How to Believe Your Eyes
Reason always requires a leap of faith
This article is inspired by and based on a lecture delivered by Pastor Mason Rambarose.
The 1884 Harvard seal contained the Latin phrases veritas and Christo et Ecclesia, meaning “truth” and “for Christ and the Church.” A century and a half ago, the religious claims of Christianity were thought to be rooted in truth. However, Harvard is now a temple of post-Christian skepticism. As early as 2006, Harvard professor Steven Pinker advocated for less emphasis on religious matters in the school’s curriculum. To require students to take a “Faith and Reason” class, he thought, was ludicrous, because that would imply that faith and reason are complementary paths to truth.
So what happened? Why did religious claims all of a sudden become irrelevant to truth and academics? Between 1884 and now, what new discovery was made or information obtained that proved religious claims cannot be objectively true in the same way the periodic table can?
Indeed, there has been a shift in philosophical thinking as it regards faith and reason. Unlike the philosophers of times past, the predominant voices of modern culture and education place faith and reason in entirely different categories. Professor Pinker wrote in the Harvard Crimson:
…the juxtaposition of the two words makes it sound like “faith” and “reason” are parallel and equivalent ways of knowing, and we have to help students navigate between them. But universities are about reason, pure and simple. Faith—believing something without good reasons to do so—has no place in anything but a religious institution, and our society has no shortage of these.
It appears Pinker segregates faith and reason based on his loose definition of faith: “believing without good reasons to do so.” In other words, Pinker dooms faith from the very outset: according to his definition, faith and reason are indeed contradictory. But is his an accurate definition of faith?
The Oxford Dictionary gives two definitions of faith. The first is “Complete trust or confidence in someone or something.” The second is “Strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof.” Even the dictionary seems to separate the basic meaning of faith from a religious one. And the religious one is, like Professor Pinker’s, contrary to reason. But is this a Biblical definition of faith? In other words, did the Biblical authors employ the first or second definition of faith when describing belief in God?
In the Old Testament, faith is based on God’s prior (usually salvific) action in the world. God says in Exodus, “They [the Israelites] will know that I am the Lord their God, who brought them out of Egypt so that I might dwell among them” (17:46, emphasis added). The Israelites “knew” God and put their faith in him because He led them out of Egypt. This is contrary to Pinker’s assertion that faith is belief without evidence. The evidence of God’s trustworthiness was His saving millions of people from bondage to, at that time, the world’s leading political power!
The New Testament strikes a similar note, grounding faith in Jesus in the eyewitness testimony of those who personally knew him. The Apostle John begins his letter by hammering home the reality of Jesus real, embodied existence:
What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have observed and have touched with our hands, concerning the Word of life— that life was revealed, and we have seen it and we testify and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us—what we have seen and heard we also declare to you, so that you may have fellowship along with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ. (1 John 1:1-3, emphasis added)
John believed in Jesus because he experienced him firsthand. In fact, John’s stated purpose for writing his Gospel was 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 20:31). John didn’t expect his readers to blindly believe in His Messiah; instead, he recorded Jesus’ actions and words in a document that people were free to read and from which they could draw their own conclusions.
Biblical faith is not blind belief or believing for the sake of believing. It’s not even “pretending” to believe in order to experience catharsis or an emotional high, as some sentimental atheists are fond of doing. Faith, at least for the Biblical authors, always pertained to a God who is knowable and therefore trustworthy.
The faith of the scientist
Faith is not only a religious activity, but is necessary for all other domains of knowledge. For example, we have faith that gravity will work in the same way it did yesterday, sometimes referred to as the uniformity of nature. Anyone who doubts that gravity will work tomorrow despite its impeccable track record would be considered unreasonable. Or, as another example, all scientists must trust the findings and conclusions of other scientists in order to progress. Reading and believing the “abstract” or summary of a study’s findings implies an understanding that the study used a valid system to measure those findings. (When that’s not the case, problems ensue, and people–including academics–are duped.)1 In fact, psychology and other fields are currently undergoing a “replication crisis”, as researchers discover “that many–perhaps half–of published studies in some disciplines fail to replicate [their findings] when other researchers try to do so.”2 The reason why, explains Musa al-Garbi, is that researchers make “slightly different but consequential choices that [lead] them to different conclusions, even when using the same method, to investigate the same question, using the same types of data (and sometimes even the exact same data).”
It turns out that many decisions researchers make are motivated by completely unscientific factors. Human error, motivated reasoning (confirmation bias, status seeking, etc.), and the freedom to choose among different measurement and interpretational models or create new ones all play into the knowledge production process. Even after findings are discredited, scientists are so well educated they are better than most at rationalizing their bad arguments and refusing to rethink their beliefs when presented with disconfirming evidence. As a result, writes Musa al-Garbi, “scientists cannot simply ‘follow the data’ and arrive at ‘big-T’ truths.”
Faith-skeptical scholars like Pinker must also trust the philosophical laws of logic (like the law of noncontradiction) and the truthfulness of their own sensory perceptions. All these positions are non-falsifiable–there’s no way to prove or disprove them. Yet without these basic assumptions, all knowledge topples like a house of cards.
We think the following analogy will be helpful in explaining the relationship between faith and reason: Imagine Pastor Mason needs to get a babysitter for his daughter. Would he be more justified in placing his faith in a stranger on the side of the road or his younger brother whom he has known for 24 years? Obviously, the answer is his brother. Over 24 years, he has acquired enough facts about his brother’s character to know that he is trustworthy. However, Pastor Mason is not omniscient. Even if his brother successfully watches her 99 times, he still has to have faith that he will do so again the 100th time. The 99 times serve as evidence for his ability to babysit her, but that doesn’t mean the 100th time is a certain outcome.
The Apostle Paul discusses this idea in Romans: “For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have?” (Rom. 8:24) You can’t have faith in that which you know. And nothing can be known with 100% certainty. Thankfully, the impossibility of certainty, so defined, does not mean we cannot know anything. God created the world to be understood and gave us rational minds equipped for such a task. The point is that faith and reason are not as discordant as Pinker thinks they are. Rather, faith supplements reason where reason is lacking, and visa versa. A theology student reads The Case For Christ to strengthen his faith. Meanwhile, an atheist places faith in a theory called the “Big Bang” to make sense of what he sees in nature. The two are not so different.
The compatibility of faith and reason are expressed by French philosopher Etienne Gilson:
Faith and Reason can neither contradict each other, nor ignore each other, nor be confused. Reason may well try to justify Faith: it will never transform Faith into Reason, for as soon as Faith were to abandon authority for proof, it would cease to believe; it would know.
Therefore, Christians can be justified in their faith. Faith will never replace reason and reason will never replace faith. Whether or not one has faith is irrelevant–everyone puts faith in something–it is the object of one’s faith that counts. Does the Big Bang or Genesis 1 make more sense of reality–of nature and human nature? Does the evidence point to design or does it point to chaos and randomness? These are the questions we should be asking.
Biblical Reason
However, does the Bible say anything about reason that traces its origins back to God? Does Pinker’s prized mental faculty bear the imprint of his Creator? According to the Bible, the answer is a resounding yes.
The Gospel of John starts out with these words: “In the beginning was the Word [Gk. logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (1:1). In Jewish tradition, the Word or logos was the revelation of God. This revelation came in different forms–sights, sounds, and sensations. Jeremiah records a revelation of God that spans the range of human perception: God speaks to Jeremiah (sound), reaches out to touch him (sight) and touches his mouth (sensation) (Jer. 1:4-10).
In the surrounding Greek culture, logos referred not only to “reason” (we derive the English word “logic” from logos) but also the epitome of reason, or the Divine Reason. Plato believed the Divine Reason was a spiritual realm called the Forms, which housed exemplars (perfect examples) of traits and objects–such as perfect justice, or the perfect circle. He arrived at this conclusion because nothing perfect exists in nature, yet human beings are able to determine when something is more or less working according to its design. There are no perfect circles in nature, yet, somehow, humans know a bad circle from a good one.3 Plato thought only someone outside of the material universe (God) could have access to such blueprints of the true, the good, and the beautiful, and then proceeded to download them into the human mind.
In the first century, the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria combined Plato’s idea of the Forms with the Gospel of John’s notion of logos to create a potent addendum to Christian theology. Scholar David Robertson explains:
For Philo, everything that exists, the incorporeal as well as the corporeal world, was created by the rational principle or speech (logos) of God… The intelligible world is a world contained in God’s mind, comparable to the ‘intellectual blueprint’ of an architect who engages in rational planning for the sake of building a city.
So John’s use of logos was compatible with both Jewish and Greek philosophy. It echoes something that many ancient people took for granted: the most basic notions of truth and beauty (and even such mathematical concepts as circularity) are rooted in a priori knowledge, or knowledge that is prior to (independent from) the senses. No one knows why there are different degrees of beauty or justice–we just do. In the same way, Michelangelo did not sculpt his masterpieces with the help of a statistically-deduced and anatomically correct reference model. Instead, he studied the human form and let logos take on from there: “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”4
But God did not create the world and then stop short of engaging it. John continues: “The Word became flesh and took up residence among us. We observed His glory, the glory as the One and Only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (1:14). The Revealer of God–Revelation itself–became a man. The Divine Reason took on the form of humanity.
Similarly, as the revealed logos, Jesus does not merely have God’s wisdom, but is God’s wisdom. Paul writes, “For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:22-24).
All pure wisdom, logic, and reason comes from God. Our innate capacity for reason hints toward the source of reason in the same way our moral sense does.
The problem of knowing
We can round off our analysis of faith and reason by reviewing epistemology. Epistemology is the study of knowledge. How do we know what we know?
Does our reasoning get us to the truth? The assumption of most people is that they’re able to somewhat understand reality as it truly is and relate to it in meaningful ways. But this, too, is a belief. How does Ben know that the library in which he sits as he types this is not a dream and that his eyes are not playing tricks on him? Or how can he be certain that he can trust his memories from this morning?
Knowledge is not mere information, it is justified belief. And, without a God who grounds Reason in an objective reality, and gives to us a way to get to Reason (e.g., the Divine Reason and the laws of logic), there is no justification for our beliefs. In his book, Faith and Reason, Steve Wilkens writes:
If God does not communicate to us in ways appropriate to our ability to know anything, then the universe truly is absurd. It must be the case that a child’s feeble first attempts at drawing a wheel must, in some primitive way, be congruent with God’s understanding of a perfect circle.
It must also be the case that without some correspondence between our minds and the world around us the concept of “knowing” would be an absurdity. Pinker’s faith and reason dichotomy rests on the assumption that the universe can tell us things about itself absent a divine intelligence or Creator. But this would be the same as thinking a pile of stones that were scattered during an earthquake so that they, by chance, formed the words “You are now entering Massachusetts” could express something true about geograhy.5 If a person driving down the highway saw the stones in such a configuration and believed (or were told) that it was an earthquake that had caused them to be that way, they would have no reason to believe what the stones were telling them. This is the epistemology of the atheist. However, most drivers would see those stones and assume that someone had put them there to welcome out-of-state visitors. Most people intuitively recognize that intelligibility—that quality of the world that enables us to understand it—would be impossible without intelligent design.
The above analogy has countless applications. I can’t very well read Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky and expect to get anything out of it unless I first assume that the book had an author–Dostoyevsky–with a rational mind capable of stringing words into coherent sentences. The power of Dostoyevsky’s prose is not in its existence, but in the fact that it was created by someone with deep feeling, unique experiences, and a mastery of the Russian language. Without belief in a Creator who designed the world according to a set of blueprints accessible to no one but himself, it is truly as Einstein said: “The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.”
How can we be justified in anything we claim to know, without referencing some objective standard that determines truth from falsity? The answer to that question is that there is a Creator, one who made the world to be understood and made our minds to understand it.
For example, a study entitled “Frankly, We Do Give a Damn: The Relationship Between Profanity and Honesty” claimed to show a positive link between swearing and honesty. The authors’s findings “confirmed” a commonly believed lie: that cursing is a sign of authenticity, and thus a trait of honest people. Not surprisingly, the study was widely circulated in the news and joyfully parroted by foulmouthed people everywhere. However, a subsequent study (“Honest People Tend to Use Less–Not More–Profanity”) found that all three experiments used to support the “honest foulmouth” hypothesis were based on faulty metrics. The study authors hinted that the researchers had a vested interest in reaching a certain conclusion. Not only would a verdict in favor of profanity be highly newsworthy (what scholar doesn’t want their research to go viral?), “[p]eople who use profanities, both online and offline, may feel exonerated by the study because the use of profanities may simply show that their profane outbursts are an honest expression of their feelings.”
This quote comes from a community research document run by Jonathan Haidt and co-authors: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w-HOfseF2wF9YIpXwUUtP65-olnkPyWcgF5BiAtBEy0/edit?tab=t.0
A good example of the Forms or Divine Reason is the way in which Michelangelo described the process of sculpting. When asked how he sculpted his life-size statue of David, he replied “All I did was chip away everything that didn’t look like David.” Who put the blueprint of David in his mind? However, none of this is to say that Plato’s position is unassailable. Sense experience does play a role, and opinion on epistemology ranges from hard rationalists (there is no knowledge apart from the divine) and hard empiricists (there is no knowledge apart from sense experience).
Whether or not this quote is attributable to Michelangelo (opinion is divided), it is nonetheless a fine example of logos at work and a pitch-perfect summation of the artistic process.
This analogy is taken from Richard Taylor’s 1963 analogy, quoted in Life’s Ultimate Questions by Ronald H. Nash
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