Faith: Blind or Necessary?

If I was in my backyard raking up leaves and I suddenly see a bush in the very back of my yard rustle a little bit and coming from it was a muffled bark and yelp; is it rational to walk up to the bush and expect to find my dog that ran away? If you answer “yes,” then you think that it is perfectly rational to act according to the evidence you witness and analyze. However, if in the same scenario of raking leaves, I decide to walk over to the same bush expecting to find my dog based on a feeling or a hunch without any reason to believe it, one would think I was paranoid, bored, or irrationally engaging in wishful thinking.

Erected as a straw man by the “new atheists,” faith is being defined as the latter situation. Richard Dawkins believes that faith is the same as expecting to find a dog behind the bush with no evidence or reason to believe it. He says this of faith in his polemical bestseller The God Delusion: “It is in the nature of faith that one is capable…of holding belief without adequate reason to do so…” He doesn’t view the concept of faith as a posture founded in evidence or rationality, but rather a creed of ignorance and unreasonable stubbornness. In his debate with Oxford mathematician John Lennox, Dawkins made it clear that he views faith as an opponent to evidence. This clearly is misunderstanding what faith means, and it allows him to extrapolate further implications of people having faith in God as a commitment to a deity with no evidence.

Furthermore, Dawkins believes that “Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument.” Rather than merely critiquing the concept of faith, he makes a moral pronouncement about it. Coincidentally, Dawkins sees science as man’s banner to intelligence which completely contradicts the idea of religious faith. He thinks that the arena of faith is confined specifically to religion, while science is founded upon and crowned by pure evidence, without any “faith” in metaphysical presumptions. This is interesting considering the fact that he gives no reason as to why we should presume a rational universe instead one of complete randomness and chaos. Also, Dawkins does not give us any reason why we should presume that our mental faculties should correlate accurately to reality. I should like to ask him how his materialistic metaphysical presumptions are in any way different from faith.

Dawkins also takes the liberty to redefine the concept of the traditional theistic God. His definition of God resembles the man-made superstitions and gods such as fairies at the end of the garden, The Flying Spaghetti Monster, The Easter Bunny, Thor, or Zeus. God, as described in the Bible is simply another mythical figure which people created in order to explain the world around them and to bring consolation to human mortality. He claims that while the God of the Bible is not the same as the said gods or superstitions, He is still just as probable to exist (and apparently it is indeed a minuscule probability). Unfortunately for him and his colleagues who hold strongly to this view, this analysis is quite weak at its best and intellectually dishonest or ignorant at its worst. Surely, no one really believes in the Flying Spaghetti Monster because it was clearly a man-made deity without any good reason to suppose that it exists. Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris both think that the idea that since there is no way of disproving God, it is the same as saying you can’t disprove the existence of Thor, Zeus, and Wotan. In a sense they are correct, but their underlying assumption which is clearly sensed is that there is no positive evidence to make God any more probable than the other man-made deities. Well, this tactic is very useful if the audience they are writing and speaking to have never seen any historical, philosophical, or scientific evidence to suggest the existence of the theistic God is reasonable and rational. I even concede that if you believe in something for which there is no evidence, it typically is a form of wishful thinking. For the sake of the topic of this post, I will insist that such evidence of the theistic God will be reserved to later posts and I will continue to build the foundation for the reasonableness of faith.

In his classic work, Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis defines faith in one sense as “…the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.” Lewis explains that we all have faith in certain facts, but our emotions and imagination have a tendency to call into question our faith. For example, we all (for the most part) have faith that when we get into our cars to drive to the grocery store, it will get us there safely. However, if we hear of a close friend getting into a wreck or his/her car breaking down, we have a tendency to call into question the reliability of our vehicles or the possibility of a tragedy happening; not because it is very probable, but because our imagination runs away with the faint possibility and in turn creates doubt. Faith allows us to continue to get into the car, and challenges us if we have legitimate doubts to investigate and analyze the evidence. We can look under the hood to check the oil, transmission fluid, water coolant, as well as the pressure in the tires, in order to have a good reason to believe that our car will not break down. We can investigate the environment to see if it is snowing or raining outside and could possibly increase the risk of getting into an accident. Doubts about our faith (religious or otherwise) should spur us towards more investigation and analysis of available information.

Science, which Dawkins and other naturalistic atheists view as their savior, really turns out in their case to be a totalitarian dictator of comprehensive explanation without question. Hardcore atheists seem comfortable and at home with a pervading skepticism, except for skepticism in their own skepticism. Science as a system is never questioned by Dawkins as the ultimate source of meaning and understanding. He may applaud the findings of science and remain open minded towards neutral scientific findings that contradict hundreds of years of work prior, but he certainly doesn’t welcome criticism of two things: Darwinism or science as a whole.

David Hume, an atheistic eighteenth century philosopher, pointed out long ago that scientific laws are not verifiable. What he means by this is that by the means of science, we contrive experiments in numerous repetition to confirm an outcome. He argues that through repetition, we derive and solidify the effect from the cause based solely on repetition and experience. Let’s say that I roll a pair of dice five times and I get double twos each time. I find it odd, but roll it a hundred more times nonetheless and each time I roll double twos. Someone else comes along and rolls the dice a thousand more times and each time he rolls them, he gets double twos. Based on the thousands of rolls, I declare that if anyone rolls two dice, they will roll double twos.

What happens the first time someone rolls snake eyes? To the flames goes that scientific law.

If Richard Dawkins believes slightly that Darwinism or science may have potential problems or limits in explanation on any level, yet continues to endorse them, is that not faith? If so, shouldn’t he be under the same scrutiny and ridicule as someone who doesn’t know for a fact that Christ rose from the dead, but accepts on faith (based on the evidence) and believes that He did?

Without implementing faith in your life in all sorts of practical manners, it would be impossible to live. Imagine always wondering whether or not your parents are your real parents, or that your husband or wife really doesn’t love you. Imagine always checking the wiring to the microwave every time you pop popcorn to make sure it doesn’t short a circuit or blow up your house. Imagine checking every inch of your house, under couches and behind refrigerators, every night before you go to bed to make sure there aren’t any black widow spiders that could bite you while you are sleeping. If we knew anyone who lived like this, I would think we would be inclined to think they are a little weird and irrational to say the least.

Faith is not blindly believing in something because it makes us feel better regardless of truth. It is not the same as observing a flat tire, smoke coming from under the hood, and loud rattling noises coming from the axles; and yet still driving your car confidently because you cannot live without a gallon of milk or a stick of deodorant. It is based on evidence and continually spurs us to find more and more reasons to believe in what we are convinced of even in the face of strong emotions or our sometimes irrational imagination. I have no desire to tell anyone to believe in Christianity and throw out their brain. It is mentioned nowhere in the Bible and I think it is a shame when Christians have no idea why they believe in God and the scriptures besides being raised to believe it or because they had a strong emotional experience one time at a youth camp or revival service.

~ by captainnevius on January 8, 2008.