Can we base our beliefs on faith?
“You have faith,” says the atheist, “but I base my beliefs on science.” Apparently we’re supposed to think that it’s better to base your beliefs on science than on faith. Many Christians would basically agree with that sentiment, except that they would argue (not without reason) that the evidence supporting Christianity is more significant than the evidence supporting atheism. Some would even say that it takes more faith to be an atheist than a Christian!
What is faith, then? We could be tempted to think that faith is just the ability to believe things without any reason. Of course, if that’s what faith is, the less you have, the better. Fortunately, this popular conception of faith is completely wrong. In reality faith is a rational and essential way of knowing things that we use every day: knowing things based on the testimony of another. Sometimes we like to pretend that we base everything we know on evidence, but the vast majority of things that we know are things that we know because somebody told them to us. My name, my date of birth, all of my wife’s experiences before we first met, the planets in the solar system, the main combatants of World War II, the capital of Sweden… If we were required to test each and every truth claim ourselves before we could accept it, we would know very, very little.
It is true that the knowledge that comes through this faith, although essential, is not infallible. The person we’re getting our information from could be passing along an error, either because he is mistaken or because he’s lying. The reliability of what we learn from somebody depends on the reliability of the person we’re learning it from. But this problem is not unique to faith, because all the means we have to gain knowledge have a possibility of error.
Now when the Bible uses the word faith, it’s not exactly the same thing as this general faith, but a special case of it. While general faith places trust in others, biblical faith places trust in God. Take Abraham for example. Although he and his wife were extremely old, when God promised him that he would have a son, “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness” (Gen 15:6, Rom 4:3). This act of believing the word of God is called by Paul “his faith” (Rom 4:5). God is worthy of all our trust, and an essential way of showing that trust is to consider everything he says to be true, even without any additional proof. According to his own understanding, Abraham had no reason to think that he would ever be a father, but when God says so, he considers God’s word to be more trustworthy than his own reasoning and he believes. This trust in God is not irrational. On the contrary, it is the most rational thing in the world to recognize when someone else is better placed to know the truth than I am. And it goes without saying that God is always in the best position to know what the truth is.
There are many elements of the Christian faith that find some confirmation in philosophy, science or history. For example, the historical case for the resurrection of Jesus is surprisingly strong. But history has its limits. What is the meaning of the resurrection? What did Jesus accomplish on the cross? No mere human investigation can find out that Jesus of Nazareth “was delivered up for our offenses and was raised for our justification” (Rom. 4:25). For that, we have only the word of God. And even where the biblical teaching is confirmed by outside sources, God’s word doesn’t depend on them for its authority. There’s no way that we can confess the Christian doctrines on human reasoning alone – faith in God is indispensable.
So if we are to be accused of basing our beliefs on faith, let us confess it gladly. Faith is a wonderful gift from God that cures the willful blindness which we once embraced. It is not a weakness of our position that we have believed the word of the living God. It is rather a mark of humility and a rejection of the pride of rationalism that puffs man up to think that he can be self-sufficient to discover the answer to every question. But for us, biblical revelation and human reason complement each other to form a coherent and robust worldview. Those who reject the former do not gain the latter, but actually lose both.
Yes, we can and we should base our beliefs on faith.