How Can I Possibly Believe That Faith Is Better Than Doubt?
St. Paul wrote that if Jesus was not resurrected from the dead, the Christian faith is “futile”
and followers of Jesus are “of all people most to be pitied.”
Christians would say, in fact, that reason is affirmed in Scripture — “Come now, and let us reason together,” is how the prophet Isaiah puts it — and
that faith properly understood is consistent with and deepens our understanding of reality.
As the pastor Tim Keller told me, “Most of the things we most deeply believe in
— for example, human rights and human equality — are not empirically provable.”
“The supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason,” is how Blaise Pascal put it.
According to Philip Yancey, the author of “The Jesus I Never Knew,” “Faith requires the possibility of rejection, or it is not faith.”
Perhaps the key to understanding why faith is prized within the Christian tradition is
that it involves trust that would not be needed if the existence of God were subject to a mathematical proof.
“Faith without reason risks descending into superstition; reason without faith builds a world without windows, doors or skylights.”
But faith itself, while not the converse of reason, is still distinct from it.
