Sunday, October 28, 2007
Faith and Reason
A friend of mine, a follower of Jesus and a philosophy student, told me once that reading Kierkegaard had helped his faith which had been plagued by questions, I suppose scientific. He paraphrased, "Anything you can reason yourself into, you can reason yourself out of." I accepted that, and so when God confronted me with John 6:62-69 after I prayed about some confusing information brought up in one of my secular religious classes, I interpreted those life-giving words in light of what I'd accepted about faith and reason. In those bright and shining verses that nourish my soul, Jesus asks his twelve disciples if they too want to leave him. Peter answers, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God" (John 6:68-69). For a while I thought that here was Peter making a choice and asserting faith in spite of reasoning that would tell him to run for it. But that's not the case at all. What Peter exhibits so beautifully is good, solid reasoning. His logic is pure and simple. Where's he gonna go? God worked in me with those verses, but not, upon reviewing my own faith, what I had thought. If my faith in Christ relied on my choosing to believe something that I thought would make me feel better, I'd have become a Taoist by now. My faith instead is hinged upon the unlikelihood of my being unconvinced that Jesus left behind an empty tomb and has been changing people's lives for 2000 years. If your faith is not inseparable from reason, from reality, then why keep it?
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3 comments:
Good thoughts, Greg. It's interesting. I have visited a site that involves a collection of atheists called Debunking Christianity. They admit that the heart is evil and that you can fool yourself, but because of that they insist on science and no faith. They absolutely have rejected God because they can't prove He exists. Yet they do not accept the concept of faith.
Brian,
Thank you for your comment.
Do you often find as I have that the atheist's science proves to be quite a thin facade by which to conceal a deep resentment toward God? That is, it usually doesn't take long to move from the vague little arguments about evolution and into the real questions like, "Why did this bad thing happen to me?" We've visited some atheist sites where the so-called theological or scientific arguments were ineffectual or nonexistent, but the personal experiences with religion were potent and heartbreaking.
God bless you
Yes. That's why we should keep loving them and not fighting them. They just need to see and realize the truth of God's love.
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