What Are the Roles of Faith and Reason in Christianity? Part 1
by Bill Pratt
A typical accusation of atheists toward Christians is that we only believe what we believe because of blind faith. In other words, we have no rational reasons for believing in God or believing that Jesus died for our sins. The person who believes in fairies or unicorns is no different than the Christian belief in God.
Richard Dawkins makes this point dozens of times in his book The God Delusion. Here is one example: “Christianity . . . teaches children that unquestioned faith is a virtue. You don’t have to make the case for what you believe.” And elsewhere: “Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument.”
Is this a fair characterization of Christianity? Is it totally based upon blind faith with no justification whatsoever? As we’ve mentioned about Dawkins before, he avoids, at all costs, actually engaging with the best of Christian thought. So, what has been the Christian answer to the question of faith vs. reason?
For this answer, we turn again to Philosopher Edward Feser. In his book, The Last Superstition, he takes on this atheist misconception. Feser describes what the traditional Christian account of the roles of faith and reason are.
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First, we start with reason. According to Feser, “Pure reason can reveal to us that there is a God, [and] that we have immortal souls.” By using philosophical arguments, we can conclude these two things.
However, Christians claim to know much more than just that God exists and humans have immortal souls. They claim to have actually received revelation from God. Does faith come into the account now, after we have established by reason that God exists and humans have immortal souls? No. “For the claim that a divine revelation has occurred is something for which the monotheistic religions typically claim there is evidence, and that evidence takes the form of a miracle, a suspension of the natural order that cannot be explained in any other way than divine intervention in the normal course of events.”
By reason alone, we know that if God exists, then miracles can occur, because of God’s very nature (creator and sustainer of laws governing nature). The God that we have arrived at by reason is a God who can suspend the laws of nature. To what miracle do Christians point? The resurrection of Jesus…
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What Are the Roles of Faith and Reason in Christianity? Part 1 | Tough Questions Answered
RECOMMENDED APOLOGETICS RESOURCES FOR FURTHER READING:
Love Your God with All Your Mind: The Role of Reason in the Life of the Soul
Reasonable Faith (3rd Edition): Christian Truth and Apologetics
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If you have rational reasons to believe in a god, then why call them “faith”? Call them “reasons” or “evidence”. Faith has another connotation because in the Bible is always associated to believing without seeing: “blessed those who haven’t seen and believe” or along those lines. Faith is usually held to mean something like: complete certainty with zero evidence or even in the face of conflicting evidence by a majority of people. So the term is misleading and I would avoid it. Avoiding it, or superseding by reason or evidence is more mentally healthy than trying to change what people think of it.
The rest of the article is all plagued with fallacies. One after the next. If reason could reveal there is a God and we have immortal souls we would already have detached groups of scientists working on hypotheses and putting them to the tests, to arrive to reproducible results they could give to other groups of scientists to put a theory together, to prove us all those things exist. If reason can reveal there is A god, and one alone, and he’s still around, a cares for us, and listens to prayer, and is supernatural, and creates souls, and he’s the designer of the universe, and he had a son an so on, we would all like to see the evidence and expect for the sake of your argument is not simply an a-priori assumption. Because extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And gods and souls are among the most extraordinary we can find.
No miracle has ever been proven to occur. What is a miracle anyway? A miracle is an event for which no explanation has been found for the time being, and it might be found eventually, or not. You can define it as an event that breaks the laws of nature, but that definition doesn’t make sense, because if it’s possible to break the laws of nature, such a violation would be AMONG the laws of nature itself. And to say that a being breaks the laws of nature doesn’t explain anything unless you present a hypothesis on HOW and WHY that would happen. The mechanisms and principles behind it if such a thing occurs. On my part, I’m gonna keep thinking like Hume Hitchens in that respect: what is more probable? that the laws of nature were broken in your favor, or that someone has made a mistake, mostly when the accounts comes from third parties and from a long time ago.