Faith is one of those words that is frowned upon in secular cultures, and in particular by secular scientists; for faith, according to those that criticise it, isn’t ‘evidence-based’ enough and should always be replaced with something more empirical. 

 

Thus, a substantial tenet of this modern anti-religious scientific movement - led by Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, Sam Harris, Victor Stenger, et al - has been a concerted effort to bring down the name of ‘faith’ - that is, to stridently assert that any adherence to a faith-based belief system must be an admission of impressionability, credulity, ignorance or foolishness. In this message I want to show that faith is nothing of the kind, and that it has been severely misrepresented by those that criticise it.

 

Often the first thing that a Christian needs to do is convince his non-believing listener that faith is not an admission of intellectual credulity. But before that we ought to examine exactly what faith is and how it fits into the Christian journey. There are two senses with which I would wish to use the word ‘faith’ - the first is a rational assent and the second is trusting something to which one cannot yet assent. To the man that believes we were created, the first kind of faith might involve, say, belief in an all-loving and personal God. The second kind might involve, say, trusting a friend to pay back the ten pounds that we lent him for the first time. But I would not wish to use the word ‘faith’ in things which are supported by scientifically established, testable evidence; thus I would not say I had ‘faith’ that we shall see stars tomorrow night, or that a ball would rebound back to me if I threw it against a wall. 

 

Now we should notice one thing straight away; both kinds of faith that I have described do not, by themselves, tell us anything about what is true and what is false. Man A might worship his god with compete subservience; man B might believe in the same god but spend his life disregarding the holy book of his faith, living a life of insubordination and profligacy. Man A probably would have both the first kind of faith and the second; man B, only the first kind; but notice that this tells us nothing about the first kind of faith, for both men have it and yet have reached different conclusions about life and how they should live it. Now it is, of course, the first kind of faith to which the sceptics are, and always have been, objecting. No sensible man objects to the second kind of faith; we are all called upon to have it. And if the first kind can be assented to by anyone, we will have to look for another way of reaching the right conclusion. 

 

When we talk about ‘belief in God’ we are assenting to the first kind of faith as a corollary of some event or experience which goes on to produce the second kind of faith. If a man sees the Spirit of Christ in front of him (as many have) and becomes a Christian because of this, he has acquired the first kind of faith and used it to develop an assent to the second kind of faith. Now better evidence or a more lucid analysis of his state of mind might tell us if his faith is rational or irrational, but the only irrational position he could take would be to disregard better evidence or a more lucid analysis - we would not think a man irrational for believing in the supernatural after he thought he had a supernatural experience. He might have been mistaken, but rationality does not work in that way - it does not embrace ‘might have’ - it always strives (or should always strive) for evidence, attestation and corroboration.

 

Having admitted all this - having admitted that faith itself is a separate thing to truth or indeed rational enquiry (discovering the former is preconditioned by the latter), we can see that it is either quite insensible or quite disingenuous (depending on who you encounter) to reject a Christian conclusion through a premise entirely distinct from anything supernatural or numinous. The truth about Christian belief is that the vast majority of Christians have begun with the first kind of faith and, through a process of searching and perhaps supplication, have established firmly in their minds the second kind of faith. The ‘seek and you shall find’ declaration very often supports this process - it would be quite irrational to have too much of the second kind of faith without having very much of the first kind. Christianity does not at any point demand or even insist that we should come into this blindly, it makes categorical and substantiated claims that those who have faith of the first kind and search will thus find faith of the second kind. Those who have the initial faith to step in will discover more than enough evidence, both in their own cognition and through knowledge gained from the vast array of experiences of other Christians. 

 

The first kind of faith involves an excess of conviction in an assent which is most comfortable and congenial to the human mind. But it does not just appear in religious beliefs; it appears in cosmology, astronomy, biology and in belief about natural law too. Our job is to work through the evidence, assess probability, and reach sound conclusions. And this is precisely what we have done; we have done it with astronomy, cosmology, physics, and biology, and we have made inferences about natural law because of this. But Christians have done the same thing regarding their own convictions; in fact, the Christian could quite well argue that his or her experiences are based more on certainty than any of the others, as God continually gives us a priori impartations in our relationship with Him. 

 

We are told by St Paul that the faith necessary to believe and trust in, and receive from, God, is one of His gifts to us. Now if no such God exists, it is all nonsense anyway. But if He does, we would certainly have better evidence of such a gift, of such a supernatural interference or invasion in our own cognisance, than we would anything else outside of the self. Having admitted this, the conclusion we should reach is that each and every non-believer would be doing the most sensible thing if, having reached a point of having the first kind of faith (perhaps even with a brief suspension of disbelief), they were to seek earnestly for the second kind of faith. 

 

Of course, people usually acquire the second kind of faith based upon a religious experience or a supernatural experience, but the fact remains true - seek with all your heart and you shall find - comes with an already established guarantee of Divine revelation. And this, I think, illustrates just how awesome God’s grace is - He offers certainty even to those who step into faith exploration with the utmost cynicism. He offers hope and assurance to anyone who would soften their hearts enough to let Him in. And if it is true that we cannot know God until we have allowed Him into our hearts - or perhaps more accurately, until He has helped us to allow Him into our hearts, then no facts of science or philosophy themselves lead to a Christian conversion. Other things might help with the eradication of doubt, they might help provide evidence and conviction - but they do not, by themselves, tell us the essential parts regarding how one comes to know God. 

 

And here we have seen why, for those on the outside criticising ‘faith’, a sound analysis of Christianity only comes from within the closed province of the first kind of faith. And this is what we should naturally expect of a God who created us and wants a relationship with us - that it would be impossible to have a relationship with Him without having faith of the first kind. Faith of the second kind has to be dependent upon the first. The magisteria of Christian revelation - that is, God revealing Himself to man - and the magisteria of all other enquiries, do not overlap without faith; thus, it is impossible, without faith, to formulate a sound analysis of the former based upon anything in the latter. That is why the many atheist critics of Christianity have been wasting their time arguing against the faith; their arguments only bring into consideration the corollaries or contextualities, not the imperatives. It is like covering your eyes with your hands and trying to convince yourself that the sun has stopped shining.

 

Admittedly, as a Christian, I can only describe the Divine revelation by describing the emotions it aroused in me, but then, a moment’s thought shows that all explanations are of this kind. I can describe the details of a road accident to a police officer, but I am only really in the strictest sense describing the effects that the accident had on my consciousness. The only difference between the road accident and the Divine revelation, as regards the ability to convey, is that the road accident can be described with a method that is common among all speakers of the language which is being used - the Divine revelation cannot, due to its a priori relation to selfhood and the first person ontology. But this is in no way surprising, for even if two people were in the same room who had both received a Divine revelation, they would have no way of describing it that was any different to that of a road accident description - that is, through linguistic commonality. 

 

There are some that think life itself is one big supernatural experience, and I will not disagree with them.   In other words, they think the Divine revelation is merely God’s way of revealing to them the cause behind their own thinking - what one might call a ‘retrospective cognitive alteration’. This might be perfectly true; but if it is, it does not alter the main point - the Divine revelation is the point of distinction between not-knowing and knowing God. Before this occurred, men and women would go about their business, thinking and feeling, but all the time remaining oblivious (or relatively oblivious) to what was really going on as regards the Divine source. 

 

Thus we see that the initial faith required to receive God can, and often does, begin with rational enquiry. That is why faith has to be a gift - it flows from various streams, but it needs supporting banks. It does not involve stepping outside of science and philosophy and history - it involves taking them with us into the water. It is a transcendent experience, one that must come from God not from ourselves. Of course, many will continue to think that belief in God is excessive and superfluous; and I suppose, for them, it is if we take into account only what they have seen thus far. But there are two points that ought to be observed here. In the first place, if we are going to accuse Christianity of being excessive and superfluous, we must re-examine how we approach our analysis of life itself; for almost all of our earthly analyses go beyond absolute demonstrable proof. In the second place, if such a revelation occurs, we must expect it to appear excessive to all those who do not have it. But it is a great mistake to assume that Christianity offers anything to the contrary. That is why we are offered the chance to seek with all our hearts and find.  If our analysis of the Christian faith was formed every time on the basis of our rejecting the external excessiveness, we would have very few Christians in the world and almost no adult converts. The obscurantism put forward by the sceptics was never their innovation, it was, and always will be, their affliction. 

 

No, Christianity demands that we transcend, or attempt to transcend, rational enquiry for a brief moment, not aside from rational enquiry but because of rational enquiry; for all sensible minds know that a real, all-inclusive, rational enquiry about Divine revelation must involve a step into something beyond human rationality itself. This moment does not involve the suspending of human reasoning, it involves the receiving of a different kind of reason altogether; reason that comes into us from Christ Jesus. It is His first of many gifts to us in our long and exciting journey with Him. It is the gift of initial faith - a faith which will reveal to us all the glories of the Divine promise which is fulfilled in Christ. The hardest part of faith is never in His giving, it is in our asking; for even the initial step towards the first kind of faith is a gift from Christ Himself. Seek and you will find? Absolutely. Ask and you shall receive? Certainly. The question has always been, are we prepared to ask, and are we ready to receive?