Coming to know

I had it on good authority from my Brooklynite daughter that the No. 2 train would take me to Penn Station in Manhattan.

Nevertheless, I asked a man on the platform for confirmation. His answer ramped up my assurance an extra notch.

Once on board, I watched the station names fly by on the subway walls, to make sure we were heading uptown and not downtown. When I heard 34th Street announced, I exited with a high degree of confidence.

That didn’t stop me, however, from inquiring of a policeman standing idle in the concourse if Amtrak operates out of the Penn Station complex.

Sound silly? In fact it is a small example of the ordinary act of human knowing that we all engage in, Christian and non-Christian alike. We come to know what we know by amassing (consciously or unconsciously) clues and evidences, or by believing an authority for things we have no direct experience of (the existence of Finland or the fact of Axis defeat in World War II).

There is no such thing as ontological absolute certainty in this life. College calculus taught us that a variable may get infinitely close to a specific target value but never quite arrives. It is the same with all knowledge.

“We know in part.” No matter how much evidence we gather, acting on it always requires as a final step the volitional act of a leap of faith, of category. Stepping onto an airplane or depositing your full weight on your kitchen chair each requires faith. It is the nature of the human condition. This is why we should let no one get away with claiming the false dichotomy that Christians live by faith and non-Christians do not.

There are only degrees of certainty. Back to my New York excursion, it was possible (though not likely) that my daughter was mistaken about subway lines. It was possible (though the unlikeliness is now compounded) that the man on the platform tossed off a glib “yes” to get me out of his hair.

It is even possible that some prankster had commandeered the subway intercom and announced 34th Street by fraud. But at this point we are dealing with degrees of possibility so infinitesimal that mathematicians use the word “theoretical” to describe them. A reasonable person will not put much ­credence in it.

My brother, in his Maharaji flirtation in the early ’70s, liked to say, “If when I am sleeping I dream I am a butterfly, how do I know when I am awake that I am not a butterfly dreaming I am a man?” Good luck with that. While it is “theoretically” possible that life is but a dream, then I’m a genius because I, middling SAT scores notwithstanding, have dreamed up trees and metallurgy and electricity and the shapes of the continents and Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.

The better “that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him” (Acts 17:26–27), God woos man with not only many evidences, but many kinds of evidences—the celestial (Romans 1) but also the internal (Ecclesiastes 7:20); the five senses but also the conscience; the guilt that nags, but also the discovery of impulses of affection within our breast; the historical and also the archaeological; the sun-kissed fields of flowers, but also the traffickers in their dark lairs. Taken together, these are clues: There is something odd about the world. Looks like it was made by a Creator who is Love itself, but some malevolent Enemy has spoiled it.

(I have felt, while in bed, in the dark, on two occasions in my adult life, the presence of sheer evil in the room. And I have known beyond a shadow of a doubt that evil is a person, not a brain epiphenomenon.)

Charles Murray (The Bell Curve, Coming Apart), hard-nosed Harvard-trained researcher to the core, has wrestled against the evidences for God most of his life, since his wife Catherine’s epiphany in 1985 set things in motion, and has finally come kicking and screaming to Taking Religion Seriously (2025). What “evidence” persuaded Catherine of God? She found she loved their baby daughter Anna “far more than evolution demands.”

To this day, Murray confesses to envying his wife because she has faith and he does not. Will someone tell the dear man the one thing he lacks—to bow the knee. Faith in God is a command: “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved” (Acts 16:31). It is a reasonable command based on evidences ranging from the orderliness of mathematics to the face of a newborn child. Say the sole alternative that has integrity is to surrender to the findings he himself presents within the pages of his book.