As the genuine Equality of human Nature is the true Principle of all our Rights and Duties to one another: and the false Notions of Equality the source of much folly and Wickedness: and the undefined and indeterminate Ideas of it, the Cause of much Nonsense and confusion, it is of great Importance to assertain, what it does mean, and what it does not mean.
It really means little more than that We are all of the same Species: made by the same God: possessed of Minds and Bodies alike in Essence: having all the same Reason, Passions, Affections and appetites. All Men are Men and not Beasts: Men and not Birds: Men and not Fishes. The Infant in the Womb is a Man, and not a Lyon. The Idiot even is a Man and not an Eagle — The Dwarf himself is a Man and not a Whale. The blind are Men, and not Insects, the deaf are Men and not reptiles, the dumb are Men and not Trees. All these are Men and not Angells: Men and not Vegetables &c. The difficulty of inventing a definition of Man has been seen by all Learned Men and there is Scarcely a Satisfactory one to be found to this day. A definition which shall comprehend those Particulars which constitute the Equality in question and no more, and no less, is not easily hit upon.
The Equality of Nature is a moral Equality only: an Equality of Rights and Obligations; nothing more.
The Physical Inequalities among Men in a State of Nature are infinite.
I recollect not, my Charles, whether you even accompanied me to the Hospital of the Enfans-trouvees at Paris. There have I seen in one room fifty Children every one of whom was under three days old, all lying neatly dressed and lodged in separate beds or Cradles in Rows. In this little Congregation, you might observe all the Inequalities of Health, Strength, Beauty, Joy, sorrow, Gaiety, Horror and despair that you can discern in a populous City. — In every School and every College you may see the Same Difference.
The Physical Inequalities, in a State of Nature, are so obvious so determinate and so unalterable, that no Man is absurd enough to deny them. These Inequalities are rights. The healthy Infant has as clear a natural right to his healthy Constitution, as the Sickly one has to his infirm Constitution. The Strong Child has as Sound a natural Right to his Strength, as the Weak one to his frailty. The active Babe has the Same natural Right to his Activity, as the Sluggish one to his Sloth. The mental vigour of one is as undoubtedly his right as the imbeility of the other. The handsome Infant has the Same right to its beauty as the Ugly one to its deformity. A pleasant temper is as natural to one, as a sour disposition to the other.
These Physical Inequalities, lay the foundation for Inequalities of Wealth Power Influence and Importance, throughout human Life. Laws and Government have neither the Power nor the Right to change them.
In what Sense, Charles, can a Child, in a State of Nature be Said to be born equal to its Mother — its Body is not equal — its Mind is not equal. It is in the Power of the Mother. She has the Power of Life and death over it. she has Authority too over it, she has Wisdom, Power and Goodness, which give her a natural Authority to govern it.
The Truth is not difficult to be understood by any Man, who sincerely Searches for it in this Instance. The natural Equality is moral only and not Physical: and in no Way affects the Question concerning forms of Government any farther than to determine that to be the best which but Secures the Equality of Rights, not that which attempts to destroy Physical Inequalities or any of their Consequences in society, upon Property Reputation or Power.
Society may institute and establish any Inequalities except of Rights, which it judges necessary to Secure the Laws. Government of no kind can be instituted without great Inequalities. Not even the Simplest democracy. for the Moment the assembly meets, a few will Start forth more Eloquent more Wise, and more brave than the rest and acquire a superior Influence Reputation & Power. Hereditary Monarchies and Hereditary Senates, may be instituted by any Nation which knows them to be essential to the preservation of their equal Rights; and even these Kings and Nobles are still upon a moral Level with their meanest subjects.
I throw out these broken hints, Charles only to put you upon thinking and reading. I am your anxious Father
The copy of your Second thoughts on Instinctive impulses with the letter accompanying it, was received just as I was setting out on a journey to this place, two or three days distant from Monticello. I brought it with me, and read it with great satisfaction; and with the more, as it contained exactly my own creed on the foundation of morality in man. It is really curious that, on a question so fundamental, such a variety of opinions should have prevailed among men; and those too of the most exemplary virtue and first order of understanding. It shews how necessary was the care of the Creator in making the moral principle so much a part of our constitution as that no errors of reasoning or of speculation might lead us astray from it’s observance in practice. of all the theories on this question, the most whimsical seems to have been that of Woollaston, who considers truth as the foundation of morality. The thief who steals your guinea does wrong only inasmuch as he acts a lie, in using your guinea as if it were his own. Truth is certainly a branch of morality, and a very important one to society. But, presented as it’s foundation, it is as if a tree, taken up by the roots, had it’s stem reversed in the air, and one of it’s branches planted in the ground. Some have made the love of god the foundation of morality. This too is but a branch of our moral duties, which are generally divided into duties to god, and duties to man. If we did a good act merely from the love of god, and a belief that it is pleasing to him, whence arises the morality of the Atheist? It is idle to say as some do, that no such being exists. We have the same evidence of the fact as of most of those we act on, to wit, their own affirmations, and their reasonings in support of them. I have observed indeed generally that, while in protestant countries the defections from the Platonic Christianity of the priests is to Deism, in Catholic countries they are to Atheism. Diderot, Dalembert, D’Holbach Condorcet, are known to have been among the most virtuous of men. Their virtue then must have had some other foundation than the love of god.
The το καλον [“the good”] of others is founded in a different faculty, that of taste, which is not even a branch of morality. We have indeed an innate sense of what we call beautiful: but that is exercised chiefly on subjects addressed to the fancy, whether thro’ the eye, in visible forms, as landscape, animal figure, dress, drapery, architecture, the composition of colours etc. or to the imagination directly, as imagery, style, or measure in prose or poetry, or whatever else constitutes the domain of criticism or taste, a faculty entirely distinct from the moral one. Self-interest, or rather Self love, or Egoism, has been more plausibly substituted as the basis of morality. But I consider our relations with others as constituting the boundaries of morality. with ourselves we stand on the ground of identity, not of relation; which last, requiring two subjects, excludes self-love confined to a single one. To ourselves, in strict language, we can owe no duties, obligation requiring also two parties. Self-love therefore is no part of morality. Indeed it is exactly its counterpart. It is the sole antagonist of virtue, leading us constantly by our propensities to self-gratification in violation of our moral duties to others. Accordingly it is against this enemy that are erected the batteries of moralists and religionists, as the only obstacle to the practice of morality. Take from man his selfish propensities, and he can have nothing to seduce him from the practice of virtue. Or subdue those propensities by education, instruction, or restraint, and virtue remains without a competitor. Egoism, in a broader sense, has been thus presented as the source of moral action. It has been said that we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, bind up the wounds of the man beaten by thieves, pour oil and wine into them, set him on our own beast, and bring him to the inn, because we receive ourselves pleasure from these acts. So Helvetius, one of the best men on earth, and the most ingenious advocate of this principle, after defining ‘interest’ to mean, not merely that which is pecuniary, but whatever may procure us pleasure or withdraw us from pain, says “the humane man is he to whom the sight of misfortune is insupportable and who, to rescue himself from this spectacle, is forced to succour the unfortunate object.” This indeed is true. But it is one step short of the ultimate question. These good acts give us pleasure: but how happens it that they give us pleasure? Because nature hath implanted in our breasts a love of others, a sense of duty to them, a moral instinct in short, which prompts us irresistibly to feel and to succour their distresses; and protests against the language of Helvetius “what other motive than self interest could determine a man to generous actions? It is as impossible for him to love what is good for the sake of good, as to love evil for the sake of evil.” The creator would indeed have been a bungling artist, had he intended man for a social animal, without planting in him social dispositions. It is true they are not planted in every man; because there is no rule without exceptions: but it is false reasoning which converts exceptions into the general rule. Some men are born without the organs of sight, or of hearing, or without hands. Yet it would be wrong to say that man is born without these faculties: and sight, hearing and hands may with truth enter into the general definition of Man. The want or imperfection of the moral sense in some men, like the want or imperfection of the senses of sight and hearing in others, is no proof that it is a general characteristic of the species. When it is wanting we endeavor to supply the defect by education, by appeals to reason and calculation, by presenting to the being so unhappily conformed other motives to do good, and to eschew evil; such as the love, or the hatred or rejection of those among whom he lives and whose society is necessary to his happiness, and even existence; demonstrations by sound calculation that honesty promotes interest in the long run; the rewards & penalties established by the laws; and ultimately the prospects of a future state of retribution for the evil as well as the good done while here. These are the correctives which are supplied by education, and which exercise the functions of the moralist, the preacher & legislator: and they lead into a course of correct action all those whose depravity is not too profound to be eradicated. Some have argued against the existence of a moral sense, by saying that if nature had given us such a sense, impelling us to virtuous actions, and warning us against those which are vicious, then nature must also have designated, by some particular ear-marks, the two sets of actions which are, in themselves, the one virtuous, and the other vicious: whereas we find in fact, that the same actions are deemed virtuous in one country, and vicious in another. The answer is that nature has constituted utility to man the standard & test of virtue. Men living in different countries, under different circumstances, different habits, and regimens, may have different utilities. The same act therefore may be useful, and consequently virtuous, in one country, which is injurious and vicious in another differently circumstanced. I sincerely then believe with you in the general existence of a moral instinct. I think it the brightest gem with which the human character is studded; and the want of it as more degrading than the most hideous of the bodily deformities. I am happy in reviewing the roll of associates in this principle which you present in your 2dletter, some of which I had not before met with. To these might be added Ld Kaims, one of the ablest of our advocates, who goes so far as to say, in his Principles of Natural Religion, that a man owes no duty to which he is not urged by some impulsive feeling. This is correct if referred to the standard of general feeling in the given case, and not to the feeling of a single individual. Perhaps I may misquote him, it being fifty years since I read his book.
The leisure and solitude of my situation here has led me to the indiscretion of taxing you with a long letter on a subject whereon nothing new can be offered you. I will indulge myself no further than to repeat the assurances of my continued esteem & respect.
Th: Jefferson
Notes
The work by William Wollaston (woollaston) was The Religion of Nature Delineated, 7th ed. (Glasgow, 1746; Sowerby, no. 1252). the το καλον: “the good.” The Good Samaritan aided the man beaten by thieves in the Bible, Luke 10.33–4. TJ provided paraphrased translations of selections from the first volume of Claude Adrien helvetius, Œuvres Complettes de M. Hélvetius. Nouvelle Édition, corrigée & augmentée sur les Manuscrits de l’Auteur, avec sa Vie & son Portrait (London, 1781; Sowerby, no. 1242). Law divided his book by letter rather than chapter. Henry Home, Lord Kames (kaims), wrote Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion, 1st ed. (Edinburgh, 1751; Sowerby, no. 1254).
Go
thomas jefferson, writing a letter in the woods, sepia plu red and yellow --chaos 10 --ar 91:51 --stylize 600 --weird 200 --v 7 Job ID: 583c1c1a-3147-44d0-aca2-cdbb97f50481
The creator would indeed have been a bungling artist, had he intended man for a social animal, without planting in him social dispositions. It is true they are not planted in every man; because there is no rule without exceptions: but it is false reasoning which converts exceptions into the general rule. Some men are born without the organs of sight, or of hearing, or without hands. Yet it would be wrong to say that man is born without these faculties: and sight, hearing and hands may with truth enter into the general definition of Man.
Faith is trust in something or someone not seen, not here, or not yet. Because the object of faith is unseen or has not yet materialized, trust therein requires reasoning. It requires an inference from what is beheld at this very moment to what is not. The inference may be confident or tentative. It may be based on overwhelming evidence or insufficiently justified. Either way, as we will see, faith is an act of our reason. Faith is not seeing, not beholding, not empiricism. But is reasoning. It is inference. Indeed, most everything we know and trust is not immediately present to the senses. Faith, then, is not some mystical or esoteric basis of belief. It is essential to all belief and action.
Misunderstood Faith
Though it is inescapable and ordinary, faith is often mischaracterized and maligned. Mark Twain’s schoolboy quipped that “faith is believing what you know ain’t so”. It’s cliché to echo that “faith is blind”. Many take it as a given that faith stands in contrast to evidence, science, and reason. In the wake of 9/11, many blamed the evil attack on faith. Terry Eagleton quotes John Milbank opining: “Where reason has retreated, there, it seems, faith has now rushed in, often with violent consequences.” (“Only Theology saves Metaphysics“) Blurbing Sam Harris’ End of Faith, Harvard jurist Alan Dershowitz wrote, “Harris’s tour de force demonstrates how faith — blind, deaf, dumb, and unreasoned — threatens our very existence.” For his part, Harris writes: “From the perspective of faith, it is better to ape the behavior of one’s ancestors than to find creative ways to uncover new truths in the present.” Portland State professor Peter Boghossian, author of A Manual for Creating Atheists, called faith a “virus”; a “belief without evidence,” a habit of “pretending to know things you don’t know”. (Peter Boghossian, A Manual for Creating Atheists (Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2013), 68.) As for the late Christopher Hitchens, he claims: “And here is the point, about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith… we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, open mindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. We do not hold our convictions dogmatically…” (GISG, p.5) For these critics, faith is juxtaposed as the polar opposite of well-justified belief: faith or science, faith or reason. You can only pick one.
These criticisms are off the mark, indicting a straw man, a mistaken understanding of the nature of faith. To dispel such confusion, my claim isn’t merely that faith and reason can be fit together or harmonized. More boldly I claim, faith is reasoning in our ordinary understanding of it. Faith is trust in what we can’t behold based upon what we can see, taste, touch, intuit, and know with confidence. Properly understood, faith is a normal and necessary component of every thought and every breath. As we shall see, in all that we say and do, there are elements of trust in realities that are not present, not seen, or not yet. Whatever ills have been motivated by faith, they are the product of misplaced faith, not of the error of faith in itself.
Everyday Faith
We walk by faith. Each time I put one foot in front of the other, I entrust my muscles, bones, joints, and footing with another step not yet made. As a baby learning to walk, after knee surgery, or on a frozen pond in spring, our steps are more tentative — a less confident faith. Most of the time, based on what we know to be true, we have good reason to trust our legs and our footing for that next step.
We talk by faith, trusting in another’s presence of mind and ability to comprehend us. We look for validation of our faith in our listeners’ nods and responses and base further sentences on their demonstrated understanding. We restate if there’s been an apparent miscommunication based on quizzical looks and raised eyebrows, and “uh-huhs” that we see or hear, though we cannot see others’ thoughts. In a foreign country in a second tongue, we may have less faith in our words, adding gestures, speaking more simply. Lacking faith, we may not talk at all. Nevertheless, we successfully communicate every day, seeing our reasonable faith in speech validated over and over.
We have faith in specialists. We trusted astronomers, who foretold that if I traveled to Madras, Oregon on August 21st, 2017 or Dallas, Texas on April 8, 2024 I would see a total solar eclipse; so too if I’m in the right American city on August 8, 2044. I have faith in cartographers and geographers that the city of Beilefeld is where they say, though I have not yet seen it with my own eyes, nor been there, nor known anyone who has.
Path of the 2017 eclipse across North America.
We have faith in all kinds of people. We trust other drivers, that they will not swerve across the dividing line; we believe our parents when they retell events we’ve forgotten from childhood; we depend upon our employer, that they will cut the check this month; we entrust our lives to the airline, that they hired a competent pilot and maintained the aircraft. We have less faith in the STUDENT DRIVER, in the negligent parent, in the startup company, in the “puddle jumper” over the Alaskan wilds. These are all reasonable inferences. And they are acts of faith.
We have faith in math. We expect that cutting the two-by-four in half will give me two equal planks for my chicken coop; we count on election judges, that when they tally the same votes, they’ll reach the same total. Knowing our own invisible thoughts, we doubt calculations that we know are beyond our ken.
A bridge not far
An instructive example of everyday faith is our trust in bridges. Evidence justifies our faith: the safe passage of many others before us, the visible steel girders and concrete abutments and thick cables, and the knowledge that architectural engineers and state regulators designed and certified the bridge. Still, to drive or walk out onto the bridge requires faith, because we have not yet traveled it ourselves. We have not seen ourselves safely to the other side. Faith, as an inference from evidence, comes easily when there’s good reason to trust. But if we come upon a rickety and rotting and abandoned bridge like the one I used to hazard over the San Miguel River, we have less faith in its ability to hold us. If with little faith we choose to cross it, we may test each board as we put our weight down and grip more tightly to the hand rails. Solid evidence of trustworthiness instills faith. Less solid evidence diminishes it.
When we have little faith, what is required, if not more testing, is greater recklessness or desperation. Once I was stuck at the Hluhlwe River Bridge. It is a low-water bridge and it was largely submerged during a flash flood. Night had fallen. My brother, his wife, and his infant daughter were in the rear seat. We were stranded without options between the two great rivers that pass through Hluhluwe Imfolozi Game Park. The only way to safety for the night from the wild animals and local bandits was over that bridge. I waited, unsure, stymied by our lack of good options. Finally, one other vehicle came around and successfully fjorded the rushing waters covering the bridge without being washed downriver. Out of desperation, we followed, desperately, with little faith. I’m here to tell the tale, but it wasn’t because I swelled with faith facing the rushing waters.
Most often, our trust is reasonable even when the object of our faith is not seen, not here, or not yet. Nietzsche associated faith with lunacy, but if you’ve ever known a paranoiac, you know that their lack of faith, their inability to trust, is fearsome and paralyzing for life. Faith is essential every day to life and thought.
William K. Clifford gets the everyday ordinariness and inescapability of faith right.
A little reflection will show us that every belief, even the simplest and most fundamental, goes beyond experience when regarded as a guide to our actions. … Even the child’s belief that the child was burnt yesterday goes beyond present experience, which contains only the memory of a burning, and not the burning itself; it assumes, therefore, that this memory is trustworthy, although we know that a memory may often be mistaken. But if it is to be used as a guide to action, as a hint of what the future is to be, it must assume something about that future, namely, that it will be consistent with the supposition that the burning really took place yesterday; which is going beyond experience.
Biblical faith is like everyday faith. Consider the paradigmatic biblical instances of faith as a test of the definition I’ve offered: trust in something not seen, not here, or not yet. Famously, the author of Hebrews says it this way. “Faith is confidence [trust] in what we hope for [not yet] and assurance about what we do not see [not seen].” (Hebrews 11:1)
The author goes on to give numerous examples.
Noah
Noah, “when warned about things not yet seen, in holy fear built an ark to save his family.” (11:7) It is rare, indeed, for someone to upend their life to prepare for a future threat like Noah. Today, climate scientists also warn of impending environmental calamities. Some few trust these climatologists and forecasters enough to upend their own lives. They reason, based on these experts’ credibility and the evidence offered, that this future state will come to pass. As with Noah, that is faith in a biblical sense. It follows a chain of reasoning into the future.
Abraham
Abraham, based on his interactions with God, trusted God’s promise of a child to come, way past child-bearing age. He considered God to be able and trustworthy (11:8). Sarah, understandably, laughed at the unlikelihood. Similarly, based on its track record and the lack of better options, many infertile couples place their faith in IVF and other medical technologies in hopes of a child. The object of faith in these instances differs: one is unnatural, the other is supernatural. In both cases, the outcome is unrealized. Faith is required, thus reasoning is required.
Speaking of Isaac and Jacob, the author of Hebrews observes: “All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance.” (11:13) They lived not only according to what they already had, but by what was yet to come.
Clearly, the author of Hebrews has in mind something like I’ve defined. The patriarchs of the Jewish and Christian faith acted upon their trust for what was not seen or not yet, based in these cases on past actions and encounters with God.
Things loved are therefore not so appropriate to faith as things hoped for, since hope is always for the absent and unseen.
Aquinas, Summa
Thomas
More famous still is “faithless”, “doubting Thomas”. He had known Jesus, seen miracles, and heard from eyewitnesses who were his own friends that Jesus had risen. He had second hand testimony and evidence from past experience. And yet he could not believe until he beheld Jesus himself. It is easy to sympathize with Thomas. He had seen Jesus crushed. He knew as well as we that the dead do not rise. He had not seen the risen Christ as the other disciples had. Jesus sympathized with Thomas and with those not present who would believe without seeing Jesus manifest: “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” Here Jesus anticipates his future disciples, acknowledging that they will have to determine whether they believe without seeing for themselves. The testimony of others would be necessary. But even for the disciples who did see the resurrected Christ, faith was in order. Jesus made promises to them that were not yet realized. As they faced hostile crowds and threats to their lives, they had to trust Jesus when he promised: “I will be with you always, till the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20) The need for faith is escaped only by seeing what was unseen, or what was hoped for, coming to pass.
“For now we see in a mirror indirectly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, just as I have been fully known.” 1 Corinthians 13:12 NET https://bible.com/bible/107/1co.13.12.NET
Paul
As one of the most prolific authors of Christian scripture, the Apostle Paul regularly invokes faith and evidence.
That is why I am suffering as I am. Yet this is no cause for shame, because I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him until that day.
Again we see the same understanding. Paul is convinced based on his encounter with Jesus about something not yet present.
Christian faith is essentially thinking. Look at the birds, think about them, and draw your deductions. Look at the grass, look at the lilies of the field, consider them.
Martin Lloyd-Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Moun (1960) pp. 129–30.
At times, some Christian apologists have ill-advisedly taken up the non-believers misconception about faith for rhetorical purposes. Frank Turek named a book I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist. And Lee Strobel has said. What they mean to say is that, for them, the evidence does not justify belief in Lawrence Krauss’ “nothing” to generate the universe, or in Darwin’s mechanism to form the intricate and sophisticated creatures we find all around us.
“So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” 2 Corinthians 4:18 NIV https://bible.com/bible/111/2co.4.18.NIV
Faithlessness
How different is the account of faith in the Bible and in our everyday lives than how it’s misconstrued.
The problem with faith, is that it really is a conversation stopper. Faith is a declaration of immunity to the powers of conversation. It is a reason, why you do not have to give reasons, for what you believe.” – Sam Harris
Faith is widely regarded as in tension or opposition to reason and evidence for at least three reasons.
First, faith does go beyond empirical evidence, and we live in a scientistic, materialistic age when sensible and repeatable evidence is thought to be the only kind. Secondly, faith can be irrational and very often is. When people trust the untrustworthy and justify it by appealing to the virtue of faith instead of to evidence, by guilt by association they discredit faith that is perfectly reasonable. And thirdly, faith is inherently uncertain, unrealized. In matters of consequence, that can be terribly unnerving. We crave certainty, but often it is not in the menu.
Scams, schemes, and misinformation are a scourge on our mediated, online existence. We live in a post-trust moment, when faith in others and in our institutions is abysmal. Misled so often, we demand evidence, see conspiracies everywhere, or content ourselves with only the apparent knowledge of our own lived experience. It’s reasonable to demand evidence. It’s perfectly sensible to want to kick the tires, to try it on, to want to see it for ourselves. We grasp beyond the insubstantiality of the unseen, the past, the future, the abstract is a longstanding complaint. The tribes of Jacob erected a golden calf instead of trusting the unseen God. And for us, if there’s no video, it might as well not have happened. It won’t get airplay.
Empiricism
In the same vein, one extreme form of empiricism, logical positivism, put it quite bluntly: if you can’t point to the thing itself, don’t believe it’s a thing that exists. Another extreme remedy, behaviorism, proposed we only judge people by their behavior, since their thoughts are inaccessible to sight and measurement.
In spite of these excesses, the scientific disciplines
Foolishness
Incompleteness
It should be clear that faith in what is not yet or not seen is very often exceedingly reasonable, indeed
For we know in part, and we prophesy in part, 10 but when what is perfect comes, the partial will be set aside. 1When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I became an adult, I set aside childish ways. For now we see in a mirror indirectly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, just as I have been fully known.
It is something of a consensus amongst Vhristian apologists who affirm the importance of reason in arriving at truth that faith is best construed as trust. Less often stated is that it is trust specifically in what is unseen or not yet.
Arthur Brooks offers a common definition of
Empricism
So, faith is at odds with empiricism, but not with evidence or reason.
And, I have faith in Jesus, inferring from multiple lines of evidence that he resurrected from the dead after a miraculous and exemplary life and is someone who can be trusted to do what he said he will do.
For Faith
The believer lives “by faith, not by sight.” (2 Corinthians 5:7) And faith is, “trusting what we have reason to believe is true.”1
Faith is not indubitable. Inferences can be mistaken
Whether it is one or the other will be a function of well justified the inference is. what I know of sturdy chairs and the appearance of this particular chair that, it will hold me in a moment.
Faith, but rather of seeing or possessing.
Believers in the conspiracy ask non-believers three questions: Have you ever been to Bielefeld, do you know anybody from Bielefeld, and do you know anybody who has ever been to Bielefeld? To most people, the answer to these three questions is “no,” supposedly proving the conspiracists’ point.
Faith, then, can be foolhardy. Put no your faith in princes.
For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? Romans 8:24 (KJV)
We are blessed
The disciple, Thomas, is famous for not believing the testimony of the women who first saw Jesus risen from the dead, nor his fellow disciples. To believe this unexpected miracle, he said he would have to touch the wounds of the risen Christ himself. He was, in other words, an empiricist. He would not believe what he could not see or touch with his own senses. Jesus does not begrudge Thomas’ request:
”Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and examine my hands. Extend your hand and put it into my side. Do not continue in your unbelief, but believe.” Thomas replied to him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are the people who have not seen and yet have believed.” Now Jesus performed many other miraculous signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are recorded so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.“ John 20:27-31 NET https://bible.com/bible/107/jhn.20.27-31.NET
This instructive episode encapsulates what we need to know about faith. Thomas failed to trust the witnesses who announced the resurrection of Jesus, but upon seeing the resurrected Jesus, declares: “my Lord and my God.” Jesus understood his predicament, that trusting in a truth or a person that is not yet seen with one’s own eyes requires more. But significantly, John tells us that Jesus performed this sign and other miracles so that we may believe. That is to say, they are the evidence for faith. Jesus. Rise up and walk to paralytic to demonstrate he can forgive sins. “so that you may know”. Sean McDowell’s pattern for OT and New: 1) miracle 2) knowledge 3) belief.
A common strategy for rejecting the notion of faith as irrational is to characterize it as synonymous with trust. But if faith were just trust, why then does faith evaporate when the object of faith comes to pass.
is inferring from the knowledge one already possesses to that which has not been, as of yet, beheld.
Fixes, the thing believed, and fiducia, the attitude towards it. Classic distinction
Five Reasonable Beliefs
Which of these are examples of faith?
1. All men are mortal 2. Socrates is a man ∴ Socrates is mortal
1. We are in orbit around the sun, controlled by natural laws that have always operated in a consistent way. 2. Our orbit around the sun and the rotation of the earth results in the sun rising over the Eastern horizon. ∴ Tomorrow, the sun will rise in the East.
1. The guarded tomb is empty. 2. Trustworthy people I know have seen Jesus, who was killed before my eyes, alive and well. ∴ Jesus is risen.
1. I see a shape that looks just like a strawberry in my hands. 2. I am biting into that strawberry-like object and taste strawberry. ∴ I am eating a strawberry.
1. Astronomist study the movement of the planets and have demonstrated the ability to predict their trajectory into the future. 2. Astronomers predict an eclipse visible over a large swath of North America on August 21st, 2017. 3. I’m going to buy my glasses and drive to Portland to see the eclipse in all its glory.
“Faith” in Common Parlance
Increasingly since the rise of modernism, faith has been viewed in contrast to reasoning rather than as an instance of it. Many Christmas movies In recent year After all, Boghossian asserts,
“if one had sufficient evidence to warrant belief in a particular claim, then one wouldn’t believe the claim on the basis of faith. ‘Faith’ is the word one uses when one does not have enough evidence to justify holding a belief.”[4]
Peter Boghossian, A Manual for Creating Atheists(Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2013), 68.
I think Boghossian is half right in two respects. Even a great thinker and believer Arthur Brooks describes faith as “beliefs that you do not know”. This mistake is the result of a faulty notion notion of faith and of knowledge. First that knowledge requires certainty. Neither the traditional definition of justified true belief (JTB) nor the Reformed view that it is a faculty operating correctly in a verisimilitudinous environment regard certainty as a requirement for knowledge.
Now, I don’t see much that can be gleaned from the phrase “blind faith”. “Just believe”, or “believe”, . No. Hope is an appropriate disposition. Credulity is not. Hope will lead one to seek true beliefs. Believing whatever is no virtue at all. I don’t have enough faith to, for example, be a Christian, or be an atheist.
Indeed, in his enthusiasm for being a beacon of science and reason, Lawrence Krauss, has at times confusedly denied having beliefs at all. Misunderstanding about these everyday terms abounds.
Pictures of chairs.
Romans 8:24-25
“For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.” Romans 8:24-25 NIV https://www.bible.com/111/rom.8.24-25.niv
“Faith is Blind.” This is half true.
”that not yet seen”
You cannot have your faith and eat it too
the Ansemian rendering, that it is faith seeking understanding, is a fine one, as long as we understand that faith itsel is also an understanding.
“For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have?” 25But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently. Romans 8:24,25 NIV http://bible.com/111/rom.8.24.niv
Hope is a corollary to faith and a key to understanding why it is that without hope, one cannot please God. If one does not harbor hopes about tomorrow, about the afterlife, then one is less likely to form beliefs about it. See Unamuno. See Pascal’s Wager. It is Annie’s hope when she’s “stuck in a day that’s gray and lonely” that inspires her rational inference that you ought to “bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there’ll be sun.”
“Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have?” Romans 8:23-24 NIV http://bible.com/111/rom.8.23-24.niv
The Bible speaks voluminously on faith and belief, but two of the most clarifying verses are:
And.
Do you trust someone when they are out of eyesight.
The term “faith” populates many a cliché. One can “take a leap of faith”, or more modestly, a “step of faith”. Some of the most common but misleading he phraseology around faith include, most infamously, that of “taking a leap of faith”.
This phrase is revealing and misleading at once. Taking a step or leap is a fine way of characterizing an inference. It can be to take the most reasonable next step in a chain of reasoning. But perhaps there are times when the step is more of a leap.
Faith Versus Empiricism
Inference is Inescapable
Fideism
Inference is an act. One of the more colorfully named types in the catalog of logical fallacies is that of the “slothful induction”.
Faithlessness
To be faithless is to be stuck, to insular, to be lonely, without conviction or direction. To be foolish, gullible and unskeptical, is to be prey to a thousand factoids, to every charlatan trying to fleece its mark.,. To be wise, to be intelligent, is to grow skilled in discriminating between facts and factoids.
Trust
The trust angle, such as WLC, who characterizes is as trusting in something based on the evidence. “Faith is believing that God will.” ~ Abraham Lincoln
I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it. That is not the point at which Faith comes in. …. Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.” ~ Lewis
Evidence
The design we infer in nature is an insight we abstract from our senses, but the inference itself is acquired by our reason. We infer design in nature by abstraction, not immediately by sense image. We see biological structures that have purpose and specified complexity, and using our capacity for abstract thought we reason that such structures imply a designer.
Faith is trust in something or someone not seen, not here, or not yet. Because the object of faith is unseen or has not yet materialized, trust therein requires reasoning. It requires an inference from what is beheld at this very moment to what is not. The inference may be confident or tentative. It may be based on overwhelming evidence or insufficiently justified. Either way, as we will see, faith is an act of our reason. Faith is not seeing, not beholding, not empiricism. But is reasoning. It is inference. Indeed, most everything we know and trust is not immediately present to the senses. Faith, then, is not some mystical or esoteric basis of belief. It is essential to all belief and action.
Misunderstood Faith
Though it is inescapable and ordinary, faith is often mischaracterized and maligned. Mark Twain’s schoolboy quipped that “faith is believing what you know ain’t so”. It’s cliché to echo that “faith is blind”. Many take it as a given that faith stands in contrast to evidence, science, and reason. In the wake of 9/11, many blamed the evil attack on faith. Terry Eagleton quotes John Milbank opining: “Where reason has retreated, there, it seems, faith has now rushed in, often with violent consequences.” (“Only Theology saves Metaphysics“) Blurbing Sam Harris’ End of Faith, Harvard jurist Alan Dershowitz wrote, “Harris’s tour de force demonstrates how faith — blind, deaf, dumb, and unreasoned — threatens our very existence.” For his part, Harris writes: “From the perspective of faith, it is better to ape the behavior of one’s ancestors than to find creative ways to uncover new truths in the present.” Portland State professor Peter Boghossian, author of A Manual for Creating Atheists, called faith a “virus”; a “belief without evidence,” a habit of “pretending to know things you don’t know”. (Peter Boghossian, A Manual for Creating Atheists (Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2013), 68.) As for the late Christopher Hitchens, he claims: “And here is the point, about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith… we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, open mindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. We do not hold our convictions dogmatically…” (GISG, p.5) For these critics, faith is juxtaposed as the polar opposite of well-justified belief: faith or science, faith or reason. You can only pick one.
These criticisms are off the mark, indicting a straw man, a mistaken understanding of the nature of faith. To dispel such confusion, my claim isn’t merely that faith and reason can be fit together or harmonized. More boldly I claim, faith is reasoning in our ordinary understanding of it. Faith is trust in what we can’t behold based upon what we can see, taste, touch, intuit, and know with confidence. Properly understood, faith is a normal and necessary component of every thought and every breath. As we shall see, in all that we say and do, there are elements of trust in realities that are not present, not seen, or not yet. Whatever ills have been motivated by faith, they are the product of misplaced faith, not of the error of faith in itself.
Everyday Faith
We walk by faith. Each time I put one foot in front of the other, I entrust my muscles, bones, joints, and footing with another step not yet made. As a baby learning to walk, after knee surgery, or on a frozen pond in spring, our steps are more tentative — a less confident faith. Most of the time, based on what we know to be true, we have good reason to trust our legs and our footing for that next step.
We talk by faith, trusting in another’s presence of mind and ability to comprehend us. We look for validation of our faith in our listeners’ nods and responses and base further sentences on their demonstrated understanding. We restate if there’s been an apparent miscommunication based on quizzical looks and raised eyebrows, and “uh-huhs” that we see or hear, though we cannot see others’ thoughts. In a foreign country in a second tongue, we may have less faith in our words, adding gestures, speaking more simply. Lacking faith, we may not talk at all. Nevertheless, we successfully communicate every day, seeing our reasonable faith in speech validated over and over.
We have faith in specialists. We trusted astronomers, who foretold that if I traveled to Madras, Oregon on August 21st, 2017 or Dallas, Texas on April 8, 2024 I would see a total solar eclipse; so too if I’m in the right American city on August 8, 2044. I have faith in cartographers and geographers that the city of Beilefeld is where they say, though I have not yet seen it with my own eyes, nor been there, nor known anyone who has.
Path of the 2017 eclipse across North America.
We have faith in all kinds of people. We trust other drivers, that they will not swerve across the dividing line; we believe our parents when they retell events we’ve forgotten from childhood; we depend upon our employer, that they will cut the check this month; we entrust our lives to the airline, that they hired a competent pilot and maintained the aircraft. We have less faith in the STUDENT DRIVER, in the negligent parent, in the startup company, in the “puddle jumper” over the Alaskan wilds. These are all reasonable inferences. And they are acts of faith.
We have faith in math. We expect that cutting the two-by-four in half will give me two equal planks for my chicken coop; we count on election judges, that when they tally the same votes, they’ll reach the same total. Knowing our own invisible thoughts, we doubt calculations that we know are beyond our ken.
A bridge not far
An instructive example of everyday faith is our trust in bridges. Evidence justifies our faith: the safe passage of many others before us, the visible steel girders and concrete abutments and thick cables, and the knowledge that architectural engineers and state regulators designed and certified the bridge. Still, to drive or walk out onto the bridge requires faith, because we have not yet traveled it ourselves. We have not seen ourselves safely to the other side. Faith, as an inference from evidence, comes easily when there’s good reason to trust. But if we come upon a rickety and rotting and abandoned bridge like the one I used to hazard over the San Miguel River, we have less faith in its ability to hold us. If with little faith we choose to cross it, we may test each board as we put our weight down and grip more tightly to the hand rails. Solid evidence of trustworthiness instills faith. Less solid evidence diminishes it.
When we have little faith, what is required, if not more testing, is greater recklessness or desperation. Once I was stuck at the Hluhlwe River Bridge. It is a low-water bridge and it was largely submerged during a flash flood. Night had fallen. My brother, his wife, and his infant daughter were in the rear seat. We were stranded without options between the two great rivers that pass through Hluhluwe Imfolozi Game Park. The only way to safety for the night from the wild animals and local bandits was over that bridge. I waited, unsure, stymied by our lack of good options. Finally, one other vehicle came around and successfully fjorded the rushing waters covering the bridge without being washed downriver. Out of desperation, we followed, desperately, with little faith. I’m here to tell the tale, but it wasn’t because I swelled with faith facing the rushing waters.
Most often, our trust is reasonable even when the object of our faith is not seen, not here, or not yet. Nietzsche associated faith with lunacy, but if you’ve ever known a paranoiac, you know that their lack of faith, their inability to trust, is fearsome and paralyzing for life. Faith is essential every day to life and thought.
William K. Clifford gets the everyday ordinariness and inescapability of faith right.
A little reflection will show us that every belief, even the simplest and most fundamental, goes beyond experience when regarded as a guide to our actions. … Even the child’s belief that the child was burnt yesterday goes beyond present experience, which contains only the memory of a burning, and not the burning itself; it assumes, therefore, that this memory is trustworthy, although we know that a memory may often be mistaken. But if it is to be used as a guide to action, as a hint of what the future is to be, it must assume something about that future, namely, that it will be consistent with the supposition that the burning really took place yesterday; which is going beyond experience.
Biblical faith is like everyday faith. Consider the paradigmatic biblical instances of faith as a test of the definition I’ve offered: trust in something not seen, not here, or not yet. Famously, the author of Hebrews says it this way. “Faith is confidence [trust] in what we hope for [not yet] and assurance about what we do not see [not seen].” (Hebrews 11:1)
The author goes on to give numerous examples.
Noah
Noah, “when warned about things not yet seen, in holy fear built an ark to save his family.” (11:7) It is rare, indeed, for someone to upend their life to prepare for a future threat like Noah. Today, climate scientists also warn of impending environmental calamities. Some few trust these climatologists and forecasters enough to upend their own lives. They reason, based on these experts’ credibility and the evidence offered, that this future state will come to pass. As with Noah, that is faith in a biblical sense. It follows a chain of reasoning into the future.
Abraham
Abraham, based on his interactions with God, trusted God’s promise of a child to come, way past child-bearing age. He considered God to be able and trustworthy (11:8). Sarah, understandably, laughed at the unlikelihood. Similarly, based on its track record and the lack of better options, many infertile couples place their faith in IVF and other medical technologies in hopes of a child. The object of faith in these instances differs: one is unnatural, the other is supernatural. In both cases, the outcome is unrealized. Faith is required, thus reasoning is required.
Speaking of Isaac and Jacob, the author of Hebrews observes: “All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance.” (11:13) They lived not only according to what they already had, but by what was yet to come.
Clearly, the author of Hebrews has in mind something like I’ve defined. The patriarchs of the Jewish and Christian faith acted upon their trust for what was not seen or not yet, based in these cases on past actions and encounters with God.
Things loved are therefore not so appropriate to faith as things hoped for, since hope is always for the absent and unseen.
Aquinas, Summa
Thomas
More famous still is “faithless”, “doubting Thomas”. He had known Jesus, seen miracles, and heard from eyewitnesses who were his own friends that Jesus had risen. He had second hand testimony and evidence from past experience. And yet he could not believe until he beheld Jesus himself. It is easy to sympathize with Thomas. He had seen Jesus crushed. He knew as well as we that the dead do not rise. He had not seen the risen Christ as the other disciples had. Jesus sympathized with Thomas and with those not present who would believe without seeing Jesus manifest: “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” Here Jesus anticipates his future disciples, acknowledging that they will have to determine whether they believe without seeing for themselves. The testimony of others would be necessary. But even for the disciples who did see the resurrected Christ, faith was in order. Jesus made promises to them that were not yet realized. As they faced hostile crowds and threats to their lives, they had to trust Jesus when he promised: “I will be with you always, till the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20) The need for faith is escaped only by seeing what was unseen, or what was hoped for, coming to pass.
“For now we see in a mirror indirectly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, just as I have been fully known.” 1 Corinthians 13:12 NET https://bible.com/bible/107/1co.13.12.NET
Paul
As one of the most prolific authors of Christian scripture, the Apostle Paul regularly invokes faith and evidence.
That is why I am suffering as I am. Yet this is no cause for shame, because I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him until that day.
Again we see the same understanding. Paul is convinced based on his encounter with Jesus about something not yet present.
Christian faith is essentially thinking. Look at the birds, think about them, and draw your deductions. Look at the grass, look at the lilies of the field, consider them.
Martin Lloyd-Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Moun (1960) pp. 129–30.
At times, some Christian apologists have ill-advisedly taken up the non-believers misconception about faith for rhetorical purposes. Frank Turek named a book I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist. And Lee Strobel has said. What they mean to say is that, for them, the evidence does not justify belief in Lawrence Krauss’ “nothing” to generate the universe, or in Darwin’s mechanism to form the intricate and sophisticated creatures we find all around us.
“So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” 2 Corinthians 4:18 NIV https://bible.com/bible/111/2co.4.18.NIV
Faithlessness
How different is the account of faith in the Bible and in our everyday lives than how it’s misconstrued.
The problem with faith, is that it really is a conversation stopper. Faith is a declaration of immunity to the powers of conversation. It is a reason, why you do not have to give reasons, for what you believe.” – Sam Harris
Faith is widely regarded as in tension or opposition to reason and evidence for at least three reasons.
First, faith does go beyond empirical evidence, and we live in a scientistic, materialistic age when sensible and repeatable evidence is thought to be the only kind. Secondly, faith can be irrational and very often is. When people trust the untrustworthy and justify it by appealing to the virtue of faith instead of to evidence, by guilt by association they discredit faith that is perfectly reasonable. And thirdly, faith is inherently uncertain, unrealized. In matters of consequence, that can be terribly unnerving. We crave certainty, but often it is not in the menu.
Scams, schemes, and misinformation are a scourge on our mediated, online existence. We live in a post-trust moment, when faith in others and in our institutions is abysmal. Misled so often, we demand evidence, see conspiracies everywhere, or content ourselves with only the apparent knowledge of our own lived experience. It’s reasonable to demand evidence. It’s perfectly sensible to want to kick the tires, to try it on, to want to see it for ourselves. We grasp beyond the insubstantiality of the unseen, the past, the future, the abstract is a longstanding complaint. The tribes of Jacob erected a golden calf instead of trusting the unseen God. And for us, if there’s no video, it might as well not have happened. It won’t get airplay.
Empiricism
In the same vein, one extreme form of empiricism, logical positivism, put it quite bluntly: if you can’t point to the thing itself, don’t believe it’s a thing that exists. Another extreme remedy, behaviorism, proposed we only judge people by their behavior, since their thoughts are inaccessible to sight and measurement.
In spite of these excesses, the scientific disciplines
Foolishness
Incompleteness
It should be clear that faith in what is not yet or not seen is very often exceedingly reasonable, indeed
For we know in part, and we prophesy in part, 10 but when what is perfect comes, the partial will be set aside. 1When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I became an adult, I set aside childish ways. For now we see in a mirror indirectly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, just as I have been fully known.
It is something of a consensus amongst Vhristian apologists who affirm the importance of reason in arriving at truth that faith is best construed as trust. Less often stated is that it is trust specifically in what is unseen or not yet.
Arthur Brooks offers a common definition of
Empricism
So, faith is at odds with empiricism, but not with evidence or reason.
And, I have faith in Jesus, inferring from multiple lines of evidence that he resurrected from the dead after a miraculous and exemplary life and is someone who can be trusted to do what he said he will do.
For Faith
The believer lives “by faith, not by sight.” (2 Corinthians 5:7) And faith is, “trusting what we have reason to believe is true.”1
Faith is not indubitable. Inferences can be mistaken
Whether it is one or the other will be a function of well justified the inference is. what I know of sturdy chairs and the appearance of this particular chair that, it will hold me in a moment.
Faith, but rather of seeing or possessing.
Believers in the conspiracy ask non-believers three questions: Have you ever been to Bielefeld, do you know anybody from Bielefeld, and do you know anybody who has ever been to Bielefeld? To most people, the answer to these three questions is “no,” supposedly proving the conspiracists’ point.
Faith, then, can be foolhardy. Put no your faith in princes.
For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? Romans 8:24 (KJV)
We are blessed
The disciple, Thomas, is famous for not believing the testimony of the women who first saw Jesus risen from the dead, nor his fellow disciples. To believe this unexpected miracle, he said he would have to touch the wounds of the risen Christ himself. He was, in other words, an empiricist. He would not believe what he could not see or touch with his own senses. Jesus does not begrudge Thomas’ request:
”Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and examine my hands. Extend your hand and put it into my side. Do not continue in your unbelief, but believe.” Thomas replied to him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are the people who have not seen and yet have believed.” Now Jesus performed many other miraculous signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are recorded so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.“ John 20:27-31 NET https://bible.com/bible/107/jhn.20.27-31.NET
This instructive episode encapsulates what we need to know about faith. Thomas failed to trust the witnesses who announced the resurrection of Jesus, but upon seeing the resurrected Jesus, declares: “my Lord and my God.” Jesus understood his predicament, that trusting in a truth or a person that is not yet seen with one’s own eyes requires more. But significantly, John tells us that Jesus performed this sign and other miracles so that we may believe. That is to say, they are the evidence for faith. Jesus. Rise up and walk to paralytic to demonstrate he can forgive sins. “so that you may know”. Sean McDowell’s pattern for OT and New: 1) miracle 2) knowledge 3) belief.
A common strategy for rejecting the notion of faith as irrational is to characterize it as synonymous with trust. But if faith were just trust, why then does faith evaporate when the object of faith comes to pass.
is inferring from the knowledge one already possesses to that which has not been, as of yet, beheld.
Fixes, the thing believed, and fiducia, the attitude towards it. Classic distinction
Five Reasonable Beliefs
Which of these are examples of faith?
1. All men are mortal 2. Socrates is a man ∴ Socrates is mortal
1. We are in orbit around the sun, controlled by natural laws that have always operated in a consistent way. 2. Our orbit around the sun and the rotation of the earth results in the sun rising over the Eastern horizon. ∴ Tomorrow, the sun will rise in the East.
1. The guarded tomb is empty. 2. Trustworthy people I know have seen Jesus, who was killed before my eyes, alive and well. ∴ Jesus is risen.
1. I see a shape that looks just like a strawberry in my hands. 2. I am biting into that strawberry-like object and taste strawberry. ∴ I am eating a strawberry.
1. Astronomist study the movement of the planets and have demonstrated the ability to predict their trajectory into the future. 2. Astronomers predict an eclipse visible over a large swath of North America on August 21st, 2017. 3. I’m going to buy my glasses and drive to Portland to see the eclipse in all its glory.
“Faith” in Common Parlance
Increasingly since the rise of modernism, faith has been viewed in contrast to reasoning rather than as an instance of it. Many Christmas movies In recent year After all, Boghossian asserts,
“if one had sufficient evidence to warrant belief in a particular claim, then one wouldn’t believe the claim on the basis of faith. ‘Faith’ is the word one uses when one does not have enough evidence to justify holding a belief.”[4]
Peter Boghossian, A Manual for Creating Atheists(Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2013), 68.
I think Boghossian is half right in two respects. Even a great thinker and believer Arthur Brooks describes faith as “beliefs that you do not know”. This mistake is the result of a faulty notion notion of faith and of knowledge. First that knowledge requires certainty. Neither the traditional definition of justified true belief (JTB) nor the Reformed view that it is a faculty operating correctly in a verisimilitudinous environment regard certainty as a requirement for knowledge.
Now, I don’t see much that can be gleaned from the phrase “blind faith”. “Just believe”, or “believe”, . No. Hope is an appropriate disposition. Credulity is not. Hope will lead one to seek true beliefs. Believing whatever is no virtue at all. I don’t have enough faith to, for example, be a Christian, or be an atheist.
Indeed, in his enthusiasm for being a beacon of science and reason, Lawrence Krauss, has at times confusedly denied having beliefs at all. Misunderstanding about these everyday terms abounds.
Pictures of chairs.
Romans 8:24-25
“For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.” Romans 8:24-25 NIV https://www.bible.com/111/rom.8.24-25.niv
“Faith is Blind.” This is half true.
”that not yet seen”
You cannot have your faith and eat it too
the Ansemian rendering, that it is faith seeking understanding, is a fine one, as long as we understand that faith itsel is also an understanding.
“For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have?” 25But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently. Romans 8:24,25 NIV http://bible.com/111/rom.8.24.niv
Hope is a corollary to faith and a key to understanding why it is that without hope, one cannot please God. If one does not harbor hopes about tomorrow, about the afterlife, then one is less likely to form beliefs about it. See Unamuno. See Pascal’s Wager. It is Annie’s hope when she’s “stuck in a day that’s gray and lonely” that inspires her rational inference that you ought to “bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there’ll be sun.”
“Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have?” Romans 8:23-24 NIV http://bible.com/111/rom.8.23-24.niv
The Bible speaks voluminously on faith and belief, but two of the most clarifying verses are:
And.
Do you trust someone when they are out of eyesight.
The term “faith” populates many a cliché. One can “take a leap of faith”, or more modestly, a “step of faith”. Some of the most common but misleading he phraseology around faith include, most infamously, that of “taking a leap of faith”.
This phrase is revealing and misleading at once. Taking a step or leap is a fine way of characterizing an inference. It can be to take the most reasonable next step in a chain of reasoning. But perhaps there are times when the step is more of a leap.
Faith Versus Empiricism
Inference is Inescapable
Fideism
Inference is an act. One of the more colorfully named types in the catalog of logical fallacies is that of the “slothful induction”.
Faithlessness
To be faithless is to be stuck, to insular, to be lonely, without conviction or direction. To be foolish, gullible and unskeptical, is to be prey to a thousand factoids, to every charlatan trying to fleece its mark.,. To be wise, to be intelligent, is to grow skilled in discriminating between facts and factoids.
Trust
The trust angle, such as WLC, who characterizes is as trusting in something based on the evidence. “Faith is believing that God will.” ~ Abraham Lincoln
I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it. That is not the point at which Faith comes in. …. Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.” ~ Lewis
Evidence
The design we infer in nature is an insight we abstract from our senses, but the inference itself is acquired by our reason. We infer design in nature by abstraction, not immediately by sense image. We see biological structures that have purpose and specified complexity, and using our capacity for abstract thought we reason that such structures imply a designer.
Faith is trust in something or someone not seen, not here, or not yet. Because the object of faith is unseen or has not yet materialized, trust therein requires reasoning. It requires an inference from what is beheld at this very moment to what is not. The inference may be confident or tentative. It may be based on overwhelming evidence or insufficiently justified. Either way, as we will see, faith is an act of our reason. Faith is not seeing, not beholding, not empiricism. But is reasoning. It is inference. Indeed, most everything we know and trust is not immediately present to the senses. Faith, then, is not some mystical or esoteric basis of belief. It is essential to all belief and action.
Misunderstood Faith
Though it is inescapable and ordinary, faith is often mischaracterized and maligned. Mark Twain’s schoolboy quipped that “faith is believing what you know ain’t so”. It’s cliché to echo that “faith is blind”. Many take it as a given that faith stands in contrast to evidence, science, and reason. In the wake of 9/11, many blamed the evil attack on faith. Terry Eagleton quotes John Milbank opining: “Where reason has retreated, there, it seems, faith has now rushed in, often with violent consequences.” (“Only Theology saves Metaphysics“) Blurbing Sam Harris’ End of Faith, Harvard jurist Alan Dershowitz wrote, “Harris’s tour de force demonstrates how faith — blind, deaf, dumb, and unreasoned — threatens our very existence.” For his part, Harris writes: “From the perspective of faith, it is better to ape the behavior of one’s ancestors than to find creative ways to uncover new truths in the present.” Portland State professor Peter Boghossian, author of A Manual for Creating Atheists, called faith a “virus”; a “belief without evidence,” a habit of “pretending to know things you don’t know”. (Peter Boghossian, A Manual for Creating Atheists (Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2013), 68.) As for the late Christopher Hitchens, he claims: “And here is the point, about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith… we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, open mindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. We do not hold our convictions dogmatically…” (GISG, p.5) For these critics, faith is juxtaposed as the polar opposite of well-justified belief: faith or science, faith or reason. You can only pick one.
These criticisms are off the mark, indicting a straw man, a mistaken understanding of the nature of faith. To dispel such confusion, my claim isn’t merely that faith and reason can be fit together or harmonized. More boldly I claim, faith is reasoning in our ordinary understanding of it. Faith is trust in what we can’t behold based upon what we can see, taste, touch, intuit, and know with confidence. Properly understood, faith is a normal and necessary component of every thought and every breath. As we shall see, in all that we say and do, there are elements of trust in realities that are not present, not seen, or not yet. Whatever ills have been motivated by faith, they are the product of misplaced faith, not of the error of faith in itself.
Everyday Faith
We walk by faith. Each time I put one foot in front of the other, I entrust my muscles, bones, joints, and footing with another step not yet made. As a baby learning to walk, after knee surgery, or on a frozen pond in spring, our steps are more tentative — a less confident faith. Most of the time, based on what we know to be true, we have good reason to trust our legs and our footing for that next step.
We talk by faith, trusting in another’s presence of mind and ability to comprehend us. We look for validation of our faith in our listeners’ nods and responses and base further sentences on their demonstrated understanding. We restate if there’s been an apparent miscommunication based on quizzical looks and raised eyebrows, and “uh-huhs” that we see or hear, though we cannot see others’ thoughts. In a foreign country in a second tongue, we may have less faith in our words, adding gestures, speaking more simply. Lacking faith, we may not talk at all. Nevertheless, we successfully communicate every day, seeing our reasonable faith in speech validated over and over.
We have faith in specialists. We trusted astronomers, who foretold that if I traveled to Madras, Oregon on August 21st, 2017 or Dallas, Texas on April 8, 2024 I would see a total solar eclipse; so too if I’m in the right American city on August 8, 2044. I have faith in cartographers and geographers that the city of Beilefeld is where they say, though I have not yet seen it with my own eyes, nor been there, nor known anyone who has.
Path of the 2017 eclipse across North America.
We have faith in all kinds of people. We trust other drivers, that they will not swerve across the dividing line; we believe our parents when they retell events we’ve forgotten from childhood; we depend upon our employer, that they will cut the check this month; we entrust our lives to the airline, that they hired a competent pilot and maintained the aircraft. We have less faith in the STUDENT DRIVER, in the negligent parent, in the startup company, in the “puddle jumper” over the Alaskan wilds. These are all reasonable inferences. And they are acts of faith.
We have faith in math. We expect that cutting the two-by-four in half will give me two equal planks for my chicken coop; we count on election judges, that when they tally the same votes, they’ll reach the same total. Knowing our own invisible thoughts, we doubt calculations that we know are beyond our ken.
A bridge not far
An instructive example of everyday faith is our trust in bridges. Evidence justifies our faith: the safe passage of many others before us, the visible steel girders and concrete abutments and thick cables, and the knowledge that architectural engineers and state regulators designed and certified the bridge. Still, to drive or walk out onto the bridge requires faith, because we have not yet traveled it ourselves. We have not seen ourselves safely to the other side. Faith, as an inference from evidence, comes easily when there’s good reason to trust. But if we come upon a rickety and rotting and abandoned bridge like the one I used to hazard over the San Miguel River, we have less faith in its ability to hold us. If with little faith we choose to cross it, we may test each board as we put our weight down and grip more tightly to the hand rails. Solid evidence of trustworthiness instills faith. Less solid evidence diminishes it.
When we have little faith, what is required, if not more testing, is greater recklessness or desperation. Once I was stuck at the Hluhlwe River Bridge. It is a low-water bridge and it was largely submerged during a flash flood. Night had fallen. My brother, his wife, and his infant daughter were in the rear seat. We were stranded without options between the two great rivers that pass through Hluhluwe Imfolozi Game Park. The only way to safety for the night from the wild animals and local bandits was over that bridge. I waited, unsure, stymied by our lack of good options. Finally, one other vehicle came around and successfully fjorded the rushing waters covering the bridge without being washed downriver. Out of desperation, we followed, desperately, with little faith. I’m here to tell the tale, but it wasn’t because I swelled with faith facing the rushing waters.
Most often, our trust is reasonable even when the object of our faith is not seen, not here, or not yet. Nietzsche associated faith with lunacy, but if you’ve ever known a paranoiac, you know that their lack of faith, their inability to trust, is fearsome and paralyzing for life. Faith is essential every day to life and thought.
William K. Clifford gets the everyday ordinariness and inescapability of faith right.
A little reflection will show us that every belief, even the simplest and most fundamental, goes beyond experience when regarded as a guide to our actions. … Even the child’s belief that the child was burnt yesterday goes beyond present experience, which contains only the memory of a burning, and not the burning itself; it assumes, therefore, that this memory is trustworthy, although we know that a memory may often be mistaken. But if it is to be used as a guide to action, as a hint of what the future is to be, it must assume something about that future, namely, that it will be consistent with the supposition that the burning really took place yesterday; which is going beyond experience.
Biblical faith is like everyday faith. Consider the paradigmatic biblical instances of faith as a test of the definition I’ve offered: trust in something not seen, not here, or not yet. Famously, the author of Hebrews says it this way. “Faith is confidence [trust] in what we hope for [not yet] and assurance about what we do not see [not seen].” (Hebrews 11:1)
The author goes on to give numerous examples.
Noah
Noah, “when warned about things not yet seen, in holy fear built an ark to save his family.” (11:7) It is rare, indeed, for someone to upend their life to prepare for a future threat like Noah. Today, climate scientists also warn of impending environmental calamities. Some few trust these climatologists and forecasters enough to upend their own lives. They reason, based on these experts’ credibility and the evidence offered, that this future state will come to pass. As with Noah, that is faith in a biblical sense. It follows a chain of reasoning into the future.
Abraham
Abraham, based on his interactions with God, trusted God’s promise of a child to come, way past child-bearing age. He considered God to be able and trustworthy (11:8). Sarah, understandably, laughed at the unlikelihood. Similarly, based on its track record and the lack of better options, many infertile couples place their faith in IVF and other medical technologies in hopes of a child. The object of faith in these instances differs: one is unnatural, the other is supernatural. In both cases, the outcome is unrealized. Faith is required, thus reasoning is required.
Speaking of Isaac and Jacob, the author of Hebrews observes: “All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance.” (11:13) They lived not only according to what they already had, but by what was yet to come.
Clearly, the author of Hebrews has in mind something like I’ve defined. The patriarchs of the Jewish and Christian faith acted upon their trust in what was not seen or not yet, based in these cases on past actions and encounters with God.
Things loved are therefore not so appropriate to faith as things hoped for, since hope is always for the absent and unseen.
Aquinas, Summa
Thomas
More famous still is “faithless”, “doubting Thomas”. He had known Jesus, seen miracles, and heard from eyewitnesses who were his own friends that Jesus had risen. He had second hand testimony and evidence from past experience. And yet he could not believe until he beheld Jesus himself. It is easy to sympathize with Thomas. He had seen Jesus crushed. He knew as well as we that the dead do not rise. He had not seen the risen Christ as the other disciples had. Jesus sympathized with Thomas and with those not present who would believe without seeing Jesus manifest: “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” Here Jesus anticipates his future disciples, acknowledging that they will have to determine whether they believe without seeing for themselves. The testimony of others would be necessary. But even for the disciples who did see the resurrected Christ, faith was in order. Jesus made promises to them that were not yet realized. As they faced hostile crowds and threats to their lives, they had to trust Jesus when he promised: “I will be with you always, till the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20) The need for faith is escaped only by seeing what was unseen, or what was hoped for coming to pass.
“For now we see in a mirror indirectly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, just as I have been fully known.” 1 Corinthians 13:12 NET https://bible.com/bible/107/1co.13.12.NET
Paul
As one of the most prolific authors of Christian scripture, the Apostle Paul regularly invokes faith and evidence.
That is why I am suffering as I am. Yet this is no cause for shame, because I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him until that day.
Again we see the same understanding. Paul is convinced based on his encounter with Jesus about something not yet present.
Christian faith is essentially thinking. Look at the birds, think about them, and draw your deductions. Look at the grass, look at the lilies of the field, consider them.
Martin Lloyd-Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Moun (1960) pp. 129–30.
At times, some Christian apologists have ill-advisedly taken up the non-believers misconception about faith for rhetorical purposes. Frank Turek named a book I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist. And Lee Strobel has said. What they mean to say is that, for them, the evidence does not justify belief in Lawrence Krauss’ “nothing” to generate the universe, or in Darwin’s mechanism to form the intricate and sophisticated creatures we find all around us.
“So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” 2 Corinthians 4:18 NIV https://bible.com/bible/111/2co.4.18.NIV
Faithlessness
How different is the account of faith in the Bible and in our everyday lives than how it’s misconstrued.
The problem with faith, is that it really is a conversation stopper. Faith is a declaration of immunity to the powers of conversation. It is a reason, why you do not have to give reasons, for what you believe.” – Sam Harris
Faith is widely regarded as in tension or opposition to reason and evidence for at least three reasons.
First, faith does go beyond empirical evidence, and we live in a scientistic, materialistic age when sensible and repeatable evidence is thought to be the only kind. Secondly, faith can be irrational and very often is. When people trust the untrustworthy and justify it by appealing to the virtue of faith instead of to evidence, by guilt by association they discredit faith that is perfectly reasonable. And thirdly, faith is inherently uncertain, unrealized. In matters of consequence, that can be terribly unnerving. We crave certainty, but often it is not in the menu.
Scams, schemes, and misinformation are a scourge on our mediated, online existence. We live in a post-trust moment, when faith in others and in our institutions is abysmal. Misled so often, we demand evidence, see conspiracies everywhere, or content ourselves with only the apparent knowledge of our own lived experience. It’s reasonable to demand evidence. It’s perfectly sensible to want to kick the tires, to try it on, to want to see it for ourselves. We grasp beyond the insubstantiality of the unseen, the past, the future, the abstract is a longstanding complaint. The tribes of Jacob erected a golden calf instead of trusting the unseen God. And for us, if there’s no video, it might as well not have happened. It won’t get airplay.
Empiricism
In the same vein, one extreme form of empiricism, logical positivism, put it quite bluntly: if you can’t point to the thing itself, don’t believe it’s a thing that exists. Another extreme remedy, behaviorism, proposed we only judge people by their behavior, since their thoughts are inaccessible to sight and measurement.
In spite of these excesses, the scientific disciplines
Foolishness
Incompleteness
It should be clear that faith in what is not yet or not seen is very often exceedingly reasonable, indeed
For we know in part, and we prophesy in part, 10 but when what is perfect comes, the partial will be set aside. 1When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I became an adult, I set aside childish ways. For now we see in a mirror indirectly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, just as I have been fully known.
It is something of a consensus amongst Vhristian apologists who affirm the importance of reason in arriving at truth that faith is best construed as trust. Less often stated is that it is trust specifically in what is unseen or not yet.
Arthur Brooks offers a common definition of
Empricism
So, faith is at odds with empiricism, but not with evidence or reason.
And, I have faith in Jesus, inferring from multiple lines of evidence that he resurrected from the dead after a miraculous and exemplary life and is someone who can be trusted to do what he said he will do.
For Faith
The believer lives “by faith, not by sight.” (2 Corinthians 5:7) And faith is, “trusting what we have reason to believe is true.”1
Faith is not indubitable. Inferences can be mistaken
Whether it is one or the other will be a function of well justified the inference is. what I know of sturdy chairs and the appearance of this particular chair that, it will hold me in a moment.
Faith, but rather of seeing or possessing.
Believers in the conspiracy ask non-believers three questions: Have you ever been to Bielefeld, do you know anybody from Bielefeld, and do you know anybody who has ever been to Bielefeld? To most people, the answer to these three questions is “no,” supposedly proving the conspiracists’ point.
Faith, then, can be foolhardy. Put no your faith in princes.
For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? Romans 8:24 (KJV)
We are blessed
The disciple, Thomas, is famous for not believing the testimony of the women who first saw Jesus risen from the dead, nor his fellow disciples. To believe this unexpected miracle, he said he would have to touch the wounds of the risen Christ himself. He was, in other words, an empiricist. He would not believe what he could not see or touch with his own senses. Jesus does not begrudge Thomas’ request:
”Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and examine my hands. Extend your hand and put it into my side. Do not continue in your unbelief, but believe.” Thomas replied to him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are the people who have not seen and yet have believed.” Now Jesus performed many other miraculous signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are recorded so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.“ John 20:27-31 NET https://bible.com/bible/107/jhn.20.27-31.NET
This instructive episode encapsulates what we need to know about faith. Thomas failed to trust the witnesses who announced the resurrection of Jesus, but upon seeing the resurrected Jesus, declares: “my Lord and my God.” Jesus understood his predicament, that trusting in a truth or a person that is not yet seen with one’s own eyes requires more. But significantly, John tells us that Jesus performed this sign and other miracles so that we may believe. That is to say, they are the evidence for faith. Jesus. Rise up and walk to paralytic to demonstrate he can forgive sins. “so that you may know”. Sean McDowell’s pattern for OT and New: 1) miracle 2) knowledge 3) belief.
A common strategy for rejecting the notion of faith as irrational is to characterize it as synonymous with trust. But if faith were just trust, why then does faith evaporate when the object of faith comes to pass.
is inferring from the knowledge one already possesses to that which has not been, as of yet, beheld.
Fixes, the thing believed, and fiducia, the attitude towards it. Classic distinction
Five Reasonable Beliefs
Which of these are examples of faith?
1. All men are mortal 2. Socrates is a man ∴ Socrates is mortal
1. We are in orbit around the sun, controlled by natural laws that have always operated in a consistent way. 2. Our orbit around the sun and the rotation of the earth results in the sun rising over the Eastern horizon. ∴ Tomorrow, the sun will rise in the East.
1. The guarded tomb is empty. 2. Trustworthy people I know have seen Jesus, who was killed before my eyes, alive and well. ∴ Jesus is risen.
1. I see a shape that looks just like a strawberry in my hands. 2. I am biting into that strawberry-like object and taste strawberry. ∴ I am eating a strawberry.
1. Astronomist study the movement of the planets and have demonstrated the ability to predict their trajectory into the future. 2. Astronomers predict an eclipse visible over a large swath of North America on August 21st, 2017. 3. I’m going to buy my glasses and drive to Portland to see the eclipse in all its glory.
“Faith” in Common Parlance
Increasingly since the rise of modernism, faith has been viewed in contrast to reasoning rather than as an instance of it. Many Christmas movies In recent year After all, Boghossian asserts,
“if one had sufficient evidence to warrant belief in a particular claim, then one wouldn’t believe the claim on the basis of faith. ‘Faith’ is the word one uses when one does not have enough evidence to justify holding a belief.”[4]
Peter Boghossian, A Manual for Creating Atheists(Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2013), 68.
I think Boghossian is half right in two respects. Even a great thinker and believer Arthur Brooks describes faith as “beliefs that you do not know”. This mistake is the result of a faulty notion notion of faith and of knowledge. First that knowledge requires certainty. Neither the traditional definition of justified true belief (JTB) nor the Reformed view that it is a faculty operating correctly in a verisimilitudinous environment regard certainty as a requirement for knowledge.
Now, I don’t see much that can be gleaned from the phrase “blind faith”. “Just believe”, or “believe”, . No. Hope is an appropriate disposition. Credulity is not. Hope will lead one to seek true beliefs. Believing whatever is no virtue at all. I don’t have enough faith to, for example, be a Christian, or be an atheist.
Indeed, in his enthusiasm for being a beacon of science and reason, Lawrence Krauss, has at times confusedly denied having beliefs at all. Misunderstanding about these everyday terms abounds.
Pictures of chairs.
Romans 8:24-25
“For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.” Romans 8:24-25 NIV https://www.bible.com/111/rom.8.24-25.niv
“Faith is Blind.” This is half true.
”that not yet seen”
You cannot have your faith and eat it too
the Ansemian rendering, that it is faith seeking understanding, is a fine one, as long as we understand that faith itsel is also an understanding.
“For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have?” 25But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently. Romans 8:24,25 NIV http://bible.com/111/rom.8.24.niv
Hope is a corollary to faith and a key to understanding why it is that without hope, one cannot please God. If one does not harbor hopes about tomorrow, about the afterlife, then one is less likely to form beliefs about it. See Unamuno. See Pascal’s Wager. It is Annie’s hope when she’s “stuck in a day that’s gray and lonely” that inspires her rational inference that you ought to “bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there’ll be sun.”
“Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have?” Romans 8:23-24 NIV http://bible.com/111/rom.8.23-24.niv
The Bible speaks voluminously on faith and belief, but two of the most clarifying verses are:
And.
Do you trust someone when they are out of eyesight.
The term “faith” populates many a cliché. One can “take a leap of faith”, or more modestly, a “step of faith”. Some of the most common but misleading he phraseology around faith include, most infamously, that of “taking a leap of faith”.
This phrase is revealing and misleading at once. Taking a step or leap is a fine way of characterizing an inference. It can be to take the most reasonable next step in a chain of reasoning. But perhaps there are times when the step is more of a leap.
Faith Versus Empiricism
Inference is Inescapable
Fideism
Inference is an act. One of the more colorfully named types in the catalog of logical fallacies is that of the “slothful induction”.
Faithlessness
To be faithless is to be stuck, to insular, to be lonely, without conviction or direction. To be foolish, gullible and unskeptical, is to be prey to a thousand factoids, to every charlatan trying to fleece its mark.,. To be wise, to be intelligent, is to grow skilled in discriminating between facts and factoids.
Trust
The trust angle, such as WLC, who characterizes is as trusting in something based on the evidence. “Faith is believing that God will.” ~ Abraham Lincoln
I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it. That is not the point at which Faith comes in. …. Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.” ~ Lewis
Evidence
The design we infer in nature is an insight we abstract from our senses, but the inference itself is acquired by our reason. We infer design in nature by abstraction, not immediately by sense image. We see biological structures that have purpose and specified complexity, and using our capacity for abstract thought we reason that such structures imply a designer.
Faith is trust in something or someone not seen, not here, or not yet. Because the object of faith is unseen or has not yet materialized, trust therein requires reasoning. It requires an inference from what is beheld at this very moment to what is not. The inference may be confident or tentative. It may be based on overwhelming evidence or insufficiently justified. Either way, as we will see, faith is an act of our reason. Faith is not seeing, not beholding, not empiricism. But is reasoning. It is inference. Indeed, most everything we know and trust is not immediately present to the senses. Faith, then, is not some mystical or esoteric basis of belief. It is essential to all belief and action.
Misunderstood Faith
Though it is inescapable and ordinary, faith is often mischaracterized and maligned. Mark Twain’s schoolboy quipped that “faith is believing what you know ain’t so”. It’s cliché to echo that “faith is blind”. Many take it as a given that faith stands in contrast to evidence, science, and reason. In the wake of 9/11, many blamed the evil attack on faith. Terry Eagleton quotes John Milbank opining: “Where reason has retreated, there, it seems, faith has now rushed in, often with violent consequences.” (“Only Theology saves Metaphysics“) Blurbing Sam Harris’ End of Faith, Harvard jurist Alan Dershowitz wrote, “Harris’s tour de force demonstrates how faith — blind, deaf, dumb, and unreasoned — threatens our very existence.” For his part, Harris writes: “From the perspective of faith, it is better to ape the behavior of one’s ancestors than to find creative ways to uncover new truths in the present.” Portland State professor Peter Boghossian, author of A Manual for Creating Atheists, called faith a “virus”; a “belief without evidence,” a habit of “pretending to know things you don’t know”. (Peter Boghossian, A Manual for Creating Atheists (Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2013), 68.) As for the late Christopher Hitchens, he claims: “And here is the point, about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith… we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, open mindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. We do not hold our convictions dogmatically…” (GISG, p.5) For these critics, faith is juxtaposed as the polar opposite of well-justified belief: faith or science, faith or reason. You can only pick one.
These criticisms are off the mark, indicting a straw man, a mistaken understanding of the nature of faith. To dispel such confusion, my claim isn’t merely that faith and reason can be fit together or harmonized. More boldly I claim, faith is reasoning in our ordinary understanding of it. Faith is trust in what we can’t behold based upon what we can see, taste, touch, intuit, and know with confidence. Properly understood, faith is a normal and necessary component of every thought and every breath. As we shall see, in all that we say and do, there are elements of trust in realities that are not present, not seen, or not yet. Whatever ills have been motivated by faith, they are the product of misplaced faith, not of the error of faith in itself.
Everyday Faith
We walk by faith. Each time I put one foot in front of the other, I entrust my muscles, bones, joints, and footing with another step not yet made. As a baby learning to walk, after knee surgery, or on a frozen pond in spring, our steps are more tentative — a less confident faith. Most of the time, based on what we know to be true, we have good reason to trust our legs and our footing for that next step.
We talk by faith, trusting in another’s presence of mind and ability to comprehend us. We look for validation of our faith in our listeners’ nods and responses and base further sentences on their demonstrated understanding. We restate if there’s been an apparent miscommunication based on quizzical looks and raised eyebrows, and “uh-huhs” that we see or hear, though we cannot see others’ thoughts. In a foreign country in a second tongue, we may have less faith in our words, adding gestures, speaking more simply. Lacking faith, we may not talk at all. Nevertheless, we successfully communicate every day, seeing our reasonable faith in speech validated over and over.
We have faith in specialists. We trusted astronomers, who foretold that if I traveled to Madras, Oregon on August 21st, 2017 or Dallas, Texas on April 8, 2024 I would see a total solar eclipse; so too if I’m in the right American city on August 8, 2044. I have faith in cartographers and geographers that the city of Beilefeld is where they say, though I have not yet seen it with my own eyes, nor been there, nor known anyone who has.
Path of the 2017 eclipse across North America.
We have faith in all kinds of people. We trust other drivers, that they will not swerve across the dividing line; we believe our parents when they retell events we’ve forgotten from childhood; we depend upon our employer, that they will cut the check this month; we entrust our lives to the airline, that they hired a competent pilot and maintained the aircraft. We have less faith in the STUDENT DRIVER, in the negligent parent, in the startup company, in the “puddle jumper” over the Alaskan wilds. These are all reasonable inferences. And they are acts of faith.
We have faith in math. We expect that cutting the two-by-four in half will give me two equal planks for my chicken coop; we count on election judges, that when they tally the same votes, they’ll reach the same total. Knowing our own invisible thoughts, we doubt calculations that we know are beyond our ken.
A bridge not far
An instructive example of everyday faith is our trust in bridges. Evidence justifies our faith: the safe passage of many others before us, the visible steel girders and concrete abutments and thick cables, and the knowledge that architectural engineers and state regulators designed and certified the bridge. Still, to drive or walk out onto the bridge requires faith, because we have not yet traveled it ourselves. We have not seen ourselves safely to the other side. Faith, as an inference from evidence, comes easily when there’s good reason to trust. But if we come upon a rickety and rotting and abandoned bridge like the one I used to hazard over the San Miguel River, we have less faith in its ability to hold us. If with little faith we choose to cross it, we may test each board as we put our weight down and grip more tightly to the hand rails. Solid evidence of trustworthiness instills faith. Less solid evidence diminishes it.
When we have little faith, what is required, if not more testing, is greater recklessness or desperation. Once I was stuck at the Hluhlwe River Bridge. It is a low-water bridge and it was largely submerged during a flash flood. Night had fallen. My brother, his wife, and his infant daughter were in the rear seat. We were stranded without options between the two great rivers that pass through Hluhluwe Imfolozi Game Park. The only way to safety for the night from the wild animals and local bandits was over that bridge. I waited, unsure, stymied by our lack of good options. Finally, one other vehicle came around and successfully fjorded the rushing waters covering the bridge without being washed downriver. Out of desperation, we followed, desperately, with little faith. I’m here to tell the tale, but it wasn’t because I swelled with faith facing the rushing waters.
Most often, our trust is reasonable even when the object of our faith is not seen, not here, or not yet. Nietzsche associated faith with lunacy, but if you’ve ever known a paranoiac, you know that their lack of faith, their inability to trust, is fearsome and paralyzing for life. Faith is essential every day to life and thought.
William K. Clifford gets the everyday ordinariness and inescapability of faith right.
A little reflection will show us that every belief, even the simplest and most fundamental, goes beyond experience when regarded as a guide to our actions. … Even the child’s belief that the child was burnt yesterday goes beyond present experience, which contains only the memory of a burning, and not the burning itself; it assumes, therefore, that this memory is trustworthy, although we know that a memory may often be mistaken. But if it is to be used as a guide to action, as a hint of what the future is to be, it must assume something about that future, namely, that it will be consistent with the supposition that the burning really took place yesterday; which is going beyond experience.
Biblical faith is like everyday faith. Consider the paradigmatic biblical instances of faith as a test of the definition I’ve offered: trust in something not seen, not here, or not yet. Famously, the author of Hebrews says it this way. “Faith is confidence [trust] in what we hope for [not yet] and assurance about what we do not see [not seen].” (Hebrews 11:1)
The author goes on to give numerous examples.
Noah
Noah, “when warned about things not yet seen, in holy fear built an ark to save his family.” (11:7) It is rare, indeed, for someone to upend their life to prepare for a future threat like Noah. Today, climate scientists also warn of impending environmental calamities. Some few trust these climatologists and forecasters enough to upend their own lives. They reason, based on these experts’ credibility and the evidence offered, that this future state will come to pass. As with Noah, that is faith in a biblical sense. It follows a chain of reasoning into the future.
Abraham
Abraham, based on his interactions with God, trusted God’s promise of a child to come, way past child-bearing age. He considered God to be able and trustworthy (11:8). Sarah, understandably, laughed at the unlikelihood. Similarly, based on its track record and the lack of better options, many infertile couples place their faith in IVF and other medical technologies in hopes of a child. The object of faith in these instances differs: one is unnatural, the other is supernatural. In both cases, the outcome is unrealized. Faith is required. Reasoning is required.
Speaking of Isaac and Jacob, the author observes: “All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance.” (11:13) They lived not only according to what they already had, but by what was yet to come.
Clearly, the author of Hebrews has in mind something like I’ve defined. The patriarchs of the Jewish and Christian faith acted upon their trust in what was not seen or not yet, based in these cases on past actions and encounters with God.
Things loved are therefore not so appropriate to faith as things hoped for, since hope is always for the absent and unseen.
Aquinas, Summa
Thomas
More famous still is “faithless”, “doubting Thomas”. He had known Jesus, seen miracles, and heard from eyewitnesses who were his own friends that Jesus had risen. He had second hand testimony and evidence from past experience. And yet he could not believe until he beheld Jesus himself. It is easy to sympathize with Thomas. He had seen Jesus crushed. He knew as well as we that the dead do not rise. He had not seen the risen Christ as the other disciples had. Jesus sympathized with Thomas and with those not present who would believe without seeing Jesus manifest: “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” Here Jesus anticipates his future disciples, acknowledging that they will have to determine whether they believe without seeing for themselves. The testimony of others would be necessary. But even for the disciples who did see the resurrected Christ, faith was in order. Jesus made promises to them that were not yet realized. As they faced hostile crowds and threats to their lives, they had to trust Jesus when he promised: “I will be with you always, till the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20) The need for faith is escaped only by seeing what was unseen, or what was hoped for coming to pass.
“For now we see in a mirror indirectly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, just as I have been fully known.” 1 Corinthians 13:12 NET https://bible.com/bible/107/1co.13.12.NET
Paul
As one of the most prolific authors of Christian scripture, the Apostle Paul regularly invokes faith and evidence.
That is why I am suffering as I am. Yet this is no cause for shame, because I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him until that day.
Again we see the same understanding. Paul is convinced based on his encounter with Jesus about something not yet present.
Christian faith is essentially thinking. Look at the birds, think about them, and draw your deductions. Look at the grass, look at the lilies of the field, consider them.
Martin Lloyd-Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Moun (1960) pp. 129–30.
At times, some Christian apologists have ill-advisedly taken up the non-believers misconception about faith for rhetorical purposes. Frank Turek named a book I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist. And Lee Strobel has said. What they mean to say is that, for them, the evidence does not justify belief in Lawrence Krauss’ “nothing” to generate the universe, or in Darwin’s mechanism to form the intricate and sophisticated creatures we find all around us.
“So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” 2 Corinthians 4:18 NIV https://bible.com/bible/111/2co.4.18.NIV
Faithlessness
How different is the account of faith in the Bible and in our everyday lives than how it’s misconstrued.
The problem with faith, is that it really is a conversation stopper. Faith is a declaration of immunity to the powers of conversation. It is a reason, why you do not have to give reasons, for what you believe.” – Sam Harris
Faith is widely regarded as in tension or opposition to reason and evidence for at least three reasons.
First, faith does go beyond empirical evidence, and we live in a scientistic, materialistic age when sensible and repeatable evidence is thought to be the only kind. Secondly, faith can be irrational and very often is. When people trust the untrustworthy and justify it by appealing to the virtue of faith instead of to evidence, by guilt by association they discredit faith that is perfectly reasonable. And thirdly, faith is inherently uncertain, unrealized. In matters of consequence, that can be terribly unnerving. We crave certainty, but often it is not in the menu.
Scams, schemes, and misinformation are a scourge on our mediated, online existence. We live in a post-trust moment, when faith in others and in our institutions is abysmal. Misled so often, we demand evidence, see conspiracies everywhere, or content ourselves with only the apparent knowledge of our own lived experience. It’s reasonable to demand evidence. It’s perfectly sensible to want to kick the tires, to try it on, to want to see it for ourselves. We grasp beyond the insubstantiality of the unseen, the past, the future, the abstract is a longstanding complaint. The tribes of Jacob erected a golden calf instead of trusting the unseen God. And for us, if there’s no video, it might as well not have happened. It won’t get airplay.
Empiricism
In the same vein, one extreme form of empiricism, logical positivism, put it quite bluntly: if you can’t point to the thing itself, don’t believe it’s a thing that exists. Another extreme remedy, behaviorism, proposed we only judge people by their behavior, since their thoughts are inaccessible to sight and measurement.
In spite of these excesses, the scientific disciplines
Foolishness
Incompleteness
It should be clear that faith in what is not yet or not seen is very often exceedingly reasonable, indeed
For we know in part, and we prophesy in part, 10 but when what is perfect comes, the partial will be set aside. 1When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I became an adult, I set aside childish ways. For now we see in a mirror indirectly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, just as I have been fully known.
It is something of a consensus amongst Vhristian apologists who affirm the importance of reason in arriving at truth that faith is best construed as trust. Less often stated is that it is trust specifically in what is unseen or not yet.
Arthur Brooks offers a common definition of
Empricism
So, faith is at odds with empiricism, but not with evidence or reason.
And, I have faith in Jesus, inferring from multiple lines of evidence that he resurrected from the dead after a miraculous and exemplary life and is someone who can be trusted to do what he said he will do.
For Faith
The believer lives “by faith, not by sight.” (2 Corinthians 5:7) And faith is, “trusting what we have reason to believe is true.”1
Faith is not indubitable. Inferences can be mistaken
Whether it is one or the other will be a function of well justified the inference is. what I know of sturdy chairs and the appearance of this particular chair that, it will hold me in a moment.
Faith, but rather of seeing or possessing.
Believers in the conspiracy ask non-believers three questions: Have you ever been to Bielefeld, do you know anybody from Bielefeld, and do you know anybody who has ever been to Bielefeld? To most people, the answer to these three questions is “no,” supposedly proving the conspiracists’ point.
Faith, then, can be foolhardy. Put no your faith in princes.
For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? Romans 8:24 (KJV)
We are blessed
The disciple, Thomas, is famous for not believing the testimony of the women who first saw Jesus risen from the dead, nor his fellow disciples. To believe this unexpected miracle, he said he would have to touch the wounds of the risen Christ himself. He was, in other words, an empiricist. He would not believe what he could not see or touch with his own senses. Jesus does not begrudge Thomas’ request:
”Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and examine my hands. Extend your hand and put it into my side. Do not continue in your unbelief, but believe.” Thomas replied to him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are the people who have not seen and yet have believed.” Now Jesus performed many other miraculous signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are recorded so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.“ John 20:27-31 NET https://bible.com/bible/107/jhn.20.27-31.NET
This instructive episode encapsulates what we need to know about faith. Thomas failed to trust the witnesses who announced the resurrection of Jesus, but upon seeing the resurrected Jesus, declares: “my Lord and my God.” Jesus understood his predicament, that trusting in a truth or a person that is not yet seen with one’s own eyes requires more. But significantly, John tells us that Jesus performed this sign and other miracles so that we may believe. That is to say, they are the evidence for faith. Jesus. Rise up and walk to paralytic to demonstrate he can forgive sins. “so that you may know”. Sean McDowell’s pattern for OT and New: 1) miracle 2) knowledge 3) belief.
A common strategy for rejecting the notion of faith as irrational is to characterize it as synonymous with trust. But if faith were just trust, why then does faith evaporate when the object of faith comes to pass.
is inferring from the knowledge one already possesses to that which has not been, as of yet, beheld.
Fixes, the thing believed, and fiducia, the attitude towards it. Classic distinction
Five Reasonable Beliefs
Which of these are examples of faith?
1. All men are mortal 2. Socrates is a man ∴ Socrates is mortal
1. We are in orbit around the sun, controlled by natural laws that have always operated in a consistent way. 2. Our orbit around the sun and the rotation of the earth results in the sun rising over the Eastern horizon. ∴ Tomorrow, the sun will rise in the East.
1. The guarded tomb is empty. 2. Trustworthy people I know have seen Jesus, who was killed before my eyes, alive and well. ∴ Jesus is risen.
1. I see a shape that looks just like a strawberry in my hands. 2. I am biting into that strawberry-like object and taste strawberry. ∴ I am eating a strawberry.
1. Astronomist study the movement of the planets and have demonstrated the ability to predict their trajectory into the future. 2. Astronomers predict an eclipse visible over a large swath of North America on August 21st, 2017. 3. I’m going to buy my glasses and drive to Portland to see the eclipse in all its glory.
“Faith” in Common Parlance
Increasingly since the rise of modernism, faith has been viewed in contrast to reasoning rather than as an instance of it. Many Christmas movies In recent year After all, Boghossian asserts,
“if one had sufficient evidence to warrant belief in a particular claim, then one wouldn’t believe the claim on the basis of faith. ‘Faith’ is the word one uses when one does not have enough evidence to justify holding a belief.”[4]
Peter Boghossian, A Manual for Creating Atheists(Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2013), 68.
I think Boghossian is half right in two respects. Even a great thinker and believer Arthur Brooks describes faith as “beliefs that you do not know”. This mistake is the result of a faulty notion notion of faith and of knowledge. First that knowledge requires certainty. Neither the traditional definition of justified true belief (JTB) nor the Reformed view that it is a faculty operating correctly in a verisimilitudinous environment regard certainty as a requirement for knowledge.
Now, I don’t see much that can be gleaned from the phrase “blind faith”. “Just believe”, or “believe”, . No. Hope is an appropriate disposition. Credulity is not. Hope will lead one to seek true beliefs. Believing whatever is no virtue at all. I don’t have enough faith to, for example, be a Christian, or be an atheist.
Indeed, in his enthusiasm for being a beacon of science and reason, Lawrence Krauss, has at times confusedly denied having beliefs at all. Misunderstanding about these everyday terms abounds.
Pictures of chairs.
Romans 8:24-25
“For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.” Romans 8:24-25 NIV https://www.bible.com/111/rom.8.24-25.niv
“Faith is Blind.” This is half true.
”that not yet seen”
You cannot have your faith and eat it too
the Ansemian rendering, that it is faith seeking understanding, is a fine one, as long as we understand that faith itsel is also an understanding.
“For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have?” 25But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently. Romans 8:24,25 NIV http://bible.com/111/rom.8.24.niv
Hope is a corollary to faith and a key to understanding why it is that without hope, one cannot please God. If one does not harbor hopes about tomorrow, about the afterlife, then one is less likely to form beliefs about it. See Unamuno. See Pascal’s Wager. It is Annie’s hope when she’s “stuck in a day that’s gray and lonely” that inspires her rational inference that you ought to “bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there’ll be sun.”
“Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have?” Romans 8:23-24 NIV http://bible.com/111/rom.8.23-24.niv
The Bible speaks voluminously on faith and belief, but two of the most clarifying verses are:
And.
Do you trust someone when they are out of eyesight.
The term “faith” populates many a cliché. One can “take a leap of faith”, or more modestly, a “step of faith”. Some of the most common but misleading he phraseology around faith include, most infamously, that of “taking a leap of faith”.
This phrase is revealing and misleading at once. Taking a step or leap is a fine way of characterizing an inference. It can be to take the most reasonable next step in a chain of reasoning. But perhaps there are times when the step is more of a leap.
Faith Versus Empiricism
Inference is Inescapable
Fideism
Inference is an act. One of the more colorfully named types in the catalog of logical fallacies is that of the “slothful induction”.
Faithlessness
To be faithless is to be stuck, to insular, to be lonely, without conviction or direction. To be foolish, gullible and unskeptical, is to be prey to a thousand factoids, to every charlatan trying to fleece its mark.,. To be wise, to be intelligent, is to grow skilled in discriminating between facts and factoids.
Trust
The trust angle, such as WLC, who characterizes is as trusting in something based on the evidence. “Faith is believing that God will.” ~ Abraham Lincoln
I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it. That is not the point at which Faith comes in. …. Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.” ~ Lewis
Evidence
The design we infer in nature is an insight we abstract from our senses, but the inference itself is acquired by our reason. We infer design in nature by abstraction, not immediately by sense image. We see biological structures that have purpose and specified complexity, and using our capacity for abstract thought we reason that such structures imply a designer.
Faith is trust in something or someone not seen, not here, or not yet. Because the object of faith is unseen or has not yet materialized, trust therein requires reasoning. It requires an inference from what is beheld at this very moment to what is not. The inference may be confident or tentative. It may be based on overwhelming evidence or insufficiently justified. Either way, as we will see, faith is an act of our reason. Faith is not seeing, not beholding, not empiricism. But is reasoning. It is inference. Indeed, most everything we know and trust is not immediately present to the senses. Faith, then, is not some mystical or esoteric basis of belief. It is essential to all belief and action.
Misunderstood Faith
Though it is inescapable and ordinary, faith is often mischaracterized and maligned. Mark Twain’s schoolboy quipped that “faith is believing what you know ain’t so”. It’s cliché to echo that “faith is blind”. Many take it as a given that faith stands in contrast to evidence, science, and reason. In the wake of 9/11, many blamed the evil attack on faith. Terry Eagleton quotes John Milbank opining: “Where reason has retreated, there, it seems, faith has now rushed in, often with violent consequences.” (“Only Theology saves Metaphysics“) Blurbing Sam Harris’ End of Faith, Harvard jurist Alan Dershowitz wrote, “Harris’s tour de force demonstrates how faith — blind, deaf, dumb, and unreasoned — threatens our very existence.” For his part, Harris writes: “From the perspective of faith, it is better to ape the behavior of one’s ancestors than to find creative ways to uncover new truths in the present.” Portland State professor Peter Boghossian, author of A Manual for Creating Atheists, called faith a “virus”; a “belief without evidence,” a habit of “pretending to know things you don’t know”. (Peter Boghossian, A Manual for Creating Atheists (Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2013), 68.) As for the late Christopher Hitchens, he claims: “And here is the point, about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith… we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, open mindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. We do not hold our convictions dogmatically…” (GISG, p.5) For these critics, faith is juxtaposed as the polar opposite of well-justified belief: faith or science, faith or reason. You can only pick one.
These criticisms are off the mark, indicting a straw man, a mistaken understanding of the nature of faith. To dispel such confusion, my claim isn’t merely that faith and reason can be fit together or harmonized. More boldly I claim, faith is reasoning in our ordinary understanding of it. Faith is trust in what we can’t behold based upon what we can see, taste, touch, intuit, and know with confidence. Properly understood, faith is a normal and necessary component of every thought and every breath. As we shall see, in all that we say and do, there are elements of trust in realities that are not present, not seen, or not yet. Whatever ills have been motivated by faith, they are the product of misplaced faith, not of the error of faith in itself.
Everyday Faith
We walk by faith. Each time I put one foot in front of the other, I entrust my muscles, bones, joints, and footing with another step not yet made. As a baby learning to walk, after knee surgery, or on a frozen pond in spring, our steps are more tentative — a less confident faith. Most of the time, based on what we know to be true, we have good reason to trust our legs and our footing for that next step.
We talk by faith, trusting in another’s presence of mind and ability to comprehend us. We look for validation of our faith in our listeners’ nods and responses and base further sentences on their demonstrated understanding. We restate if there’s been an apparent miscommunication based on quizzical looks and raised eyebrows, and “uh-huhs” that we see or hear, though we cannot see others’ thoughts. In a foreign country in a second tongue, we may have less faith in our words, adding gestures, speaking more simply. Lacking faith, we may not talk at all. Nevertheless, we successfully communicate every day, seeing our reasonable faith in speech validated over and over.
We have faith in specialists. We trusted astronomers, who foretold that if I traveled to Madras, Oregon on August 21st, 2017 or Dallas, Texas on April 8, 2024 I would see a total solar eclipse; so too if I’m in the right American city on August 8, 2044. I have faith in cartographers and geographers that the city of Beilefeld is where they say, though I have not yet seen it with my own eyes, nor been there, nor known anyone who has.
Path of the 2017 eclipse across North America.
We have faith in all kinds of people. We trust other drivers, that they will not swerve across the dividing line; we believe our parents when they retell events we’ve forgotten from childhood; we depend upon our employer, that they will cut the check this month; we entrust our lives to the airline, that they hired a competent pilot and maintained the aircraft. We have less faith in the STUDENT DRIVER, in the negligent parent, in the startup company, in the “puddle jumper” over the Alaskan wilds. These are all reasonable inferences. And they are acts of faith.
We have faith in math. We expect that cutting the two-by-four in half will give me two equal planks for my chicken coop; we count on election judges, that when they tally the same votes, they’ll reach the same total. Knowing our own invisible thoughts, we doubt calculations that we know are beyond our ken.
A bridge not far
An instructive example of everyday faith is our trust in bridges. Evidence justifies our faith: the safe passage of many others before us, the visible steel girders and concrete abutments and thick cables, and the knowledge that architectural engineers and state regulators designed and certified the bridge. Still, to drive or walk out onto the bridge requires faith, because we have not yet traveled it ourselves. We have not seen ourselves safely to the other side. Faith, as an inference from evidence, comes easily when there’s good reason to trust. But if we come upon a rickety and rotting and abandoned bridge like the one I used to hazard over the San Miguel River, we have less faith in its ability to hold us. If with little faith we choose to cross it, we may test each board as we put our weight down and grip more tightly to the hand rails. Solid evidence of trustworthiness instills faith. Less solid evidence diminishes it.
When we have little faith, what is required, if not more testing, is greater riskiness or desperation. Once I was stuck at the Hluhlwe River Bridge. It is a low-water bridge and it was submerged during a flash flood. Night had fallen. My brother, his wife, and his infant daughter were in the rear seat. We were stranded without options between the two great rivers that pass through Hluhluwe Imfolozi Game Park. The only way to safety for the night from the wild animals and local bandits was over that bridge. I waited, stymied by our lack of good options. Finally, one other vehicle came around and successfully fjorded the rushing waters covering the bridge without being washed downriver. Out of desperation, we followed, desperately, with little faith. I’m here to tell the tale, but it wasn’t because I swelled with faith facing the rushing waters.
Most often, our trust is reasonable even when the object of our faith is not seen, not here, or not yet. Nietzsche associated faith with lunacy, but if you’ve ever known a paranoiac, you know that their lack of faith, their inability to trust, is fearsome and paralyzing for life. Faith is essential every day to life and thought.
William K. Clifford gets the everyday ordinariness and inescapability of faith right.
A little reflection will show us that every belief, even the simplest and most fundamental, goes beyond experience when regarded as a guide to our actions. … Even the child’s belief that the child was burnt yesterday goes beyond present experience, which contains only the memory of a burning, and not the burning itself; it assumes, therefore, that this memory is trustworthy, although we know that a memory may often be mistaken. But if it is to be used as a guide to action, as a hint of what the future is to be, it must assume something about that future, namely, that it will be consistent with the supposition that the burning really took place yesterday; which is going beyond experience.
Biblical faith is like everyday faith. Consider the paradigmatic biblical instances of faith as a test of the definition I’ve offered: trust in something not seen, not here, or not yet. Famously, the author of Hebrews says it this way. “Faith is confidence [trust] in what we hope for [not yet] and assurance about what we do not see [not seen].” (Hebrews 11:1)
The author goes on to give numerous examples.
Noah
Noah, “when warned about things not yet seen, in holy fear built an ark to save his family.” (11:7) It is rare, indeed, for someone to upend their life to prepare for a future threat like Noah. Today, climate scientists also warn of impending environmental calamities. Some few trust these climatologists and forecasters enough to upend their own lives. They reason, based on these experts’ credibility and the evidence offered, that this future state will come to pass. As with Noah, that is faith in a biblical sense. It follows a chain of reasoning into the future.
Abraham
Abraham, based on his interactions with God, trusted God’s promise of a child to come, way past child-bearing age. He considered God to be able and trustworthy (11:8). Sarah, understandably, laughed at the unlikelihood. Similarly, based on its track record and the lack of better options, many infertile couples place their faith in IVF and other medical technologies in hopes of a child. The object of faith in these instances differs: one is unnatural, the other is supernatural. In both cases, the outcome is unrealized. Faith is required. Reasoning is required.
Speaking of Isaac and Jacob, the author observes: “All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance.” (11:13) They lived not only according to what they already had, but by what was yet to come.
Clearly, the author of Hebrews has in mind something like I’ve defined. The patriarchs of the Jewish and Christian faith acted upon their trust in what was not seen or not yet, based in these cases on past actions and encounters with God.
Things loved are therefore not so appropriate to faith as things hoped for, since hope is always for the absent and unseen.
Aquinas, Summa
Thomas
More famous still is “faithless”, “doubting Thomas”. He had known Jesus, seen miracles, and heard from eyewitnesses who were his own friends that Jesus had risen. He had second hand testimony and evidence from past experience. And yet he could not believe until he beheld Jesus himself. It is easy to sympathize with Thomas. He had seen Jesus crushed. He knew as well as we that the dead do not rise. He had not seen the risen Christ as the other disciples had. Jesus sympathized with Thomas and with those not present who would believe without seeing Jesus manifest: “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” Here Jesus anticipates his future disciples, acknowledging that they will have to determine whether they believe without seeing for themselves. The testimony of others would be necessary. But even for the disciples who did see the resurrected Christ, faith was in order. Jesus made promises to them that were not yet realized. As they faced hostile crowds and threats to their lives, they had to trust Jesus when he promised: “I will be with you always, till the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20) The need for faith is escaped only by seeing what was unseen, or what was hoped for coming to pass.
“For now we see in a mirror indirectly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, just as I have been fully known.” 1 Corinthians 13:12 NET https://bible.com/bible/107/1co.13.12.NET
Paul
As one of the most prolific authors of Christian scripture, the Apostle Paul regularly invokes faith and evidence.
That is why I am suffering as I am. Yet this is no cause for shame, because I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him until that day.
Again we see the same understanding. Paul is convinced based on his encounter with Jesus about something not yet present.
Christian faith is essentially thinking. Look at the birds, think about them, and draw your deductions. Look at the grass, look at the lilies of the field, consider them.
Martin Lloyd-Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Moun (1960) pp. 129–30.
At times, some Christian apologists have ill-advisedly taken up the non-believers misconception about faith for rhetorical purposes. Frank Turek named a book I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist. And Lee Strobel has said. What they mean to say is that, for them, the evidence does not justify belief in Lawrence Krauss’ “nothing” to generate the universe, or in Darwin’s mechanism to form the intricate and sophisticated creatures we find all around us.
“So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” 2 Corinthians 4:18 NIV https://bible.com/bible/111/2co.4.18.NIV
Faithlessness
How different is the account of faith in the Bible and in our everyday lives than how it’s misconstrued.
The problem with faith, is that it really is a conversation stopper. Faith is a declaration of immunity to the powers of conversation. It is a reason, why you do not have to give reasons, for what you believe.” – Sam Harris
Faith is widely regarded as in tension or opposition to reason and evidence for at least three reasons.
First, faith does go beyond empirical evidence, and we live in a scientistic, materialistic age when sensible and repeatable evidence is thought to be the only kind. Secondly, faith can be irrational and very often is. When people trust the untrustworthy and justify it by appealing to the virtue of faith instead of to evidence, by guilt by association they discredit faith that is perfectly reasonable. And thirdly, faith is inherently uncertain, unrealized. In matters of consequence, that can be terribly unnerving. We crave certainty, but often it is not in the menu.
Scams, schemes, and misinformation are a scourge on our mediated, online existence. We live in a post-trust moment, when faith in others and in our institutions is abysmal. Misled so often, we demand evidence, see conspiracies everywhere, or content ourselves with only the apparent knowledge of our own lived experience. It’s reasonable to demand evidence. It’s perfectly sensible to want to kick the tires, to try it on, to want to see it for ourselves. We grasp beyond the insubstantiality of the unseen, the past, the future, the abstract is a longstanding complaint. The tribes of Jacob erected a golden calf instead of trusting the unseen God. And for us, if there’s no video, it might as well not have happened. It won’t get airplay.
Empiricism
In the same vein, one extreme form of empiricism, logical positivism, put it quite bluntly: if you can’t point to the thing itself, don’t believe it’s a thing that exists. Another extreme remedy, behaviorism, proposed we only judge people by their behavior, since their thoughts are inaccessible to sight and measurement.
In spite of these excesses, the scientific disciplines
Foolishness
Incompleteness
It should be clear that faith in what is not yet or not seen is very often exceedingly reasonable, indeed
For we know in part, and we prophesy in part, 10 but when what is perfect comes, the partial will be set aside. 1When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I became an adult, I set aside childish ways. For now we see in a mirror indirectly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, just as I have been fully known.
It is something of a consensus amongst Vhristian apologists who affirm the importance of reason in arriving at truth that faith is best construed as trust. Less often stated is that it is trust specifically in what is unseen or not yet.
Arthur Brooks offers a common definition of
Empricism
So, faith is at odds with empiricism, but not with evidence or reason.
And, I have faith in Jesus, inferring from multiple lines of evidence that he resurrected from the dead after a miraculous and exemplary life and is someone who can be trusted to do what he said he will do.
For Faith
The believer lives “by faith, not by sight.” (2 Corinthians 5:7) And faith is, “trusting what we have reason to believe is true.”1
Faith is not indubitable. Inferences can be mistaken
Whether it is one or the other will be a function of well justified the inference is. what I know of sturdy chairs and the appearance of this particular chair that, it will hold me in a moment.
Faith, but rather of seeing or possessing.
Believers in the conspiracy ask non-believers three questions: Have you ever been to Bielefeld, do you know anybody from Bielefeld, and do you know anybody who has ever been to Bielefeld? To most people, the answer to these three questions is “no,” supposedly proving the conspiracists’ point.
Faith, then, can be foolhardy. Put no your faith in princes.
For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? Romans 8:24 (KJV)
We are blessed
The disciple, Thomas, is famous for not believing the testimony of the women who first saw Jesus risen from the dead, nor his fellow disciples. To believe this unexpected miracle, he said he would have to touch the wounds of the risen Christ himself. He was, in other words, an empiricist. He would not believe what he could not see or touch with his own senses. Jesus does not begrudge Thomas’ request:
”Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and examine my hands. Extend your hand and put it into my side. Do not continue in your unbelief, but believe.” Thomas replied to him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are the people who have not seen and yet have believed.” Now Jesus performed many other miraculous signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are recorded so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.“ John 20:27-31 NET https://bible.com/bible/107/jhn.20.27-31.NET
This instructive episode encapsulates what we need to know about faith. Thomas failed to trust the witnesses who announced the resurrection of Jesus, but upon seeing the resurrected Jesus, declares: “my Lord and my God.” Jesus understood his predicament, that trusting in a truth or a person that is not yet seen with one’s own eyes requires more. But significantly, John tells us that Jesus performed this sign and other miracles so that we may believe. That is to say, they are the evidence for faith. Jesus. Rise up and walk to paralytic to demonstrate he can forgive sins. “so that you may know”. Sean McDowell’s pattern for OT and New: 1) miracle 2) knowledge 3) belief.
A common strategy for rejecting the notion of faith as irrational is to characterize it as synonymous with trust. But if faith were just trust, why then does faith evaporate when the object of faith comes to pass.
is inferring from the knowledge one already possesses to that which has not been, as of yet, beheld.
Fixes, the thing believed, and fiducia, the attitude towards it. Classic distinction
Five Reasonable Beliefs
Which of these are examples of faith?
1. All men are mortal 2. Socrates is a man ∴ Socrates is mortal
1. We are in orbit around the sun, controlled by natural laws that have always operated in a consistent way. 2. Our orbit around the sun and the rotation of the earth results in the sun rising over the Eastern horizon. ∴ Tomorrow, the sun will rise in the East.
1. The guarded tomb is empty. 2. Trustworthy people I know have seen Jesus, who was killed before my eyes, alive and well. ∴ Jesus is risen.
1. I see a shape that looks just like a strawberry in my hands. 2. I am biting into that strawberry-like object and taste strawberry. ∴ I am eating a strawberry.
1. Astronomist study the movement of the planets and have demonstrated the ability to predict their trajectory into the future. 2. Astronomers predict an eclipse visible over a large swath of North America on August 21st, 2017. 3. I’m going to buy my glasses and drive to Portland to see the eclipse in all its glory.
“Faith” in Common Parlance
Increasingly since the rise of modernism, faith has been viewed in contrast to reasoning rather than as an instance of it. Many Christmas movies In recent year After all, Boghossian asserts,
“if one had sufficient evidence to warrant belief in a particular claim, then one wouldn’t believe the claim on the basis of faith. ‘Faith’ is the word one uses when one does not have enough evidence to justify holding a belief.”[4]
Peter Boghossian, A Manual for Creating Atheists(Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2013), 68.
I think Boghossian is half right in two respects. Even a great thinker and believer Arthur Brooks describes faith as “beliefs that you do not know”. This mistake is the result of a faulty notion notion of faith and of knowledge. First that knowledge requires certainty. Neither the traditional definition of justified true belief (JTB) nor the Reformed view that it is a faculty operating correctly in a verisimilitudinous environment regard certainty as a requirement for knowledge.
Now, I don’t see much that can be gleaned from the phrase “blind faith”. “Just believe”, or “believe”, . No. Hope is an appropriate disposition. Credulity is not. Hope will lead one to seek true beliefs. Believing whatever is no virtue at all. I don’t have enough faith to, for example, be a Christian, or be an atheist.
Indeed, in his enthusiasm for being a beacon of science and reason, Lawrence Krauss, has at times confusedly denied having beliefs at all. Misunderstanding about these everyday terms abounds.
Pictures of chairs.
Romans 8:24-25
“For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.” Romans 8:24-25 NIV https://www.bible.com/111/rom.8.24-25.niv
“Faith is Blind.” This is half true.
”that not yet seen”
You cannot have your faith and eat it too
the Ansemian rendering, that it is faith seeking understanding, is a fine one, as long as we understand that faith itsel is also an understanding.
“For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have?” 25But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently. Romans 8:24,25 NIV http://bible.com/111/rom.8.24.niv
Hope is a corollary to faith and a key to understanding why it is that without hope, one cannot please God. If one does not harbor hopes about tomorrow, about the afterlife, then one is less likely to form beliefs about it. See Unamuno. See Pascal’s Wager. It is Annie’s hope when she’s “stuck in a day that’s gray and lonely” that inspires her rational inference that you ought to “bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there’ll be sun.”
“Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have?” Romans 8:23-24 NIV http://bible.com/111/rom.8.23-24.niv
The Bible speaks voluminously on faith and belief, but two of the most clarifying verses are:
And.
Do you trust someone when they are out of eyesight.
The term “faith” populates many a cliché. One can “take a leap of faith”, or more modestly, a “step of faith”. Some of the most common but misleading he phraseology around faith include, most infamously, that of “taking a leap of faith”.
This phrase is revealing and misleading at once. Taking a step or leap is a fine way of characterizing an inference. It can be to take the most reasonable next step in a chain of reasoning. But perhaps there are times when the step is more of a leap.
Faith Versus Empiricism
Inference is Inescapable
Fideism
Inference is an act. One of the more colorfully named types in the catalog of logical fallacies is that of the “slothful induction”.
Faithlessness
To be faithless is to be stuck, to insular, to be lonely, without conviction or direction. To be foolish, gullible and unskeptical, is to be prey to a thousand factoids, to every charlatan trying to fleece its mark.,. To be wise, to be intelligent, is to grow skilled in discriminating between facts and factoids.
Trust
The trust angle, such as WLC, who characterizes is as trusting in something based on the evidence. “Faith is believing that God will.” ~ Abraham Lincoln
I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it. That is not the point at which Faith comes in. …. Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.” ~ Lewis
Evidence
The design we infer in nature is an insight we abstract from our senses, but the inference itself is acquired by our reason. We infer design in nature by abstraction, not immediately by sense image. We see biological structures that have purpose and specified complexity, and using our capacity for abstract thought we reason that such structures imply a designer.
