What Easter Tells Us About Christianity and Reason

Meet an “Internet atheist” (as opposed to someone in higher education) and you will hear that “faith” is opposed or incompatible with reason.

No.

That’s not what most Christians believe. Cite Thomas Aquinas, John Chrysostom, and CS Lewis as examples of Christians who gave reasons for faith and you are met with a blank stare. These Christian “intellectuals” are not the “true believers.” Internet atheists do not want to acknowledge that the “intellectuals” are  defending the same beliefs as people in the pews, just with more sophistication, because that would leave Internet atheism without a major talking point.

Christianity and all forms of secularism (including atheism) are intellectual traditions. Of course some Christians and some atheists are anti-intellectual, but if you want to be in the mainstream of your own tradition, then you should not be. Still the belief that Christian philosophers are not defending “faith” that “regular Christians” believe is common. Easter shows it is false.

How?

Let’s take the basic Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox person one can meet. They have no theological training other than Sunday School or a few church programs and they have not taken a philosophy class since freshman year of college. Ask this person what happened on Easter Sunday and they will say: “Jesus rose from the dead.”

“Aha,” says the critics, “how do you know?”

My guess is that the response will depend on the community. The Christian might reply: “The Bible says so.” or “The Church taught me this truth.” They might give a combination of both ideas. (“This is what the Church taught me and the Bible says.”)

Before anything else is said, notice the church member did not say: “I believe despite reason.” Instead, he had a reason. Of course a skeptic might say that the two reasons are bad, but this is not obvious. For example, suppose a very simple Christian was asked: “Why trust the Bible?” and he or she replied, “Because is the Word of God.” This might be wrong (an atheist is sure it is), but again the Christian is giving a reason. In fact, appealing to authority (the pastor or priest) is also not foolish for a non-expert. His minister has studied the Bible or Christian ideas carefully and is paid to teach those ideas. If the Christian has a good experience with the competence and truthfulness of their pastor, they are no more unreasonable to trust the local theological expert than anyone is when they trust their mechanic or their therapist.

Now my argument in not that the lay Christian cannot be criticized and the discussion continued. “How do you know the Bible is the World of God?” and “How do you know your pastor or church is telling you the truth?” These are great questions. Having taught with this question for several decades, I am sure that eventually a lay Christian will run out of things to say. He or she would have to go do more research to carry on their end of the discussion. Given my experience with students, some will also be tempted to give up or grow hostile. If you have not had to do it often, having your deepest beliefs challenged can be very scary or irritating. This is the moment when a bad student will shut down a conversation and appeal to their feelings . . . as if reasons do not matter.

This is wrong. It is also wrong, however, when we assert that people must be bothered by all our questions or have our struggles. I am a “question asking” person by nature. Tell me that the sky is blue and my first impulse is to check and see for myself. Not everyone has this disposition and that is not a bad thing. The bad side of wondering, by nature, is to have too little trust in authority or friends. People should find answers to the questions they have and sometimes should question more than they do, but not everyone questions as much as those drawn to philosophical or “thinking” careers.

At some point, a Christian can look at an Oxford philosopher like Richard Swinburne and take some degree of intellectual comfort that he is doing good work. Of course, a “street atheist” can do the same thing when he looks at smart atheists in academic philosophy. Nobody has a market on good arguments or “smarts.” If you have a powerful Christian experience, then your reasons can be defended at the very highest level of philosophy. There is no killer argument against Christian theism or for it, for that matter. People do not pick their view of reality just based on intellectual reasons. We have experiences and some of those are at the very core of our being and are hard to describe. God is there is not an “argument,” but it is a reason just as a child who cannot define “light” knows when she sees light.

Arguments do  not work that way. A good argument (thank God!) continues and Christians must be part of the argument. We are part of the argument . . . as even the simplest Christian demonstrates when they give reasons for their beliefs.