Many believers, particularly Christians, claim to have arrived at their beliefs via “reason,” and that their belief is not irrational. They also claim that following their religion requires “faith,” and faith is virtuous, especially in the eyes of their deity.
The problem is that an invisible, omnipotent, infinite, omniscient, eternal deity can’t possibly be known via “reason.” What’s more, using “reason” as a way to bolster one’s “faith” flies in the face of the nature of faith.
Faith is defined in many ways. Here are some definitions:
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belief that is not based on proof: He had faith that the hypothesis would be substantiated by fact. |
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firm belief in something for which there is no proof; clinging to the faith that her missing son would one day return |
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Confident or unquestioning belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing |
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to accept (something) as true without proof or evidence that it is true |
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Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. (Heb 11:1) |
The crux of all these definitions is the same: “Faith” is the acceptance of a notion as true, despite having no evidence for it.
And let’s also look at some definitions of “reason”:
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Definition |
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a basis or cause, as for some belief, action, fact, event, etc. |
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a sufficient ground of explanation or of logical defense |
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The basis or motive for an action, decision, or conviction |
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a statement or fact that explains why something is the way it is, why someone does, thinks, or says something, or why someone behaves a certain way |
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And he was reasoning in the synagogue every Sabbath and trying to persuade Jews and Greeks…. They came to Ephesus, and he left them there. Now he himself entered the synagogue and reasoned with the Jews. (Acts 18:4, 19) |
Thus, “reason” involves taking information, examining it, and following it to a conclusion.
Since faith is the act of accepting an idea based upon no premises, but reason is reaching conclusions based upon (hopefully) valid premises, these are mutually exclusive. You cannot “reason” your way to “faith,” except through thinking-processes having nothing to do with the faith itself; for example, “If I don’t stay in the church I was raised in, my family will ostracize me; so I’ll hold onto my faith.”
Both of these things can’t be true at the same time. One can’t believe in Christianity based on “faith” but also believe in it based on “reason.” The two are mutually exclusive.
As noted, the Abrahamic God is an omnipotent, infinite, omniscient, eternal deity. This has many ramifications, going far beyond the topic at hand, so I will stick only with those which are currently relevant. The most important is that such a God can remain utterly hidden to us if s/he/it wishes to. Those who claim that they’ve “proven” God’s existence to themselves, do not account for this — there’s no way they can.
Hopefully I can explain this: Let’s say you’ve devised some scientific experiment which will prove or refute God’s existence. (It doesn’t matter what the experiment is, exactly, just take for the sake of argument that one is possible.) Now, what could happen as a result of the experiment? You could, through positive results, show God’s existence; or by negative results, show he doesn’t exist. Sounds great, but consider further: What if you get a negative result because God himself has chosen to muck with your experiment and make its result come out negative? An omnipotent being would be able to do so (since by definition there is nothing an omnipotent being cannot do). So even if you get a negative result, God might still exist in spite of that, and you would still have to have “faith” in him, rather than conclude he exists based on evidence.
The bottom line is that since God is an irrefutable hypothesis, any experiment at all concerning him is invalid, and invalidating such experiments further is that, being omnipotent, he can, himself, directly alter the experiment and its results.
As noted, faith and reason are not inherently compatible. This doesn’t mean, however, that believers don’t attempt to blend the two nonetheless. They can hardly be blamed for this; the Bible itself is conflicted on the matter. While on the one hand, Hebrews says that faith is based on no evidence at all, leaving nothing upon which to reason, Acts talks about Paul “reasoning” with Jews in various places.
How is one to reconcile this? Perhaps what happens is that people believe based on faith, which is to say, based on no evidence other than the faith itself; then they see things around them which they interpret as “evidence” supporting their belief. They then take this interpreted (rather than objective) “evidence” as being reasons to believe. This ought not be surprising; human nature is to justify one’s suppositions, in any venue of thinking, not just in religion. An obvious example is when the parents or family members of convicted felons continue making excuses for them; what they’re doing is justifying their affection for the felon by interpreting things in such a way that it supports their affection. They ignore the felon’s wrongdoing or excuse it as somehow understandable.
Unfortunately, some believers don’t understand that their natural effort to synthesize what they consider to be “reason” with their preselected faith, has no basis in reality. Instead, they take their own God’s existence as though it were demonstrable via reason, in spite of the fact that it’s not. This leads them to the fallacious conclusion that they can “prove” God’s existence through reason. This in turn leads them to see those who refuse to accept their God’s existence nonetheless, as unreasonable or as being dogmatically and/or irrationally opposed to the idea of God.
The problem, of course, is that this view is based upon believers’ own subjective experience of their belief, and their natural tendency to try and blend their subjective faith with objective rationality. Since this synthesis is not itself objective, it means nothing to anyone who has not had the same subjective belief-experience. What’s worse, they’re incapable of understanding this, since for them, the blend of subjectivity and objectivity is second-nature; they cannot comprehend its fallaciousness.
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