Re: Reason and Faith

Rothstein of the NY Times states:

"Reason's battles, though, continue unabated. Only now it
finds its opposition in the more unyielding claims of
religious faith. This latest conflict is over seemingly
incompatible ways of knowing the world. It is a conflict
between competing certainties: between followers of Faith,
who know because they believe, and followers of Reason, who
believe because they know. "

We often hear statements like this from unbelievers: Believers "know because they believe." This is so wrong and IMO completely misinterprets Christian faith. To "know because you believe" makes faith sound totally vacuous and unwarranted--and I'm sure the writer intends it to sound that way. But through the Holy Spirit we have a knowledge of God that is always more than vacuous and in some cases is tantamount to tangible. It's experience-based knowledge every bit as much as knowledge from scientific experimentation; the differences are in the kinds of detectors and in the subsequent data reduction. Such direct knowledge is always incomplete; and people have gone wildly off-course in their interpretations of it. But no such failure nullifies the essential validity of the knowledge. Scriptures as a rule have served to keep those who have such knowledge on course.

Those unbelieving writers need to explore more deeply why people believe. While it's obvious that faith really is sometimes blind, it's definitely not always so.

Don

   
Received on Tue Dec 23 04:37:50 2003