I’m a huge Indiana Jones fan. While I don’t own a bullwhip, I do have an Indy style fedora hanging on the lamp stand in my office. I don’t advocate many of his moral choices, but he has great adventures that make for fun movies. My favorite is the third installment, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.1 The film chronicles the tale of Indy and his father, played by Sean Connery, searching for the mythical holy grail while being pestered by Hitler and Nazis.
In the climax of this particular adventure, the Nazis shoot Indy’s dad in order to force our hero to navigate the deadly booby traps that stand between the healing powers of the grail and his dying father. After successfully dodging disaster in the first two booby traps, Indy comes to the edge of a cliff overlooking an apparently bottomless ravine. He can see the entrance to the cave that houses the grail on the other side of the ravine, but it’s too far to jump. Indy looks down and says, “It’s a leap of faith.” The scene cuts to a shot of Indy’s dad lying on the ground holding his wound saying, “You must believe boy, you must believe.” We then see Indy take a deep breath, close his eyes, put his hand on his heart, and step into the nothingness hoping something catches him. If you want to know what happens I guess you’ll have to watch the movie!
The point is, that’s how many people, including many Christians, see biblical faith. They think we neither have, nor can we have, any actual reasons to believe Christianity is true, so we simply take a deep breath, close our eyes, put our hands on our hearts, and take a leap hoping that God will catch us. After talking about digging into questions, picking apart the logic, and wondering if “the crown of thorns is no more than folklore,” one popular Christian song from a few years ago put it this way,
But what if you're wrong?
What if there's more?
What if there's hope you've never dreamed of hoping for?
What if You jump? Just close your eyes.
What if the arms that catch you, catch you by surprise?
What if He's more than enough?
What if it's love?2
Christians are good at giving the “faith” answer. Challenged to think about a difficult issue? No need, just have faith. Confronted with something that, if true, would mean Christianity is false? No worries, just have faith. Asked to give a reason you’re a Christian rather than an atheist, Muslim, Hindu, or a member of some other belief? No problem, I just have faith! In other words, “faith” as it has come to be understood is something used when we’re ignorant of facts and is seen to be in opposition to reason and knowledge. It’s seen as wishful thinking of sorts such that we close our eyes to reality and by sheer willpower make ourselves believe the impossible. It’s almost as if many people think their faith actually makes true that in which they believe. Mortimer Adler once said,
I suspect that most of the individuals who have religious faith are content with blind faith. They feel no obligation to understand what they believe. They may even wish not to have their beliefs disturbed by thought. But if God in whom they believe created them with intellectual and rational powers, that imposes upon them the duty to try to understand the creed of their religion. Not to do so is to verge on superstition.
It’s no wonder that those who do not share Christian convictions find faith so repugnant. According to the late Christopher Hitchens, an extremely popular atheistic journalist and debater from the last decade,
Faith is the surrender of the mind, it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other animals. It's our need to believe and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Out of all the virtues, all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.3
In his book A Manual for Creating Atheists, Peter Boghossian defines faith as either belief without evidence or the pretending to know something one doesn’t know.4 Atheist George Smith says, “Reason and faith are opposite, two mutually exclusive terms: there is no reconciliation or common ground. Faith is belief without, or in spite of reason.”5 Finally, one of the leaders of the New Atheist movement, Richard Dawkins, says, “There are two ways of looking at the world: through faith and superstition or through the rigors of logic, observation and evidence – in other words through reason."6
Is biblical faith really nothing more than wishful thinking or superstition and completely contrary to reason? If one would spend some time reflecting on the text of Scripture and the historical understanding of the term rather than accepting popular opinion or picking and choosing verses out of context one would clearly see that blind irrational faith is completely absent from the Bible. But wait, doesn’t Heb. 11:1 say, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen,” (NASB)? Indeed it does, but what does that mean? The word for “faith” is pistis, and it means trust, firm persuasion, or conviction. Once someone is persuaded that Christianity is true and trusts in Jesus’ death and resurrection as payment for their sins they have assurance of things hoped for and conviction of things not seen, i.e. an eternity with God and freedom from sin and suffering (in context, believers were enduring hardship, persecution, and struggling with sin and they hoped for the day when such things would come to an end). The Complete Word Study Dictionary: New Testament puts it this way, “[Hebrews 11:1] means that persuasion is not the outcome of imagination but is based on fact, such as the reality of the resurrection of Christ (1 Cor. 15), and as such it becomes the basis of realistic hope.”
Think about it this way. Imagine if a stranger ran up to you and said, “Take these two pills right now or you’re going to die!” Would you say, “Gee thanks! Do you have a glass of water too?” If you would, then we need to get you some help regarding good decision making. Yet, that’s a picture of blind irrational faith, or irrational trust. Now, imagine you just left your doctor’s office after having a series of tests run. Your doctor runs up to you and says, “I got the results of your tests. Take these two pills right now or you’re going to die!” Granted, you may have some questions, and this is just an analogy so don’t carry it too far. But the truth is your reaction would be different would it not? Why? Well, he’s your doctor. You have reason to believe that he’s an authority on matters that deal with your health and that he has access to information to which you don’t have access, and you either choose to trust him and take the pills or not. That is a picture of biblical faith.
We can see this concept of biblical faith illustrated in the account of Jesus and the paralytic from Mark 2. Jesus was teaching in a crowded house with everyone packed in trying to hear what He was saying. A group of friends brought their paralyzed buddy to the house with the hopes that Jesus would heal him. It was too crowded for the band of brothers to get in the house, so they had the bright idea of cutting a hole in the roof of the house and lowering their buddy down to Jesus. You can imagine what everyone must have been thinking when they did this. They just cut a hole is some guy’s roof! Jesus simply looks at the poor guy lying on his mat and says, “Your sins are forgiven.” The Scripture says the scribes were thinking to themselves that no one can forgive sins but God (side note, but if this is true, then who does that make Jesus?). Jesus, knowing what they were thinking, says, “You silly scribes. Why are you doubting? Just have faith and believe!” If you think that’s the case then look again. In Mark 2:8-11 Jesus says,
Why are you reasoning about these things in your hearts? Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven’; or to say, ‘Get up, and pick up your pallet and walk’? But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins...I say to you, get up, pick up your pallet and go home.
In other words, He did a miracle. They couldn’t see if the man’s sins were forgiven, so Jesus did something they could see in order to give them reason to trust that Jesus was an authority who could forgive sins and that what He said was true. When John the Baptist was about to be killed and was doubting if Jesus was the Messiah, Jesus pointed to His own miracles as confirmation of His authority (Luke 7:22). We see this all throughout the Bible. Miracles confirm the message, and those who received and delivered new divine revelation had every reason to believe it was true.
Miracles? What!? Now you may be thinking I’m just assuming God’s existence and blindly believing that miracles are possible. So you may think I still have blind irrational trust in something that is demonstrably false. But again, nothing could be further from the truth. As Dr. Edward Feser says,
At every step, evidence and rational argumentation – not ‘blind faith’ or a ‘will to believe’ – are taken to justify our acceptance of certain teachings.…We can know that such-and-such a teaching was true because Christ taught it; we can know that He is an authority to be trusted because His miraculous resurrection puts a divine seal of approval on what He said…and a divine being cannot be in error; we can know that He really was resurrected because of such-and-such historical evidence together with our background knowledge that God exists…we can know God exists…because of such-and-such philosophical proofs; and so on. Every link in the chain is supported by argument.7
And once someone is persuaded that Christianity is true, they either choose to place their trust in Jesus or not. Biblical faith is ultimately the willful action of trusting God because of our conviction that what God says is true and that He is a trustworthy authority.
The fact is, we all take things on authority. No one has done, or can do, all the required studying, researching, reasoning, etc. about every subject under the sun. Even Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins had to rely on authorities when writing their books and preparing for debates. We have to rely on authorities all the time, even to know simple things like the fact that George Washington was the first U.S. President. We can’t repeat that in a lab, we can’t reason to it ourselves upon reflecting on the principles of logic and observation. No, we have to be told that by an authority on the matter. But we are told many things by many people claiming to be authorities on many subjects. How do we know which authority to trust? We use good reason!
In the end, faith and reason are distinct, but they are not separate. They are two sides of the same coin. The Christian faith is not a superstition that requires someone to close their eyes, put their hand on their heart, and take a blind leap into nothingness. Rather, the Christian faith is one grounded in reality and one that can be investigated rigorously. I’m convinced that if someone does rigorously investigate it using good reason they will find that biblical faith is not a leap in the dark, it is actually a step of trust in light of the evidence. As Ravi Zacharias says,
Faith in the biblical sense is substantive, based on the knowledge that the One in whom that faith is placed has proven that He is worthy of that trust. In its essence, faith is a confidence in the person of Jesus Christ and in His power, so that even when His power does not serve my end, my confidence in Him remains because of who He is.
Christian, please stop punting to faith in an attempt to avoid the need to think, and please stop acting as though your faith actually makes true that which you believe. Non-Christian, please stop attacking a strawman of biblical faith in an effort (knowingly or not) to make Christianity seem like an unevidenced superstition that is irrational by nature. If anyone wants to truly champion reason and clear thinking, then engage with the actual issues and stop thinking your caricature proves anything false. That's no more rational or intellectually honest than the Christian with blind faith who you're so quick to disregard.
END NOTES
1. LucasFilm Ltd., Paramount Pictures. 1989.
2. "What If," Recollection: The Best of Nicole Nordeman. 2007.
3. "Holier Than Thou", Penn & Teller: Bullsh*t!. May 23, 2005.
4. A Manual for Creating Atheists (Kindle Locations 304-305). Pitchstone Publishing. 2014.
5. Atheism: The Case Against God. 1979.
6. Enemies of Reason. 2007.
7. The Last Superstition. 2012.