Written and contributed by Adam Newman
Gullibility is not the same as real faith. Faith is only as good as the thing we trust. When people do not believe in Christianity, it is not as though they believe in nothing. They still believe things, since the act of our believing in God is not any different than the trust we place in anything else. Everyone trusts all the time (as Plato pointed out in the Republic: faith is the basic psychology of our experience of things). Humans don’t typically doubt, unless they have a reason to doubt. However, we must ask why people doubt Christianity. Do they have reasons to doubt it?
Typically, people don’t disbelieve Christianity based upon the fact that they considered it and came to the cold, harsh truth that it was simply unbelievable. Rather, they don’t really consider it because the experience of faith acts like water. Faith displaces doubts and other beliefs. For example, if I believe I am sitting here, it precludes belief that I am not sitting here. Unless, of course, I am being irrational, which also accounts for how most people believe as well. They hold mutually exclusive beliefs, with the “real” ones showing up in action (which is also why faith without works is dead). If I am actually sitting here, anybody can see what I really believe, even if I say otherwise. So, when people do not believe in Christ, they have actually displaced that faith with faith in something, which upon scrutiny always proves to be much more unbelievable than Christianity. This latter point is essentially the thesis of the book, I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist by Frank Turek and Norman Geisler. An atheist supposedly believes in no God, then operates as though things matter and are intelligible. Or, I think it is pretty obvious that a person would never choose Hinduism, with its crazy caste system, over Christianity.
However, people do, in fact, believe in things far less plausible than Christianity. Indeed, Christians know this fact to be the case. Furthermore, the criteria for believing in Christianity is very high, so faith in Christ sets a high bar for believing in anything else that is not Christian. St. Paul (in Romans 1) says that when people reject the obvious and clear faith in Christ, they become fools, and one of the things that characterizes fools (in ancient Greek ethics and Proverbs) is that they are gullible. St. Paul actually pointed out in this passage that when people reject belief in God, thus showing themselves to be utter fools, then they engage in two other foolish practices: idolatry and perverted sexuality. Hence, we can gauge the level of foolish unbelief by the extent of idolatry and perverted sexuality. If such foolish things are on the rise, so is unbelief. True faith in Christ displaces bad faith in other things, like false gods. Accordingly, being a Christian makes a person less gullible.
But what about gullible Christians? By their fruits, you will know them. It is pretty obvious that a person who says he believes in Christ, and is gullible in other respects, has shown the character of his faith. You simply can’t believe in Christ and be otherwise gullible. Faith in Christ is not foolish, and this faith becomes the basis for our faith in anything else. Like Israel in the Bible, those who are supposed to be numbered among God’s people can engage extensively in illicit activities. And when they do, we know that the judgment of God upon them is imminent (as St. Paul also explains in Romans).
It is this foolish gullibility of unbelief that we increasingly face today in the world, including among Christians. When people reject Christianity, we can expect them to become more gullible. Wise people, like Socrates, question the basis upon which they believe things. They never take anything for granted. They also know that the world is full of clever folks waiting to take advantage of them through schemes. Cleverness is actually a foil for true wisdom. If there was anything that became obvious after the year 2020, people today are increasingly and overtly gullible. With the decrease of belief in Christianity (both explicitly and in people no longer attending church, even when they say they believe in God), we see an increase in belief in things far less believable (as expected).