roll around your mind and you could be forgiven for thinking that people and life in the “outside world” would surely be just like those in yours. How different can one deep rocky valley be from another?

At the same time, it was not as though everything was perfect in your home village. If someone becomes sick, they either get better or die. The food is really bland and unvaried. A whole lifetime of bread, some sheep meat, milk and a bit of fruit in season gets pretty tedious. When arguments break out the village elders try to resolve them, but if they get really out of hand people can get killed and then there are honour killings in return. The vendettas can last generations. It’s not heaven on earth.

One day, talking with one of the passing traders, you hear that the way out of the valley is supposed to be up a perilous ladder at the head of a gorge a few days walk away. No-one you have talked to in the village has ever climbed the ladder, some even deny its existence. Others said it was broken and didn’t go anywhere, still others said it was made during the great war to enable you to cross a rocky ridge to another valley just like this one, but this man claims to have climbed it and that it leads to a land of abundance. You know what the elders and your family and friends all say: they say these men are full of tall stories and legends. People used to believe that kind of stuff in old times but now we know it is nonsense. As for the ladder, its broken and it doesn’t go anywhere, so don’t waste your time going to look at it. Everyone knows nothing is up there.

Yet it niggles you and niggles you. What if he is right? Maybe there is more to life than this valley, this rocky prison. So, you slip round to the hut where he is staying and quietly ask him to take you with him when he leaves. You ask to be shown the ladder. The next day, just before dawn, the air cold and dry, the valley eerily silent, you slip out of the village with your guide, leaving behind the flocks of sheep, sparse grass, endless rocks and little stone homes of the village, the long trek to the head of the gorge is tough. When you finally see the ladder, your heart sinks. It doesn’t look climbable. It doesn’t even look safe. It consists of metal rungs or staples embedded in a huge sheer cliff face. In fact, it looks obvious that everyone else in the village must be right, there can’t be anything better up a ladder like that and the doubts creep in. As for finding a better life, what would be the point of risking everything to climb such a ladder to just end up in another valley full of rocks and sheep?

Even so, a little voice keeps prompting you to check out the ladder. You think the options through. Stay where you are and insist that this valley is all there is, just like the village elders, or try to climb out. Why risk climbing? All there is to go on at this point is the word of someone you hardly know who claims to have been this way before. Plus, the tallest ladder you have climbed was no more than ten rungs onto the roof of the house and even that gave you a queasy stomach from the height. This one appears to go up out of sight forever on a sheer cliff face with only blue sky above.

Lost in your own thoughts and weighing up your fears and choices you fail to notice that your guide has already set out climbing and he starts calling down from much higher up,

“The view is amazing, I’m out of the shadow, it’s so warm, you really should come and see for yourself. I can’t describe how far I can see, and how green and beautiful it is.”

“What have I got to lose?” you say to yourself and so, with encouragement from him you start climbing. The first rungs of the ladder do look to be solid enough to try testing, so stepping up, cautiously at first, they hold your weight. Then you climb some more. So far, so good, just remember his advice and don’t look down!

A curious thing about the whole experience of starting on the ladder is that as you climb your perspective changes rapidly. Maybe there is something up there after all. As you emerge from the deep shadow of the valley, the sickening feeling in the pit of your stomach and the thumping of your heart pounding in your ears, take second place to new sensations. The ladder turns out to be much stronger once you are experiencing it, rather than just looking at it from below. It is solid and dependable, and your grip tightens, your legs stop trembling; you are going to be alright. Ascending steadily, it is possible to see much more than you ever have before. Excitement wells up as you wonder what more will be revealed. Some problem with perspective must have been distorting the view from the ground, because the ladder, rather than appearing to be almost endlessly long, now looks and feels solid and safe and very climbable and you think you can see the top. Your assumptions about the ladder had been wrong.

Still testing each rung carefully before you put your weight on it, you move higher with increasing confidence. The rungs seem to get stronger not weaker. Looking back one final time, the gorge below the ladder is now an insignificant part of a greater landscape that is larger more varied and beautiful than you ever imagined. The greatest surprise of all is that up here in this incredible place you are not alone. There are stone walls, paths, meadows, forest and houses all visible.

Stepping off confidently onto solid ground, everything about your former world seems so small and so insignificant, that you now can’t imagine not climbing out of the valley of shadows. As you begin to walk around and explore, the world out of the gorge is everything you were told and more. It all now makes sense. The views are immense, the landscape sparkling in crystal clear air is bursting with beauty and life. It truly has to be seen to be believed. Rich forests and rushing streams, lush deep green meadows highlighted by an array of flowers of every hue. Sheep and cattle are grazing the fields. The scattered farmhouses with flowers on their balconies show that other people are not just surviving here as your community does in your own valley, eking out an existence. Here they are thriving. All of this stands in embarrassing contrast to the tiny stone hut that was home such a short time ago. The air is full of pine scent and bird song, the babbling brook is accompanied by the rustling of bushes in the breeze, it caresses your face as the sun warms your back. The experience is overwhelming, something akin to being released from lifelong imprisonment. It is as though you are experiencing freedom and the wonders of nature for the first time ever and you’re brought to tears of joy. How could you have called it living without experiencing such beauty? How could it be called life to exist in deep shadows, while all the time such wonders were so nearby?

Quite simply, having the courage to climb one ladder has changed your perspective on everything, forever.

I have taken time to describe this metaphor in detail, because the image needs to be in mind throughout all that we will look at in this book. At this point you might be thinking that I can’t be serious with the contrast I have painted between the world of belief and unbelief, between the valley of shadows of secularism and the beautiful landscape of belief and hope? Well truly I am, and I aim to show that it is not wishful thinking or some delusional escapism. Christian belief is real, based on solid evidence and available for anyone to explore. So, let’s begin to examine why this is so.

Over the last century it has become the norm to talk about faith or belief as some sort of leap in the dark, away from solid ground and testable evidence and that picture is deeply embedded in many people’s minds. No analogy is perfect, but the aim of this book is to challenge that view and to present the steps of a ladder that can be climbed towards belief and hope, a dependable robust ladder, rather than a leap in the dark. It aims to show you that contrary to the prevailing view, belief in Jesus is credible, reasonable and fits well with all the evidence you can find of the world around you and even of what you can know of yourself.

Exploring this evidence may well help you to come to belief, but that is a journey that should be undertaken based on an understanding of the evidence and then a willingness to act on it. Don’t rush, test the evidence. At this point however, I am trusting that you are prepared to “follow the argument wherever it leads” (Anthony Flew: we will return to him in a later chapter). So, we will look at the evidence that makes the rungs on this ladder.

I am convinced that one of the main reasons that many people do not consider even trying to climb a ladder to faith or belief, is because they have been persuaded that it is not possible. They have been told that many rungs of the ladder are missing and that others are broken or simply too weak to stand on. So, they won’t even consider trying, they are sure it would be pointless. The short chapters that follow will start looking at the evidence to make the case that belief is a reasonable step to take, that the evidence is there to rely on, and then point out where you can find out more.

Many objections are raised to the very possibility of belief, so much so, that the prevailing view in most western countries today is that belief is only possible when you ignore the evidence and take a leap in the dark. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is only when you ignore the evidence that it is easy to believe nothing much.

What are the supposedly missing and broken rungs? Most people in western countries are aware, at some level, that there have been several main lines of attack on Christian belief in the last 150 years.

The first line of sustained attack has been on the historical reliability of the book Christians base their beliefs on, the Bible. The popular conception of the result of a century and a half of those attacks by critics, is that there is little evidence for the existence of Jesus and that the other stories in the Bible are basically legend and not anything a reasonable person would base their life on. And if they are “made up” then why believe anything the Bible says?

The second line of attack has been through the ideas promulgated by Charles Darwin and others on evolution, which is now popularly perceived to explain the existence of all life without the need for any kind of God.

“Those rejecting religious belief cite scientific theories of unguided chemical and biological evolution more frequently than any other reason for their loss of faith.” (Stephen Meyer, The Return of the God Hypothesis, Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe, page 434)

A third line of attack has come from physics and astronomy with ideas around the origin of the universe as arising from a Big Bang. Again, as it is popularized, there is no need for a God, the universe just made itself.

Running hand in hand with these ideas have been many others that have been deadly to the faith of millions. For example, a fourth line of attack has been the claim that there is no such thing as truth. In fact, these attacks are closely interlinked, since if there is no God, or at least not one who is knowable, then we have no-one to answer to but ourselves. If everything evolved by Random Chance from ‘molecules to man’, then there is no ultimate basis for right and wrong, only what we agree amongst ourselves. Everything becomes relative and we are left with no real truth, just subjectivity. That is the place where western culture has ended up.                           

In a short book like this we can’t deal with every objection, but we must look at some of these foundational views that affect everything else. We must engage with them since they underpin the world view of most secular or non-religious people in Europe, North America and many other countries, whether they realize it or not. Everyone has a world view, but not everyone’s world view is based on careful consideration of the evidence. In fact, for many people all they have done is give it a quick look and move on.

We will consider each of those attacks on Christian belief just outlined and see if they stand up to scrutiny. To summarize in plain language, those secular views go something like this: 

The Universe came from a big bang a very long time ago. Somehow by Random Chance life started and evolved, ending up with us. There’s no real meaning to life other than the meaning we make for ourselves. The Bible is made up stories. Jesus was no more than a good teacher with some interesting insights on ethics. There is no absolute right or wrong. Anyone who has faith in God is basically involved in wishful thinking, which most of the time is fairly harmless, but not based on anything reliable, or on any kind of solid evidence.

We will consider whether this is in fact a credible set of claims, as millions assume. Is all the evidence really stacked in favour of secular unbelief? Is it really the case that Christian belief isn’t possible on any reasonable basis? Which fits better with the evidence?

We will look at some of the most basic evidence available and see whether, on balance, it supports either Christian belief, or an agnostic or atheistic and secular view of life. However, what most people do, most of the time, is to measure claims they encounter against the basic assumptions they already hold as “true” and then dismiss what doesn’t agree with those assumptions or pre-suppositions. That approach makes some sense on a day-to-day basis, but there is a time for stepping back and checking whether the assumptions you hold to are actually based on anything like reliable evidence. They may be held by many other people, but they may also not be true.

So, to continue with the analogy that we started with, let’s see if we can identify the basic steps on the ladder to belief and see how strong they are. Truth always stands up to scrutiny. I hope that in following the evidence you will find that belief is not only possible and reasonable but that it also makes surprisingly good sense of who you are, what your life is all about, and is true to the evidence in the world around you.

Every person’s journey through life is different, but we all owe it to ourselves to face up to reality as it presents itself

“Jacob, …. taking one of the stones there, he put it under his head and lay down to sleep. He had a dream in which he saw a ladder resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven.”

Moses, in the book of Genesis 28 vs 1

Let’s climb a ladder