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, faith is an act of our reason. Granted, faith is not seeing, not beholding, not empiricism. It is reasoning. It is inference. Indeed, most everything we know and trust is not immediately present to the senses. Faith 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 luminary Alan Dershowitz wrote “Harris’s tour de force demonstrates how faith — blind, deaf, dumb, and unreasoned — threatens our very existence. … A must read for all rational people.” 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 indict 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. 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. 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 their 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 countless times a 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, nor been there, nor known anyone who has.

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; we put our weight on the approaching bridge, trusting that its engineers did their maths. Knowing our own invisible thoughts, we doubt calculations that we know are beyond our ken.

In all of these, we reasonably trust 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 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.

William K. Clifford in “The Ethics of Belief” (1877)

Biblical Faith

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 put their life on hold 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 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 is 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. 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.

Paul

As one of the most prolific writers of 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.

‭‭2 Timothy‬ ‭1:12‬ ‭NIV‬‬

In each of these biblical accounts, the faithful had a basis for their faith. Noah and Abraham are described as knowing God.

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.

“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

Sam Harris

“Our principles are not a faith,” Hitchens

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.

‭‭1 Corinthians‬ ‭13‬:‭12‬ ‭NET‬‬

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?

“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.

Michael Egnor at Evolution News (September 30, 2019).

Notes

1 JP Moreland, In Search of a Confident Faith, (), p. 18.

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, faith is an act of our reason. Granted, faith is not seeing, not beholding, not empiricism. It is reasoning. It is inference. Indeed, most everything we know and trust is not immediately present to the senses. Faith 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 luminary Alan Dershowitz wrote “Harris’s tour de force demonstrates how faith — blind, deaf, dumb, and unreasoned — threatens our very existence. … A must read for all rational people.” 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 indict 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. 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. 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 their 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 countless times a 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, nor been there, nor known anyone who has.

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; we put or weight on the approaching bridge, trusting that its engineers did their maths. Knowing our own invisible thoughts, we doubt calculations that we know are beyond our ken.

In all of these, we reasonably trust 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 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.

William K. Clifford in “The Ethics of Belief” (1877)

Biblical Faith

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 put their life on hold 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 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 is 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. 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.

Paul

As one of the most prolific writers of 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.

‭‭2 Timothy‬ ‭1:12‬ ‭NIV‬‬

In each of these biblical accounts, the faithful had a basis for their faith. Noah and Abraham are described as knowing God.

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.

“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

Sam Harris

“Our principles are not a faith,” Hitchens

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.

‭‭1 Corinthians‬ ‭13‬:‭12‬ ‭NET‬‬

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?

“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.

Michael Egnor at Evolution News (September 30, 2019).

Notes

1 JP Moreland, In Search of a Confident Faith, (), p. 18.

Such a statement has three features: (1) The claim establishes some requirement of acceptability for an assertion (such as having to be empirically verifiable). (2) The claim places itself in subjection to the requirement. (3) Then the claim falls short of satisfying the requirement of acceptability that the assertion itself stipulates. In other words, when a statement is included in its own subject matter (i.e., when it refers to itself) but fails to satisfy its own standards of acceptability, it is self-refuting. Self-refuting statements can come in many forms. Take a look at these examples: “All sentences are exactly three words long.” “I cannot utter a word of English” (spoken in English). “I do not exist.” “This sentence is false.” “Truths can only be verified by the five senses or by science.”

To me, as to many, Dallas Willard was a gentle giant. Through his books like Spirit of the Disciplines and The Divine Conspiracy, he indelibly shaped my understanding of the way of Jesus and his followers. Even more so, Willard’s former students like philosophers J.P. Moreland and Doug Geivett further kneaded his way of thinking into my own. Philosophically, when Willard wasn’t busy bringing Husserl down off the top shelf for his students, I appreciated his simple and stalwart defense of a common sense understanding of truth. Simply stated, “A belief or idea (a statement or a proposition) is true provided that what it is about is as it is represented in the belief, statement, or so forth.“ More concretely, “Truth reveals reality, and reality can be described as what we humans run into when we are wrong, a collision in which we always lose.”

I had not been aware of Willard’s views on intelligent design. Recently rereading his posthumously published Allure of Gentleness piqued my curiosity. The book commends regarding the role of the apologist as a servant helping doubters of all kinds, not as a combatant gunning down the enemy. To that end, it sketches out the kinds of evidence one might gently bring to bear in addressing a truth seeker’s questions. Willard’s case includes evidence from design in nature and a stiff rebuke to scientism.

Mind the Inference

For Willard, order in the natural world is evidence of an intelligent mind. He echoes a key premise that intelligent design theorists make in their abductive inferences to the best explanation.

The one place we know order comes from is minds. Nearly everything you see around you, except you, was produced by a mind. We constantly experience order coming from human minds into physical reality, whether it is chocolate cakes, space shuttles, or computers. Now, it’s been proven that there is a preexisting material that minds work on, but we all know that those things causally depend upon minds conceiving them and fashioning them. And we have experience that would lead us not to believe anything else about order generally. A creative mind lies behind the physical world. You can read all about that in the first chapter of Genesis. And read again in Romans 1 these words from Paul: “Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse.” And Hebrews 11:3: “By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen [the creation] was made from things that are not visible.” Relative to our data, then, we must believe that the first cause of physical reality would also be a mind, and a sufficiently great mind at that.

Dallas Willard. The Allure of Gentleness (HarperOne)

Here Willard echoes the design inference, that we can know the kinds of things that are the product of a mind. Based on this insight, can we infer from aspects of the natural world that they too are the product of intentionality?

Against Scientism and Separation

Willard was not overawed by the scientific enterprise, and far from confining science and faith to their own magisteria, where never the twain shall meet, he observed that as two knowledge disciplines, their integration where they overlap can be trying. As such, pursuing harmony between scientific hypotheses and biblical claims is necessary. Not only that, but he expected convergence, that scientific discoveries would continue to serve as a powerful reassurance of religious truths.

I praise God for science. I believe it is his work. If you know the history of science, you must agree that it’s of God, because human beings are just staggering through it. It may interest you to look at Arthur Koestler’s book The Sleepwalkers, in which he discusses many of the great figures in the rise of modern science. The “reconciliation” of science and the Bible is a serious task, because they are both so fundamental to humankind’s call to be responsible children of God. Scientific hypotheses are held tentatively, whereas biblical truth is eternal. It is not necessary to have total reconciliation of the two, yet some amount of harmony is required. And understanding their interrelations is not easy. I truly believe that God’s hand is in history in the form of the development of technology and science. I believe it is a part of his plan to approach us through human history, and I think there will be science and technology in heaven too. I’m thankful for the scientific advances we have seen in our day, because I am sure that the more we learn, the more we’re going to be assured that, indeed, what the Bible says about creation and physical reality is true. I’m sure of it, and I can’t wait.

Dallas Willard. The Allure of Gentleness (HarperOne)

Against Deism

Willard rejected any deistic conception of God’s relation to his creation. Where suggests it’s belittling of God to think he would remain involved, Peanut Butter example

Mixed Signals

I knew that John Ortberg, one of the foremost popularizers of Willard’s thought, is also a well-known proponent of theistic evolution and is on the Advisory Council of Biologos. Willard even attended a Biologos workshop — In Search of a Theology of Celebration — in 2009. Relevant to my inquiry, he did not return in 2010 and is not a signatory to the statement drafted there, that “… the diversity of life is best explained as a result of an evolutionary process”.

Willard was also the editor of A Place for Truth, a compendium of Veritas Forum talks that prominently featured a talk by Francis Collins. Revisiting his sentiments in The Language of God, Collins assured the audience that, despite appearances, “parts of the bacterial flagellar motor have been recruited bit by bit from other structures and used in a way that gradually built up its capacity to serve the function that we now so admire.” The Forum transcripts seem largely unedited and I don’t know whether Collins’ inclusion was at Willard’s sole discretion, nor what to make of it if it was.

Wondering if I might be reading too much between the lines in The Allure of Gentleness, I searched to see if Willard had spoken of intelligent design by name.

On The Blind Watchmaker

Thanks to the work of his family collecting and archiving his papers, Dallas Willard’s website is a treasure trove of his thinking on many matters. One gem is a lengthy, unpublished review of Richard Dawkins’ bestselling 1986 book, The Blind Watchmaker. There he poses the question explicitly:

What logical relation, if any, does the theory of evolution have to the argument from the existence of order in the world of nature to the existence of a mind as causal source of (significant aspects of) the world of nature?

Dallas Willard, “Reflections on Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker” (1986)

At this point in Willard’s thinking, evidence of design in biology was not essential to teleological arguments for God.

In my own view, living organisms simply have nothing essentially to do with the heart of arguments from order to God, and hence I regard theories of biological evolution as beside the point of “design” arguments for God’s existence.

Ibid

Nevertheless, Willard’s withering review finds nothing persuasive in Dawkins’ defense of blind watchmaking or “speciesmaking”, nor a solution to the “problem” of “complex design”. He credits still less to the case for cosmic Darwinism, Dawkins’ attempt to explain the preexisting state of affairs required for biological evolution to get off the ground.

Speaking of Dawkins’ computer simulations of supposedly unguided evolutionary processes, Willard notes the crucial point, that the “computer exercises are precisely the result of a rational planner”.

Such exercises are aimed at “ramming home the importance of gradual, step-by-step change.” If the conclusion to be drawn is that current and extinct forms of life such as we are acquainted with here on planet earth could have come into existence through tiny modifications in reproduction of yet other, simpler life forms over unimaginably long periods of time, without intervention by a rational planner who is working toward a goal, then I can only insist that no such conclusion follows. The computer exercises are precisely the result of a rational planner. The more modest conclusion — that certain processes set up but not directly guided by rational intention at each step can, under conceivable circumstances, produce surprisingly ordered results — should no doubt be conceded. But this does not seem to me even to render it faintly probable that the astonishing complexity of living forms could have evolved from simple forms of the sort usually referred to — much less to lend evidence to the view that they actually did so evolve.

Ibid

Prefiguring his low regard for scientism in The Allure of Gentleness, Willard also noticed how Dawkin’s writing fits in a “romance of science” genre, as Dawkins melodramatically scores his work to an epic score.

I still cannot conceal from you my feeling of exultation as I first watched these exquisite creatures emerging before my eyes. I distinctly heard the triumphal opening chords of Also sprach Zarathustra the 2001 theme’) in my mind. I couldn’t eat, and that night “my” insects swarmed behind my eyelids as I tried to sleep.

Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (1996), p. 60.

A Growing Interest

Even with his apparent dismissiveness toward the relevance of evidence of design in biology at the time, by 1999 Dallas Willard had taken a serious interest in intelligent design and blurbed William Dembski’s seminal book.

Intelligent Design is a centerpiece in the current renewal of intellectual responsibility among thoughtful Christians. Everyone with interest in and responsibility for how science and theology interrelate should study it carefully.

In 2003, Francis J. Beckwith included him on a list of scholars supportive of intelligent design. More telling, Willard made clear in notes for a 2005 USC Templeton Lecture that he stood for academic freedom regarding evolutionary theory and its alternatives. There he defined intelligent design thusly:

In the sense relevant here, a design is an arrangement of elements to form a larger whole, typically a whole that serves some larger function. It can be synchronic or diachronic. A checkerboard has a design, as does an egg or the leaf of a tree or a park or a dance.

Some things with a design (of course everything has one) we know to have been originated through a process essentially involving thought or, more inclusively, mind. Birthday cakes, art works, 747s, checkerboards, hamburgers. “Design” as a verb always involves thought.

An intelligent design is one the causation for which involves mental processes. Obviously, intelligent designs exist. They are all around us. There is even an occupational field known as “Design.”

Obversely,

A non-intelligent design would be one the causation for which does not involve mental processes. There seem to be a lot of such designs around us. Everything from solar systems and galaxies, to geological strata, to tree leaves, birds and rabbits. Non-intelligent designs that we know of always originate from previously existing things, which of course have designs.

Dallas Willard, “Notes for Two Talks on Intelligent Design, Evolution, and the Purpose of Education“, dwillard.org (2005)

When I speak here of evolution, I refer to the process more clearly designated as “natural selection.” This is a process whereby living things undergo transformation through interaction with the environment, possibly even giving rise to other species of living things.

Evolution as natural selection is a highly accredited theory in Biology or the Biological Sciences. It has immense explanatory power within the proper range of its applicability and the types of mechanisms and processes that it invokes in its explanations are at home in the physical world, where the natural sciences carry out their investigations. This is not true of the claims of “Intelligent Design” and it is not true of “evolution” when it is pushed beyond the functioning and interrelations of living species and their parts and properties.

Evolution is itself a diachronic design, like erosion. It is no more self-explanatory or all-explanatory than is erosion. What the causes and conditions are of there being a world in which evolution occurs is not even addressed, much less answered, by natural selection. Evolution did not evolve out of something else and is not a self-subsistent being. In the NYT article on “Intelligent Spaghetti” (8/29, ’05, p. B3), language like this occurs: “This month, the Kansas State Board of Education gave preliminary approval to allow teaching alternatives to evolution like intelligent design (the theory that a smart being designed the universe).” And “…he <Mr. Henderson> agreed that science students should ‘hear multiple viewpoints’ of how the universe came to be.” And that’s where the Flying Spaghetti Monster comes in—if that’s the way to put it. Now ask yourself: Is evolution (natural selection) one alternative theory of what or who designed the universe, or of how the universe came to be? If you think it is, you are ready to step right into the ball of confusion that is the current imbroglio around the words “intelligent design.”

Teach the Controversy

Dallas Willard emphasized that education aimed at the truth about reality is purposely and inherently subversive, able to destabilize established orthodoxies and pet theories that are in error.

I assume that the purpose of education, as a human enterprise, is to equip individuals to deal with reality (what you run into when you are wrong), and that this includes putting them into possession of facts and values of various ranges and training them to distinguish facts and valuable values from fictions and bum steers, especially with respect to the traditions and institutions within which they must live, including those of family, nation, education, sciences and arts, religion and politics. Because institutions are always more interested in survival and domination than in facts and methods for finding them, education — though not everything that goes by that name — is always subversive, not least of one’s own opinions and habits.

Ibid

Indeed, he articulated the philosophy of education Discovery Institute has championed for years: Teach the Controversy. As he put it at the time: Speaking directly to an issue of academic freedom,

With respect to the teaching of evolution in the public schools, surely the spirit of Darwin and of great scientists through the ages is that no question should be ducked or obfuscated or avoided. This would mean, above all, that the theory — whatever it might be, in whatever domain — must face the hard questions. How can you honestly teach evolution if you do not face the hard questions — and not defensively, but with fairness and enthusiasm. You can’t defend “good science” teaching in the schools by identifying “good science” with specific theories sheltered from alternatives. Increasingly, today, “good thinking or research” is identified with coming to the “right” conclusions. We used to teach that you evaluated a conclusion, for its rational standing, by the arguments that might back it up. Now, increasingly, the argument is evaluated, to be brushed off, by whether or not it comes out with the “right” conclusion. If it doesn’t, the reasoning offered must be wrong, and the motives of the person on the other side must be bad. But, surely, the detailed work of open and thorough inquiry is what you want to involve students in if you wish to educate them in matters of science or matters of society.

Ibid

Detecting Design

design.”4 The almost irresistible impression of a “maker” of the physical universe is no doubt what Paul was … intelligent author; and no rational enquirer can, after serious reflection, suspend his belief a moment with regard to the

Epictetus, a famous Stoic philosopher contemporary to Paul, assigned the pervasive order in physical reality to the goodwill of God or “Providence”: “From the very construction of a complete work, we are used to declare positively that it must be the operation of some artificer, and not the effect of mere chance. Does every such work then demonstrate an artificer, and visible objects not do so?” Is not the order in things, an order obvious to thought, “sufficient to prevail on men and make them ashamed of leaving an artificer out of their scheme?…Let them explain to us…how it is possible that things so wonderful, and which carry such marks of contrivance, should come to pass spontaneously and without design.”

The almost irresistible impression of a “maker” of the physical universe is no doubt what Paul was referring to when he claimed that the existence and nature of God was “plain” or “shown” to humans. This impression remains very strong up to today. David Hume, often thought to be the prince of modern skeptics, conceded: “The whole frame of nature bespeaks an intelligent author; and no rational enquirer can, after serious reflection, suspend his belief a moment with regard to the primary principles of genuine Theism and Religion.”5 This same outlook survives in the later, carefully guarded concession of Hume’s “Philo,” in the posthumously published Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, “That the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence.”

Misunderstandings of Darwin’s theory of “natural selection” have in more recent times blunted the impact of the reasoning behind this conclusion in the minds of people generally. But in recent years an increased understanding of the astonishing complexity of life has led some who were longtime atheists to reconsider their position. In any case, the complexity and order of the physical universe reaches far beyond, and is prior to, the complexity of living beings, to which Darwin’s theory applies; and that prior order would have been there even if life and evolution had never occurred. (Of course, we, then, would know nothing about it or about anything else!)

Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today (HarperCollins), pp. 95-6, Kindle Edition.

Taking it farther than merely the obvious need to keep evolutionary theories open to questioning, Willard suggested that intelligent design is a question that can be entertained.

The question of Intelligent Design can be a question about the limits of what can be explained, about living organisms or other things, by “Natural Selection.” There is nothing wrong with these questions, and if you try to shut them down you will simply arouse legitimate suspicions in thoughtful minds. Not the business of the educator, one might think.

Ibid

Methodological naturalism was, for Willard, an unnecessary and artificial constraint on scientific inquiry, no matter the political or social implications.

It is not a priori or empirically clear, much less established, that every possible kind or quantity of design is explicable wholly in terms of non-intelligent design, that is, without the causal intervention of some mind or other. … It is perfectly permissible, if not necessary, to raise the question of the limits of explanation in terms of non-intelligent causes. It is a reasonably clear question, and one with considerable significance for our understanding of the universe. It may be that it represents a futile quest, and one easily misguided. It may involve a question that is politically dangerous, socially unsettling or individually disastrous. But we should know by now that this is all to be expected in serious intellectual work, and we should know by now that repressive orthodoxy can show up anywhere. Even in universities supposed to be “secular.” Secularism is no protection from folly.

For his part, the question was still open. Contra scientism, Willard rejected the notion of a monolithic science that had provided a universal theory of all the facts discovered in various scientific disciplines.

None of the individual sciences have closed that question off, and it is not clear how they could even address the question, given their subject matters and methods. And there is, in fact, no such thing as a SCIENCE, in addition to the particular sciences, that has competence over universal questions about reality or knowledge. Such a “Science” is an illusion, sustained largely by philosophers who hope to cloak themselves in an authority not based on reason or experiment, to advance all-inclusive views about knowledge and reality.

Ibid

Early on, Willard didn’t see the relevance of biological organisms to the design argument.

Overreaching

He expressed some concern that intelligent design theorists, like evolutionists, had gotten too far out over their skis.

On Causal Closure

This in turn threatens many scientists and those who like to think of themselves as scientific, because they think something not physical (or at least “natural”) threatens their results. They go for “causal closure” of the physical universe as a defensive move, though causal closure has vast implications for the understanding of human life and the universe (one would think that anyone who thought the universe had a beginning would have to give up causal closure at the beginning, and why, then, worry about it later), and to rationally defend causal closure, not just shout about it, is a huge metaphysical project, and not something any science actually proves.

“Notes for Two Talks on Intelligent Design” at dwillard.org.

On Method and Causal Closure

alternative that the physical universe had no cause at all. There is a principle that many investigators accept as a truth guiding the investigation of nature. It holds that every physical event has a physical cause. This is called the “causal closure” of the physical domain. It is a sensible, practical rule that, when involved in investigations of physical phenomena, we should look for physical causes. (In “research” it could still be a good rule to look only for physical or at least “nonsupernatural” causes of physical things and events, but without any dogmatic assumptions about reality as a whole, or about what must be the case in the physical universe.) But to take this rule as a practical guide for individual investigations is not the same as asserting the “causal closure” of the whole physical domain; namely, that every physical event or thing has a physical cause.

Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today (HarperCollins), p. 98, Kindle Edition.

ChatGPT fabricated citation

Confusion from Francis Bekwith’s Essary?