What is Faith?

Many people view science as fascinating and full of mystery. We absolutely benefit from the scientific discoveries of recent years. Just consider the progress in medical science. Heart surgery some years ago was extremely risky and now is considered very common place. I had a friend who was the heart association poster child back in the 60’s because she had had open heart surgery and it was considered experimental back then but now we see operations to correct heart defects while still in the womb. Amazing stuff!

Many questions of faith and religion are not answered through scientific experiments. Some people say either you believe or you don’t and that’s what faith is. Others might have a religious experience of some sort, like God speaking to them, so they feel compelled to believe. To many people outside the church walls, faith is both blind and irrational. Here are some examples.

Mark Twain joked that faith is “believing what you know ain’t so,” H.L. Mencken, the American anti-supernaturalist critic of Christianity, once said, “Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable”. Evolutionary biologist, professor and famous atheist Richard Dawkins said, “Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even because of, the lack of evidence. Christian author and professor Paul Little told a story of a Sunday school teacher who asked the question, “What is faith?”. To answer the question a boy quickly popped up with “ believing something you know isn’t true”. Wonder where that came from?

From the time of Jesus, faith has never been unreasonable. The overarching issue as we begin this week is whether or not thinking people can embrace faith in an age of scientific discovery. We’ll tackle questions like, “Has science made God obsolete? Are faith in God and scientific knowledge incompatible? Does knowledge from science outweigh religious knowledge? Which one is more reliable, and what do we do when they contradict each other?”

Compared to scientific discovery, religious claims in modern day culture are viewed with less credibility. In the realm of science, faith in God, the Bible, and Jesus Christ are seen as personal-based claims unlike the knowledge-based claims of science.

Christians have always understood there are two books: the book of nature and the book of revelation(the Bible). The book of nature is the observable universe with the discipline of science as her reader. The book of revelation is God’s spoken truth to humanity. For Christians, both of these books have the same author and therefore should be intergrated at some level. So the real question becomes: “Can science be done with God in mind?”

The modern day champions of science say “absolutely NO!”. They also say, “Sure you can believe in God, but in the real world, science is equated with knowledge and religion with faith. These two are not equal”

Science has become the owner of knowledge in society, accompanied by the modern philosophy of naturalism. This is the view that all life rose spontaneously from non-living matter and then evolved by purely naturalistic means. In other words, chance combined with physical law created life on this planet and evolved to its present state. This idea is embodied by Carl Sagan’s famous words, “The Cosmos is al that is or ever was or ever will be.” God is excluded. He’s not required to explain anything having to do with the natural world. Scientific explanations are limited to natural processes and the laws of nature, so supernatural explanations cannot be offered to inform or augment science in any way.

However, both science and faith (theology) do make knowledge claims. For example, Christian belief is founded on history and evidence. Arguments for God’s existence can be offered as evidence for our knowledge of Him. The difference is that science and faith view reality through two different windows. The late Stephen Jay Gould, famous Harvard paleontologist and champion of Darwinian evolution, believed science and faith occupy different domains. He called his philosophy NOMA (non-overlapping magisterial). Gould said “the net of science cover the empirical universe…(while) the net of religion extends over questions of moral meaning and value.” Galileo said, “Science tells you how the heavens go, and the Bible tells you how to go to heaven.” Are science and faith in conflict? We’ll look at some of the details this week.

If you ask God, “Wisdom and knowledge will be given to you” (2 Chronicles 1:12) God will bless your efforts to learn more about Him.

What evidence do you rely on for your faith?

Read Psalm 19 as you answer that question