Response to global atheism series

6. Does faith make sense?

Greg Clarke

Faith really is becoming the ‘f’ word of today in some circles. It is uttered with contempt by many atheists today, and atheism is sometimes offered as the mature alternative to faith. But the definition of faith among the New Atheists is a peculiar one. So Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, calls it “unjustified belief”. Richard Dawkins says faith is “blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence”. And philosopher A.C. Grayling labels it “a commitment to belief contrary to evidence and reason”.

As a Christian, I don’t recognise any of these definitions.

In the Christian tradition, it has been by far the most common to see faith as a conviction that grows out of ‘encounter’ with God. This ‘encounter’ takes many and various forms, be it the sort of experience of God reported in the Hebrew Bible (e.g. the words of the prophets, the Law, the narratives of Israel’s history, proverbs, the voice of God in a burning bush), or the personal encounters with Jesus Christ that are recorded in the pages of the Gospels, or the ‘textual encounter’ (for want of a better term!) that people have today when they read or hear the words of the Bible and come to believe that those words are the truth about God.

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In other words, faith for Christians is a response to experience (seeing, hearing, feeling) and to knowledge (i.e. thinking, reasoning). This fits remarkably well with contemporary theories of epistemology, whereby it is widely acknowledged that beliefs are formed not merely by abstract reasoning, nor simply in response to our senses, but by a complex amalgam of these things. As philosopher Alvin Plantinga describes it, “This is no leap in the dark, not merely because the person with faith is wholly convinced but also because, as a matter of fact, the belief in question meets the conditions for rationality and warrant.”1

The Bible talks about faith as “assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). It is faith based on experience, on history, on reasoning and on reliable testimony. This faith is not so much a wild a leap into the dark as a confident step into the future.

We can further address this misunderstanding by concentrating on what people of faith (in particular, for my purposes, Christian faith) are not saying.

First, people of faith are not saying that belief in God can be proven correct. The new atheists profoundly misunderstand this (and many believers do, too). The philosophical arguments for God’s existence are pointers to the reasonableness of belief in God, not proofs of it. Aristotle, Aquinas and Kant, the philosophical giants who shaped the most enduring arguments for God’s existence all use the best science of the day to provide reasons for belief in God. None of them thought they were knock-down proofs: unless God is merely a mathematical problem, proofs are not going to be available. But valid reasons to believe in God might be, and that is what the various arguments are seeking to provide.

The arguments about God’s existence (including the contemporary ones, such as the design argument from the finely tuned nature of the universe) are instances of human beings wrestling at rational grounds for belief, and it is a good wrestle to have (if you are into philosophical wrestling!)

Second, people of faith don’t think that you should believe things when the evidence is to the contrary. There might be a few misguided types who think that it is a ‘test of faith’ to believe things when the evidence suggests it isn’t reality, but that is not the position of orthodox Christianity.

It is for this reason that many Christians in the sciences do not believe in a literal seven-day creation, or in a variety of views about dinosaurs and fossils. They think the evidence is to the contrary. Christians are realists, not head-in-the-sand, plug-the-ears idiots. At least, they shouldn’t be. There is no need to be afraid of evidence and knowledge—of course, we will need to interpret it well. It is very fair to reserve judgement about evidence until such investigation has been done, but then we must let the evidence sit and deal with it as best we see it.

Response to Global Atheism series: 6. Does faith make sense? Page 2

1. Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, Oxford University Press, 2000, p.264.

16-Apr-2010 06:43 PM

Greg,Just one small comment about this section. I have found in my discussions with atheists that it is important to point out to them that they are also 'believers'. I.e They believe in the non existence of God, materialism. It is not belief versus knowledge but actually one belief versus another belief. This shifts the discussion onto whether the belief is reasonable or not. We need to point this out to them, becuase they have taken the high ground that they have knowledge we have faith. This is incorrect. The cannot 'prove' their position anymore than we can. I have found this approach immensely helpful in discussion. Anyway, the rest is great keep up the good work! Mike

29-Apr-2010 06:36 PM Peter Hinchley

I suspect most Christians initially enter the faith, not based on logical reasoning, but rather subjective experience. It is at this point, however, that they then accept, carte blanche, a wealth of theological doctrine that is beyond critique and rational enquiry. We could have a healthy debate about many topics, appealing to research data and experimentation to arrive at a shared conclusion. However, if you and I were to debate theological principles such as reincarnation, the existence of one god or many, the reality of the soul, the nature of heaven, etc, we will quickly arrive at a dead end. The fact that the world's population is split across conflicting world religions is a testament to this point. While faith makes sense to Christians, a different faith also makes sense to Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims. When we cannot debate the tenets of these faiths with respect to some objective reality, our dialogue must come to an abrupt end; as Sam Harris has said: faith is the ultimate conversation killer. And a quick follow up to the previous commenter: whilst some atheists firmly believe in the non-existence of God, for many atheists, and agnostics, the absence of belief cannot be equated with active disbelief. I suspect many people, like myself, are not certain that a god doesn't exist; we just don't see a reason to claim that he does exist.

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