I am finally kicking off the 20 Tough Questions series! (If you’re curious about what the 20 Tough Questions series is, check out the Purpose, Promise, and Plan post.)
I will present each post in the series just as I would a legal argument. I’ll start by explaining the question, come right out with my conclusion, present an outline of the points that lead to that conclusion, and then dive into the points themselves. Simplicity, clarity, and brevity will be my guides.
To launch the series, I’m starting with a question that used to be one of my most fundamental objections to faith as an atheist: Isn’t faith just blind belief?
When I asked this question as an atheist, I was criticizing faith as lacking any foundation or justification. I was attacking faith as arbitrary and results-oriented rather than being based in any underlying rationale.
Now, I confidently say the answer to this question is: No, faith is not just blind belief. Here are the points that lead me to this answer:
- There are two aspects of faith: belief and trust.
- Belief is not blind; it is supported by evidence, experience, and reason.
- Trust in Jesus is wholly justified by belief in Jesus.
- Doubts do not disprove faith.
There are two aspects of faith: belief and trust.
I want to start by pointing out a linguistic error hidden in this question, which plagues conversations between atheists and Christians.
When I was an atheist and pushed Christians to justify their faith, the conversation almost always led to Christians saying something like this: “faith is believing in what you cannot see.” When they said this, the Christians thought they had won, and I thought they had forfeited. In hindsight, I think we were both wrong—we did not understand that we were talking about different things.
There are two aspects of faith: belief and trust. While these concepts are related (they are both acceptance of truth in the absence of certainty), it is critical that we understand their differences.
Belief is acceptance that a statement is true or that something exists.
Trust is belief in the qualities of someone or something.
Let’s look at an example from law. If there is a lawsuit about a car accident, and the parties are disputing who is at fault, the jurors might look at the physical evidence (photos, measurements, etc.) and decide who was at fault based on belief about the evidence. If an eyewitness testifies about how the accident occurred, and if the jury believes that witness is credible, the jury might decide who was at fault based on trust in the witness’s testimony. Most likely, the jury will decide who was at fault through a combination of belief and trust.
This is how faith works—in the absence of certainty, we may accept something as true through belief, trust, or a combination of the two.
When it comes to God, faith requires both belief and trust.
This is where the linguistic error comes into play. When atheists say “faith,” they most often mean belief, but when Christians say “faith,” they most often mean trust. This miscommunication makes sense when we think about it. An atheist, who believes there is no god, spends little or no time focused on whether to trust that non-existent god. Conversely, the Christian, who believes God exists and consequently has committed her life to Him, spends most of her time focused on how to trust God with more of her life.
So, our first point is that the question is flawed and should be rephrased as: Isn’t faith just blind belief and trust?
Belief is not blind; it is supported by evidence, experience, and reason.
I noted above that belief and trust are both acceptance of the truth in absence of certainty. This makes belief and trust (and thus faith) different from knowledge. Defining knowledge is no easy task—there is an entire branch of philosophy called epistemology dedicated to the study of knowledge. But I’ll offer my definition and move on for the purposes of this post.
Knowledge is the awareness of the truth with certainty through experience or reasoning.
I often hear people speak of faith and knowledge as though they are opposites, as if faith is the currency of Christianity while knowledge is the currency of atheism. This is flat wrong. Faith and knowledge are not opposites; they are companions in a joint pursuit of one thing—the truth.
Christians do not, or at least should not, have faith merely for the sake of having faith. Faith for the sake of faith is a hollow philosophy that could be used to support anything (faith in oneself, a political party, a social reform, money, a conspiracy theory, etc.). The essence of Christianity is not to have faith for the sake of having faith. The essence of Christianity is to follow Jesus, and Jesus told us point blank: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” (John 14:6 NKJV). Thus, the Christian faith is the pursuit of the truth.
There is a lot of evidence to support belief in Jesus Christ and the accuracy of the Bible. This includes archeological evidence, textual and documentary analyses, statistical quantification of fulfilled prophecies, medical evaluation of Biblical descriptions, and logical arguments, among others. Exploring those is beyond the scope of this post. The point here is that the belief aspect of faith is not blind; it is the pursuit of truth that works in conjunction with knowledge based on evidence, experience, and reason.
Trust in Jesus is wholly justified by belief in Jesus.
What about the trust aspect of faith? Is it blind?
That depends on what you mean by blind, but I am unashamed to admit that I have faith, through trust, in many things that I would not ordinarily believe. If I am in the next room and hear a glass shatter in the kitchen, and if there is only one person in the kitchen at the time, I will believe that the person in the kitchen caused the glass to shatter. But if the one person in the kitchen is my wife, and she tells me “I didn’t touch the glass; it just shattered on its own,” I will accept that as true because I trust her more than I believe in my experience-based deductions about how glasses shatter.
When it comes to Jesus, our trust in Him is wholly justified by our belief in Him. In other words, if we believe in the fundamental fact assertions of the Bible (God created us, became human in Jesus Christ, walked the Earth performing miracles, was killed, and rose from the dead — all because He loves us and wants to be with us), then we should trust Him because His very nature warrants our trust in Him. [C.S. Lewis made a similar point in Mere Christianity, in what is now referred to as “Lewis’ Trilemma.”]
When it comes to Jesus, belief is both a necessary and a sufficient condition for trust. Christians need to understand that an atheist will not trust God unless he first believes in God. On the other hand, atheists need to understand that belief in God justifies—and demands—trust in God.
So, is the trust aspect of faith blind? No. Faith in God may require us to accept something as true through trust in God even when we would not ordinarily believe that thing to be true, but that trust is wholly justified by our belief in God.
Doubts do not disprove faith.
I want to cover one more point in this post. As an atheist, when I asked Isn’t faith just blind belief?, I was insinuating that people should not persist in faith in the presence of doubts. In other words, I thought doubts disproved faith. I now realize this was a silly and illogical theory.
Doubts and faith share a bond—they exist only in the absence of certainty. If we are certain about something, there is room for neither doubts nor faith.
Here are two examples to help us understand this relationship:
- I am certain that the sum of two and five is seven; I have neither doubts nor faith about this, just certainty (i.e. knowledge).
- I have faith and some doubt—albeit it very little—that I will wake up tomorrow morning; I do not have certainty about this.
Far from being mutually exclusive with faith, the potential for doubts is required for faith.
The Christian response to doubts is not to give up faith or pretend the doubts do not exist but to ask for help with them, like the father of the child, who cried out to Jesus, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24 NKJV).
Persisting in faith in the presence of doubts is not blind; it is a humble and honest admission that we are not all-knowing and a declaration that we nevertheless remain committed to pursuing the truth, the way, and the life.
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Respectfully,
Kyle Zunker
