It seems it is not like that in religion. In religion, he has to have faith; he has to trust the evidence to be true. What kind of evidence is it that you have to trust to be true? Surely the evidence itself should be convincing. He begins to think that Christians are a credulous lot. They are so eager; they so much want to believe that they believe almost anything. He wants to say, "Look, show me. Seeing is believing, so show me."

I don't know how you would talk to the unbeliever who asks you the question or who said that to you. Let me tell you how I would respond to them. I would say, "Affirm, if you wish, that seeing is believing, but if you do, realize what the implications are, then be prepared to live with them. Let me point out two or three of them to you.

Say, if you wish, that seeing is believing, but if you do, you had better make up your mind that you will never be a scientist. That may be a strange thing to say, because surely the scientist is the one person who believes only what he sees. That is how we commonly think of them.

Is that how you think of a scientist? If it is, I think you sell him short. Scientists are far more creative and far more imaginative than that. They are the people who are saying to us now-a-days, "Not seeing is believing, but if you believe only what you see, you won't see very much and you won't believe very much."

I know a journalist who has a friend who is a scientist. He says to him, "You journalists may get away with the glib conclusion and the surface judgment, but we scientists can't." He goes on to tell him astonishing things, fantastic things. He says to him, "Matter, this hard stuff, is really energy and light is subject to gravity. If you increase an object's speed, you decrease the passage of its time." This is astonishing, but that is what they are saying to us.

I know another scientist and he says that some people think that scientists just go around picking up facts. He refers to those scientist as the stamp collectors of science. Then he goes on to apologize to all stamp collectors. Facts are not just sitting there waiting to be picked up. Facts are available only to those who have thought and imagination.

For example, do you know that the protons and electrons -- the very stuff of matter, the stuff of which matter is made -- have never been seen or touched? We know they exist only because they hold together in a kind of schema which is itself a mental concept.

Science isn't a matter of believing only what you see. Science is a matter of believing and seeing by believing. One of the greatest scientists tells us that. Einstein said that it all begins in an attitude and the attitude is one of wonder which is not far from faith. He says that astronomy began not when somebody looked at a star through a telescope. It began when somebody said, "Twinkle, twinkle little star. How I wonder what you are." Say that seeing is believing, but if you do, don't expect to be a scientist.

Here is the second thing: say that seeing is believing but if you do, don't expect to be a creative artist. The creative artist will reply, "There isn't anything to see."

This morning in the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church I preached a sermon which didn't exist yesterday. Creativity means bringing into being something that was not there before. It was Robert Frost who loved to say, "No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader."

I read an interview with Ernest Hemingway carried out by a journalist not long before Hemingway died. He talked to Hemingway about The Old Man and the Sea. Hemingway said to him, "When the fish swam around the bait, I didn't know whether it was going to take it or not. I had to discover whether or not it was going to take it."

Flannery O'Connor, that great American novelist from Georgia, says of one of her short stories, "I didn't know how it was going to come out. I had to discover how it was going to end." C. Day Lewis, the late poet laureate, says that poetry is not the expression of truth in verse, it is the discovery of truth in verse.

You find that out in good conversation. It is then you discover that it is not somebody thinking something and then saying it. It is that you discover truth in the very action of saying it. Sometimes you say something that was better than anything you thought and you said, "My goodness, I didn't realize I was that clever. Did I really say that?"

In creativity, believing is seeing.

Here is the third thing. Say, if you wish, that seeing is believing, but if you do, then you had better get ready for some very superficial relationships because that is the only kind you are going to get. You know how it is when a young couple falls in love. Jack and Jill. Some of the old gossips say over their bridge cards, "I don't know what he sees in her," or "I don't know what she sees him." They are absolutely right. They don't know, but Jack knows. He sees in Jill the fulfillment of the ideal of womanhood and she sees in him a very wonderful man. There has been nobody like him ever. Who is right, the old gossips or Jack and Jill?

William James once gave his attention to that question. He said, "It's Jack and Jill who are right, and for this reason, they are right because love and trust and openness reveal what suspicion and hostility and cynicism will hide."

In other words, only trust will reveal what a person is. Who knows you best? The people who trust you and whom you trust. If I can't trust you and if you don't trust me, you are never going to know me because I am not ever going to show you anything that I care about. When we are met with suspicion or hostility, the juices of personality dry up and we are not ourselves. We can hardly express ourselves at all.

Do you remember you went to a party and you thought everybody was watching you to see if you would make a mistake? You hardly knew what to say and whatever you did was awkward and whatever you said was clumsy. You tried to tell a funny story. When you told it to your friends, they rolled on the floor. You tried it at the party and it died and you nearly did, too.

With your friends there is openness and trust. They know who you are because you are not afraid to show them. It is a bit like that in preaching. Sometimes people say that great preachers make great congregations. It is also true that great congregations make great preachers, by their attentiveness, by their expectation, by their trust. They bring the very best out of us.

I know about a preacher and he preached in a particular church. He told a friend, "I preached there ten years ago and I still haven't got the chill out of my bones." It was like that with our Lord. One of the saddest comments in the New Testament is that He could do no mighty work there, such was their lack of faith.

That brings me to the last thing. If you say that seeing is believing, you will never be a great scientist; you will not be a creative artist; you will have nothing but superficial relationships, and here is the last thing: If you say that seeing is believing, you will never be a leader.

There are some whose conception of leadership says to us, "Now you demonstrate to me that that can't fail and if you do, then I will give you my support." I want to say to them, "Look, if I could demonstrate that to you, I wouldn't need your support. By the time I can demonstrate it, by the time I can prove it to you, we are already past it."

Leadership doesn't say, "Prove it to me and then I'll give you my support." Leadership comes in and says, "With faith and trust and openness, we can really make this thing work."

Four things. What is it really that I have said to you? Let me in good homiletical style tell you what I have just told you. It is this: faith is a way of seeing. St. Augustine put it perfectly. He said, "To have faith is to believe what you can't see and the reward of faith is to see what you believe."

I remember once going to the cinema and the film was out of focus and that annoyed me because it had cost me $5.00 to get in. I said to the attendant, "Would you sharpen the focus on that?" And, he did. He went away and tried, but not perfectly.

Driving home, I noticed that the highway signs were out of focus and there wasn't anybody to complain to about them. What if there is something out there waiting to be seen?

What if faith is a way of seeing? If I say to you, "Have faith," I am not asking you to surrender your intellectual integrity; I am calling upon your humanity. Believer and unbeliever alike, if we don't have faith, we won't see.

David Hardin: Maurice, you told me that one of your favorite sermons was given on this program.

R. Maurice Boyd: Many years ago, Dave, I read a sermon by Leslie Weatherhead that had been preached here. He began with a translation of the tenth verse of Psalm 59. He had a story with it, but the translation was, "My God in His loving kindness shall meet me at every corner."

That became a very significant text and a very comforting one. So, I associate this Club with Leslie Weatherhead and that particular sermon.

Hardin: I hope that God will meet us in every pulpit, too. I know that your books have focused largely on your preaching. Preaching is, of course, a central part of the church. What are you trying to accomplish when you preach?

Boyd: I think the function of preaching is to move people. There is instruction in it, but it is to move people and to lead in worship and to present the gospel, so that they are free to respond to it.

Hardin: When you talked about believing is seeing, you mentioned science and how scientists have to take on faith a lot that they can't ever see. There was kind of a break between science and faith, with Copernicus and Galileo, etc. Do you think that science and faith are coming closer together?

Boyd: I think that one of the things that I am interested in doing in my ministry is to show that the people who profess to be unbelievers believe more than they know they believe.

I remember once when Karl Barth had a debate with a very distinguished atheist. He did not begin by saying, "Well, you are a non-believer and I am a believer. We both believe certain things. What is it we believe?"

It became a comparing of two beliefs. Similarly today, science is impossible without faith. The very presuppositions of science are acts of faith. If that is so, then the scientist is a man of faith as the religious believer is. To find those common elements seems to me to be a useful thing to do.

In preaching one should always be aware, I think, of the unbeliever in the congregation and the unbeliever in us. Maybe we are too credulous as Christians.

Hardin: A lot of people have a faith but they don't think it is well expressed in the church. What do you think?

Boyd: I think it is a great rebuke to the church that it isn't. All of the polls say that there is a great deal more spirituality in American life than the churches are realizing or expressing.

Hardin: So we have some work to do.

Boyd: A lot of work to do.