Tuesday, March 20, 2018

The Object And Method Of Faith

There is a difference between an object of faith and faith as a method or a basis for belief.  It is vital to distinguish between these, appraise what is meant by each concept, and then declare the truth about both things.  The object of faith is the thing that is trusted in.  Thus, having faith in someone's honesty means that a person's honesty is the object of faith.  But as a methodology or foundation, faith is belief in something without confirmation.  This is what is meant when someone defends a claim by saying he or she believes in it on faith.  The former can be consistent with reason (in that the thing believed in/trusted in might actually be real and true), yet the latter is contrary and exclusive to rationality.  You cannot hold something to be true on faith and know it is true simultaneously.

The object of someone's faith might indeed be true and consistent with the necessary laws of logic, but faith as a method or basis for a belief is never compatible with reason, since it inevitably involves belief or trust in something beyond what can be proven.  I will give an example: if someone believes on faith (by trust in what has not been or cannot be proven) that extraterrestrial life exists, he or she has no basis whatsoever for that belief, though it is entirely logically possible that alien life exists, and thus it is not the conclusion that is intrinsically irrational but the method used to arrive at the conclusion.  If alien life exists, that person was only right by accident; if it does not, that person was no less irrational, since the veracity of the conclusion has nothing to do with the validity of the methodology.

These points are seldom clarified when Christians discuss faith and reason, especially since some of the positions I've frequently encountered are quite untrue.  One is that reason itself requires faith, a claim which is by its very nature impossible [1], and another is that it is somehow rational to believe in what cannot be proven in full--again, the nature of logic makes this impossible, for it can never be rational to believe in what cannot be rationally proven.  The object of someone's faith might be rational and true, but believing in something because of faith is inherently irrational whether or not the object of faith is real.

I have made it clear to those around me that I am not a Christian because of some introspective experience, because I was raised by Christian parents, or because of some emotional insecurity or preference.  I don't even believe that the entirety of Christianity is true; I believe that Christianity is internally consistent, consistent with all external evidence I have found, supported by a great amount of various evidences, and that parts of it are true by logical necessity (the parts holding that truth, a material world, and an uncaused cause exist, or that the mind is distinct from the body, for example), because that is all that I can demonstrate to be true.  I can prove that Christianity is evidentially-fortified, but that is not the same as proving that the entirety of it is correct.

Still, I am committed to Christianity because of the evidential strength that it boasts.  Nothing about Christianity is logically impossible, but that does not mean that it is true--all I can prove are that some parts of it are true and that the rest seems quite probable.  Acting upon what evidence reveals is not irrational if one keeps in mind that even great evidence is not a total proof and understands the distinction.


[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-impossibility-of-faith-in-reason.html

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