Big Questions Lead To Big Answers #1 - Must We Ask Questions

Must we ask questions?


    So here's a good question: Must we ask questions? The short answer, of course, is "yes." I hear you saying, "Now wait just one minute, here. Didn't you just spend the last whole section on talking about how important it is to seek good answers to good questions?" Trust me, I'm not pulling a fast one on you. I'm asking a question about the validity of questioning and the ideas that you bring with you when you begin to ask your brilliant questions. These are called presuppositions, and they are tricky fish to catch. We all bring ideas about truth and the experience of truth to any exploration of it. We must be careful to "see" how we see things and that we may have a faulty foundation that may need to be dealt with first. 
    It is important to work out whether we are being honest intellectually in our quest for knowledge and the truth. Why? Because if I don't really believe there is such a thing as truth that is true, what am I seeking to know? Obviously I am seeing things as all relative to one another and based on a situational basis, case by case. I may be convinced that there is in fact no way to know the truth, and therefore skeptical to a fault, committing the fault of Hume or Descartes, coming to the point of doubting even my own existence. This can go so far as to  cause someone to imagine that they themselves are God, as in New Age religion, or are the zero point reference  of all things, called solipsism. 
   The other direction is to simply be intellectually lazy, not wanting to ask questions at all. I have met many people in this group, even so-called Christians. The Barna Group that does so much work polling and finding out what people think about themselves and their beliefs calls these people "Notionals." The name gives away their problem. They have a notion that they are Christians, but in fact are not according to Biblical requirements. The scary part about this is that this group consists of fully half of the people claiming to be Christians in the United States, approximately some forty to fifty million people. So for millions of people their unwillingness to think through their faith and core beliefs leaves them in a precarious position both spiritually and intellectually. 
    In C.S. Lewis's first published work after becoming a Christian, The Pilgrim's Regress, he ably creates a clear understanding of both extremes; the unthinking and intellectually void pop Christianity and the hyper-intellectual philosophers and theologians of his day. Not much has changed since he wrote that book. There are still the same ditches on both sides of the road, one leading to a vapid super-spirituality and legalism and the other leading to a dry formalism or nihilistic cynicism.


from: JavaJazzJesus