Faith or Reason?

In our culture and in times past, there has been a complete misunderstanding of what faith and reason are. Skeptics and atheists accuse Christians of having a blind faith, in which there is no reason involved. On the other hand, many Christians have bought into this phenomena & accept that their faith does not involve reason either. What we have in our culture is a false dichotomy between faith and reason. The truth is that faith and reason are not meant to be separated, but actually compliment one another. For example, someone may choose to believe something that isn't reality. In this case, they have divorced their faith from their reason and are in danger of being labeled mentally ill. For example, if someone was to tell you that they believe that tomorrow morning, they are going to wake up as a frog, then you would think that they were absolutely absurd. Even though they truly believe that this will happen, their faith in this situation does not line up with reason. We must be aware that what we choose to believe may not always be true to reality. So with this is mind, can we really discuss religion and faith in the context of reason and knowledge? Many Christians would say "no", but I emphatically say "yes" and that is what this post is all about.

Christians need to be aware of not only what they believe, but how they think. I am convinced more and more that in this post-modern world that we live in today, that it is imperative that Christians are good thinkers. The Christian faith holds a heritage of stellar philosophers, scientists and theologians such as Clement of Alexandria, Augustine, Origen, Thomas Aquinas, Karl Barth, G.K Chesterton, C.S Lewis, Isaac Newton, Francis Shaeffer and many others. So today there is no need to shy away from thinking. Many times, when people within Christendom or outside have honest doubts about the Christian faith, they are dismissed and just told that they have to "believe" more. My husband, Devin, experienced this quite a bit growing in a Christian home, in which no answers were provided to his questions about science and the Bible. As a result, as a teenager, he walked away from the faith. We shouldn't just disregard people's honests about the faith . This is a sign that they are actually thinking- something that many Christians have forgotten how to do. I think somewhere we have forgotten our rich heritage of Christian thinkers & think that somehow if people probe too much, that they will find that the claims of Christianity are unreliable & dismiss the faith altogether. But in actuality, if people objectively research their doubts against Christianity with the evidence, they will find that the evidence actually confirms the claims of Scripture. Truth is on our side!

What we are going to discuss falls under the category of epistemology. Epistemology is just a big word that philosophers use when discussing human knowledge. It deals with questions such as what can we really know? How do we know anything with certainty? What is the difference between faith and reason? These are important questions, especially in the melting pot culture that we currently live in. There are very consequential effects on a society if these questions are not legitimately answered. I think that our schools, universities and the secular humanists have done a poor job of answering these questions, but so has the Christian community. As a result, our society has deteriorated. These are also difficult subjects to discuss, but I will do my best.

Let's start with propositional statements. These are statements that are either true or false. Then you also have poetical truth. A parable, myth or a fantasy would fall under this category. For instance, if someone makes up a story, although it's fictional, it may have some some aspects of reality to it. Although there may be good moral truth being taught, the details of the story are not meant to be taken as logically true. In religion, you have both, propositional statements and you have poetical truth. Some people make the huge mistake of thinking that religion is all poetical truth. For instance, there are liberal scholars who don't believe that the historical and scientific claims of the Bible are necessarily true, but believe that we should only focus on the spiritual lessons being taught. For example, they may say whether or not King David was an actual historical figure is irrelevant, the most important thing is that we learn something from his life that we can apply to our own life. This view just reduces the Bible to an unreliable, fantasy book from which we can learn some good life lessons from rather than a real book, with real historical figures and events. Then there are some who just read the Bible as a historical document ignoring the spiritual aspects that God has outlined in His Word to change our lives from the inside out. The point here is that we can't reduce religion to just a set of propositional statements or to just a set of poetical truths, because both are involved.

Most people cannot reconcile what we can know with what we may believe & I admit this is a difficult arena to investigate; however, it is one that we must investigate nonetheless. Knowledge is obtained through observation and experience. It's what happens when we process information using our five senses. In an earlier post, I discussed empiricism. In empiricism, the viewpoint is that "seeing is believing" so direct knowledge as processed through our five senses is the only "real" knowledge. As I exposed in the earlier post,(How do we arrive at Truth), empiricism is necessary for daily living, but it does fall short. With empiricism, we would have to dismiss any knowledge of things that we have not directly seen, touched, tasted, heard or smelled. So such things as gravity, electricity, radio waves, the wind, love, joy and goodness would be excluded. As I stated, empiricism is vital because we have to be able to process sensory information, but the minute that we make any kind of value judgment based on the knowledge that we have gained through our senses, then we have left the arena of knowledge and entered into the arena of belief.

Belief also relies on observation and experience, but it also adds common sense based in human reason. What happens with belief is that receive knowledge through our senses and then based on that knowledge, we evaluate and come to a judgement using common sense. In belief, the senses, the mind, the will and heart are all used to convince us that something is true. I will use the example that I'm alone walking in the woods & I hear a rustling and growling noise behind some bushes. Using knowledge, I can hear the growling & rustling and see the bushes moving. Though I haven't seen anything with my eyes, but based on what I do know, using belief, I can conclude that there is some sort of animal behind those bushes, that could potentially harm me, and that for my own safety, I need to run. Now I could be completely wrong, maybe that's just one of my friends behind the bushes making growling noises to scare me. So in all honesty, my beliefs could be wrong. But based on the knowledge that I gained, that was the best possible explanation. So you can see in this silly illustration how knowledge and belief both compliment each other. We use both when making decisions on a daily basis. Belief goes deeper than knowledge. You have to use your faculties: your mind, will and emotions to come to a judgment based on the knowledge that you've received. To get to the truth in a matter, you must employ both knowledge and belief or reason and faith. In the arena of religion, this is especially true because otherwise, you will end up with some very unbalanced views and theologies as we see around us everyday. When we really ponder this subject on a practical level, we realize that there is really so little that we know, but so much that we believe. For instance, when I arrive at work every morning, I park my car in the parking deck. When I lock the doors and go into the building, I have reason to believe that when I leave work at the end of the day that my car will be there in that spot. I don't go out to the parking deck every hour to see if it's still there. As another example, one morning when I got on I-77 headed to work, there was very dense fog- so much so that I couldn't see the road ahead of me. But even though I couldn't see the road ahead of me, I still came to the conclusion that the road had not ended, and it continued even though I couldn't see the road. The fact is that most of what we think we know, we really believe.

So is the Christian faith a rational faith? Yes, it is. I believe that if we objectively look at the evidence around us- God's creation, the reliability of the Bible, as well as the evidence in history, archaelogy and science, that the most rational explanation is that there is a God, that Jesus Christ is the Word made flesh and that He has revealed Himself to us in Holy Scripture. I also believe that it takes more faith to be an atheist than to be a Christian. Some would say that we can't know that God exists because we haven't seen Him. I would answer that by agreeing that I can't "prove" to you that God exists as in a mathematical equation, such as 2 + 2= 4. However, the goal of scientific research is to arrive at the most reasonable explanation for something. When I reiew the First & Second Laws of Thermodynamics, the fact that life can't come from non-life, that matter can't come from non- matter, that the universe had a beginning, the amazing design & fine-tuning of the universe & the presence of objective moral values in all mankind, the most reasonable explanation points to the fact that there is a Creator, who is outside of time and space.
But while the Christian faith is a rational faith, it can't be reduced to just rationalism. If that were the case, it wouldn't be a faith at all and we would all be own our gods because we could know everything within the grasp of our own human reason. The Christian perspective contains things that can be verified & mysteries. It contains things that we can know for sure & things that just leave us in awe & wonder. The truth is that God is infinite & we are finite. So the finite can not fully grasp the infinite. But God has revealed Himself to us through His creation & through the Bible. The great news about Christianity is that we don't have to close our eyes to reality. Because we serve a real God, who has revealed Himself to us in a real way, then we don't have to check our brains at the door when we begin to look into the truth about God & the Bible.

If Christianity is to grow, believers must learn to also engage others' mind as well as their heart. In light of science, history and archaeology, Christianity stands the test. We must be able to present Christianity in a real way, not in a mystical, mysterious way, but in way that engages both the mind & heart. Otherwise, Christianity will be viewed as unrealistic, which it is quite the opposite. If Christianity only involved reason with no faith, then we would not be open the grandeur & absolute power & awe that our Lord inspires. On the other hand, if we had a faith with no reason, then there would be nothing attainable in our faith. We couldn't know anything for sure. That's why both are vitally important. I would like to leave you with a quote by Blaise Pascal:

"If we submit everything to reason, our religion will have no mysterious and supernatural element. If we offend the principles of reason, our religion will be absurd and ridiculous."