Suspended Disbelief
The term “suspension of disbelief” was first coined by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1817. Coleridge asked readers to allow a “willing suspension of disbelief,” so they might better engage with his fantastical poems.
Of course, we have all done this when reading a good book or watching a movie. Often, the difference between a positive or negative review is whether the critic was persuaded to suspend their disbelief. But even as we are persuaded to do this, no one really thinks that Superman can fly, or that Dr. Frankenstein was able to bring a corpse back to life. Rather, for the sake of being taken on the journey, we make a conscious decision to suspend critical thinking.
What we are less conscious of is the fact that we are often called upon to suspend our disbelief when it comes to how we view the real world. For example, who has ever actually witnessed the spontaneous generation of life from non-living matter? The fact that this has never been observed begs the question, what’s the difference between this “story” and the tale of Frankenstein’s life-imparting lightning strike? As far as we have been able to determine, the one is just as improbable as the other. At least Frankenstein’s effort had an intelligent agent behind it while the story we have been told is totally dependent on a chance occurrence. Yet, we consider one a fantasy while the other is touted as a fact.
The greatest minds in the world, combined with all of today’s advances in science and technology, don’t begin to know how to breathe life into non-living material. It’s not just that it’s difficult to do, it’s that we have discovered it to be beyond the realm of possibility. By any definition, such an event, however it happened, would be a miracle. And yet, without blinking an eye, we have suspended our disbelief and have accepted that it was blind, unguided chance that produced life. Modern science has asked us to allow a “willing suspension of disbelief,” so that we might better engage in their fantastical theories about reality, and we have complied.
We don’t typically suspend our critical thinking to no benefit, so why have we been willing to do this? What is the pay-off? We have turned our critical facilities off and accepted an inadequate explanation for the inexplicable so that we might avoid the implications of the inexplicable. We have suspended our critical thinking in order to embrace a narrative that leaves God out of the picture. In the face of the miraculous, instead of awe, we have chosen suspended disbelief.
"For ever since the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky. Through everything God made, they can clearly see his invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature. So they have no excuse for not knowing God" (Romans 1:20, NLT).
The Selective Search for Intelligence
In the movie Contact, Jodie Foster plays Dr. Arroway, an atheist scientist who works for the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program at an observatory in Puerto Rico. She and her colleagues work tirelessly using high-tech equipment to analyze the airwaves for possible signals sent by extraterrestrial life.
After years of patiently scanning the skies, they finally hit the jackpot -- a strong signal repeating a sequence of prime numbers, apparently emitting from the Vega star. The moment Dr. Arroway hears a pattern in the signal, she immediately recognizes that it was produced by an intelligent source.
"Those are primes!" she exclaims. "Two, Three, Five, Seven...those are all prime numbers and there's no way that's a natural phenomenon!"
Dr. Arroway's reaction to the pattern in the signal is a reasonable one. The human mind naturally recognizes purposeful patterns when it encounters them, and logically infers that they are the product of intelligence. But for those who have made up their minds that God does not exist, the search for intelligence is highly selective. Dr. Arroway, like her atheist colleagues, is only prepared to see intelligence where they want to see it. The complexity they encounter in nature, and even in their own DNA, though far more complex than a list of prime numbers, does not impress them in the same way.
It seems that the weighty implications that come with an admission to the existence of God have closed their minds to what should be obvious to them.
"So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts" (Ephesians 4:17-18).
Anyone Can Have a Change of Heart
"I have been persuaded that it is simply out of the question that the first living matter evolved out of dead matter and then developed into an extraordinarily complicated creature. The unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce life must have involved intelligence."
Rationalist Philosopher Antony Flew, atheist until age 81
Anyone can have a change of heart and become convicted of the truth, even those who have spent their entire lives trying to deny it. That should provide hope to those of us who share God's desire for "...all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth" (1 Timothy 2:4).