Faith: belief without evidence?

Faith. A five letter word which is treated with disdain in 21st Century Britain. Having faith is often compared to having a delusion. People who have faith are those that believe in God, fairies, trolls, hobgoblins, and other mythical creatures. Its a belief which has no evidence for it. Or at least, that is how it is commonly characterised. However, I intend to argue that faith is by its very definition reliant on reason, and thus belief in God is unlike mythical creatures in principle due to this clarification of faith and thus distinction.

Firstly, I will outline how many atheists and secularists have tried to characterise faith. Here is just a few definitions given:

Mark Twain defined faith as “believing what you know ain’t true.”

Sam Harris: "Faith is the license religious people give themselves to keep believing when reasons fail."

In the documentary Religulous, Bill Maher said “Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking.”

Richard Dawkins: “The whole point of religious faith, its strength and chief glory, is that it does not depend on rational justification. The rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices.”

For more, go to http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/faith-and-reason-are-mutually-exclusive.html

Essentially, the claim is that faith is the absence of evidence. It is a belief which does not have rational grounds as opposed to other ones, usually said to be 'based on science'. W. K. Clifford once argued that 'It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.' (The Ethics of Belief (1879)). Thus, the position those like Dawkins, Harris and other New Atheists take, is that based on this princple, faith is an irrational belief, for it does not have any evidence whatsoever.

Whilst this view is popular amongst the youth of today, when one digs beneath the surface, it is apparent that as a thesis it is highly flawed. I want to look specifically at what Martin Luther, the great protestant reformer, thought faith was, and this is the foundation of much Protestant and Christian thought, interacted with by many key theologians such as John Calvin and Birmingham's very own Cardinal John Henry Newman. Luther's thoughts on faith as trust will be the focus of this next part.

The root of the word faith is the Latin 'fiducia', which means trust. Trust is defined as  'Firm reliance on the integrity, ability, or character of a person or thing.' Luther describes the relationship of trust and belief in God in the following passage:

'The person who does not have faith is like someone who has to cross the sea, but is so frightened that he does not trust the ship. And so he stays where he is, and is never saved, because he will not get on board and cross over.' Faith is not merely believeing something is true, it is being prepared to act on that belief. To use Luther's analogy, faith is not simply about believing that a ship exists; it is about stepping into it and entrusting ourselves to it.

Now this has implications for the New Atheist's definition of faith. Whereas faith for them is based on a lack of evidence, a Lutheran interpretation would be grounded in reason. Why is this? Well, when you trust someone, it is not because there is an absence of evidence of arguments for doing so, but because you have good inductive reasons for believing in them. You trust your friends not because you have no evidence for it, but because past experience indicates they are trustworthy, other people testify to their reliability and they don't appear to be treating you badly in their overall actions. Of course, you may be wrong, and the person you trust could be stabbing you in the back without any of the evidence indicating it: however, if the evidence points in the other direction, then it is rational to trust that person.

And so it is with faith. Proffessor John Lennox of Mathematics at Oxford once asked Richard Dawkins 'Do you have faith in your wife', which he replied 'Of course I do.' 'Is there any evidence for that', 'Yes, there is plenty of evidence'. Faith is a commitment based upon evidence, or rather, what is percieved by the believer as good reasons for trusting another.

Now lets apply this to belief in God. Understanding that faith is trust means entails that faith in God is based upon very good evidence. It is a commitment made on the fact that there are very good reasons to believe in God. It is not, like belief in fairies, something where there is very limited arguments. Faith in God, for the believer, is founded upon good reasons for trust in God.

Thus, faith is not a belief which has no evidence, or is irrational. Rather, faith is rational, based upon arguments and evidence. The job of the sceptic is to demonstrate that belief in God is not faith, that it is on a lack of evidence, that the reasons a person such as myself gives, they are not sufficient to show the rationality of belief in God, whether that is trust in God or the existence of God. The way the New Atheists characterise faith should actually be called 'anti-faith', for that would be trust in God without evidence. So I think faith is intertwined quite heavily with reason.

Now I don't pretend that most theists have good reasons for their faith. However, when interacting with an ideology hostile to your own, one should always assess a view on its strongest position, which I try to do (not always succeeding!) This would then be demonstrating the reasons provided by natural theology for belief in God, such as the Ontological argument, Argument from Meaning, the Infinity of God and Pascal's Wager, are all insufficient evidence for trust in God's existence to be rational. If that is achieved, then religion is based on anti-faith, not faith. As it happens, I don't think anyone has done that yet, and thus, faith in God is one of the most rational of things.

I want to stress that this article does not attempt to show God does exist. Rather, it is clarifying whether faith is based on reason, or are they in conflict. By definition it is not, but the burden of proof is to show belief in God is not faith.