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Contents © 2004
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

CONFESSIONS
September 2004

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FOXHOLE FAITH

“There are no atheists in foxholes,” goes the old saying. You hear believers say it as a salvo against unbelievers (usually not present) — when you’re up against it and staring death in the face, you’ll come over to our side.

If I were an atheist, and if I were present, I’d be awfully tempted to reply, “If that’s true, then what a shame. Not to have the courage of my convictions. I have nothing but scorn for the deathbed conversion. Of course, the dying man is repenting and accepting Jesus — he’s scared. He’s dying, something nobody likes — losing himself in oblivion. But that’s reality. Converting is just embracing a fantasy because reality is too frightening, the fantasy of a loving God with whom you can live forever. How is that kind of cowardice felicitous? How is that an argument for your side?”

To which the believer might answer, “If the prospect of death is what it takes to make you get over your stupid pride, your imagined strength at shouldering the nightmarish burden of despair, then so be it. You need to be pushed onto the point of the human desire to keep on living, and to consider the meaning of that desire.”

The atheist: “Come on. What does it mean for a cockroach to run from your stomping foot? Living things desire to keep on living. Nothing wants to die; people just complain about it more.”

Last month was a rough one for my faith. Poking around online, I stumbled across a long essay arguing for evolution that calmly addressed many of the more faith-friendly arguments against the idea. First up was one that had always comforted me: the classic “complexity” argument, which points to something so exquisitely wrought as the human eye and says, “chance mutation could not have produced such an organ.” The writer pointed to a witnessed mutation in a simple creature, in which cells began to differentiate and stretch into something resembling the rod cells in the eyeball.

The evolution salvo might not have bothered me so much; but the author pressed on. He made an argument, based on genetics, that it was impossible for us to have descended from one set of parents. But if no Adam and Eve, no original sin handed down from generation to generation. If no original sin, then whence came death as a sentence from which we needed redemption?

And what then of Paul: “In Adam, all sin; in Christ, all may be raised up.”? And what becomes of the regenerative waters of baptism, and the Church which proclaims their necessity? For the first time in ages, I began to succumb to that notion that as science marches on, it will, bit by bit, demolish the edifice of faith.

I caught bits of a Japanese horror movie on TV, in which a teacher mentioned the hormone/toxin/substance which produced the symptoms that “used to be mistaken for religious ecstasies.” That started me chewing on other matters, and raised the suspicion that there is no “me” to have faith — that my precious self, faith included, is just a bundle of upbringing/conditioning/training, chemical reaction, animal impulse, emotional response, et cetera.

But if there are no atheists in foxholes, there are certainly no struggling faithful either. One night, I woke up with a pain in my left arm that radiated into my chest. I woke my wife, told her my symptoms. She agreed that it sounded like a heart attack, and went to check online. (I ended up spending three days under observation in an intensive care unit.)

I lay sideways across our bed and stared at the small crucifix above the illumined doorway into the bathroom. I could just make out the silver Jesus against the wooden cross. I did not wonder whether he existed. I was not scared that he wasn’t there. I was scared that he was there, and that I would soon be meeting him for judgment. After that, my fate would be sealed. The thought of heaven was no consolation; the thought of hell was a powerful misery. I begged him to forgive my sins. Then I begged him not to take me yet. I didn’t protest that I was too young, or that I had a wife and children to support. I just told him I was not ready. I had eaten, drunk, been merry, and now feared that my life was being required of me.

I laugh when I tell people about it. How typical — “Don’t take me now, Lord!” The doctors aren’t certain about what happened; the pain may have been brought on by pneumonia. But I haven’t thought much about my doubts since.

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