Faith, Reason, and Telling People What They Really Think

“You really like this,” my wife would say about some food I really did not like.

“No,” I would reply. Persuasion, and her beauty, can work on many topics, but I am the world’s greatest expert on what I like. My likes can change over time, years of her effort have made cooked carrots palatable, but this process isn’t sudden. How do you feel? If you don’t know, only God does.

I also know what I mean . . .though often it is not what I say. For example, once I told my wife: “That dress looks great on you.” I meant it. Sadly for me, I did not sound as if I meant it. My communication skills failed me and yet I still knew what I meant. In some rare cases, we don’t know how we feel, we are so self-deceived, or what we mean, but those cases are for a psychologist and not for normal discussion.

In talking to people who are not Christians, particularly atheists, communication fails if we don’t accept that folks generally know what they feel and what they mean. I had better start every discussion thinking my friend knows her own mind and given time will express it clearly.

Clarity is good. Sometimes when people say what they mean and we discuss this idea, we discover inconsistencies with other ideas they also have. They might not like implications of their beliefs and so come to reject that belief. What I should never do is define their terms for them and insist, no matter what, that they believe what they do not. The one thing nobody can do is win an argument by insisting on a misunderstanding. Nobody will be persuaded when their views are not understood or accurately described.

We need to dialog until we understand and let people define their beliefs as they wish. Only then can we have meaningful conversations. Take atheists as an example. They have many motivations for their beliefs. Some atheists insist they have no other beliefs than that “God/gods do not exist.” Other atheists believe that assertion has implications. Before having reasonable discourse, a Christian must find out what the atheist believes and how he or she would define terms. When I write, I tend to address the average atheist I meet in person and online outside the academic community. Philosophers who are atheists (perhaps the majority of philosophers) approach atheism differently than people with no formal training in philosophy. There is a limitation then to anything I say: atheists vary in sophistication, atheists disagree about the nature and implications of atheism, and atheists don’t always agree on their approach to Christianity.

I can write generally, but in discussion with a human, I should strive to grasp what they believe. Sometimes in Christian thought, we fail at this job and that is wrong.

With 2.2 billion Christians (1/3 of the population of the world), communication by non-Christians to Christians can be difficult. Christians will have some things in common (Jesus is important and worth a listen), but we vary. Take the term “faith.” Almost all the world’s Christians will use the world “faith,” but they have varied understandings of what “good faith” would be. That is not surprising since no idea is so simple that we cannot misunderstand it! Other times Christians do not disagree so much as have a difference in nuance. Still, when Soren Kierkegaard uses “faith,” the term is different in important ways than when Saint Thomas Aquinas uses it.

So just as one cannot memorize a Big Book of Christian Answers definition that fits all atheists, so nobody should approach Christians with a preconceived idea of what we mean when we use the term faith. Generally, mainstream Christians believe faith has a strong relationship with reason. When a Christian says “I believe” about religious truths, she doesn’t mean “something I believe despite the facts or the evidence.” Most often Christians have meant things God has revealed to us that cannot be known just with reason and experience, but that are compatible with reason and experience and truths (like the existence of God) that can be known just by reason and experience.

Faith is a substantial hope. Hope in a belief is the response to a wish, a longing, that the belief be true. Faith uses reason and experience of God to make this hope more substantial. Faith (in this sense of the term) is not unreasonable.

Recently, I heard a discussion between an atheist or skeptic and Glenn Beck. If I understood him correctly, Beck has a different view of faith. His use of the term is more existential: he has committed himself to God and now he thinks he sees.

If a person was to discuss “faith” with me, he could not use the definition that Beck uses. I think Beck is wrong . . . that his view of faith is not Biblical, what the community has taught, or defensible. Beck obviously would disagree and we could have an interesting discussion.

The odd thing is when I talk to many “pop atheists” they insist on applying a Beck definition of faith to all religious believers. This is not as much offensive as it is useless. Whether we are discussing CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, Dorothy Sayers, Richard Swinburne, JP Moreland, Eleonore Stump or many other Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox theologians, the Beck view of faith is not going to work. You cannot impose your Big Book of Atheist Answers on all of us. We just don’t define faith and reason as incompatible.

There is nothing more foolish than endlessly repeating to a person that they must understand an important idea, central to their thought, in the (usually) clownish way that the “attacker” has decided must be true.

One might decide that the reasons some Christians give for their beliefs are not good, but that is a discussion about reason (using logic!) not a sign that the Christian has rejected reason and logic.

Both atheists and Christians must begin a discussion with particular atheists and Christians by trying to determine what each is saying or means to say. We must worry about “means to say” because plenty of us will use terms badly or make mistakes in our expression. I once gave an entire talk about the wife of the last Russian Czar calling her “Alexandria” (like the city). I know this wrong, but . . . who knows why. . . I messed up. Now imagine someone simply dismissing everything I said because of a verbal gaffe. Christians can sometimes do this “gotcha” when they trick a secularist into saying they absolutely believe in “no absolutes.” What the secularists means is: there is one absolute and it is that nothing else is an absolute. They have spoken hastily and the Christian has (perhaps) been uncharitable.

We should fix our friend’s position if we can: that is charity in an argument.

God knows we should apply this to politics. If you are Republican, do you try to understand what a Democrat is saying. Recently, I wrote against socialism. I had very good discussions with different socialists (Christians and non-Christians) that helped me understand that while my posts fit general socialism, there were subtle nuances that no 500 word essay could cover.

And so it goes. . . the wonderful thing about learning is that it does not end. We put our position out there and then we learn what other people think. This is rarely easy and “victory” does not come by smashing our foe, but in a mutual journey to truth.

Christianity is true. Jesus is Lord and we should all submit our lives to His message of Justice and Love. Many of you disagree. . . come then let’s reason together God helping us.