Life without faith in God?
It is impossible to live a coherent life without faith in God
In a piece entitled “Faith in God Is the Only Coherent Basis for Reason”, Michael Egnor asserts the following, with which I completely agree.
Atheists commonly assert that there is a profound dichotomy between faith and reason. This is exemplified by atheist evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne’s book Faith vs. Fact. He implies that we can have faith in the truth of something or we can have factual knowledge of the truth but we cannot have both. Faith and fact are, in his view, mutually exclusive. But that is not true.
Faith in God provides an indispensable foundation for the power of human reason. In the perspective proposed by medieval philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), we must accept radical skepticism about the veracity of our perceptions and our concepts.
One may ask: How do we know that what we perceive or what we believe corresponds to reality? The answer is that we can’t know, in the sense that we can’t use our perceptive or intellectual abilities to prove the validity of our perceptions or concepts. To do so would be to reason in a circle. If our perceptions and our concepts are not reliable, then how could we use them to validate their reliability?
That’s Radical Enough
The skepticism Thomas requires is radical indeed. For example, even Descartes’s assertion, “I think therefore I am,” is not something we can prove without faith. The problem lies in the “therefore.” We must tacitly assume the validity of logic — specifically the logic of non-contradiction — to link “I think” to “I am.”
If we do not have faith in logic, then it would be possible to think but not to exist. Of course we find this possibility absurd, but it is only absurd because of our profound faith in the validity of logic — in this case, the validity of the logical principle of non-contradiction. That is the principle inherent in the belief that thinking presupposes the existence of the thinker. If logic were not reliable, there would be no logical connection between thinking and existence. Thinkers could think without existing.
So we are left with radical skepticism — theists and atheists alike. We can conclusively prove nothing about our knowledge of the world. It might all be a delusion and we have no certain way to be sure that it is not.
But of course sane people believe that — at least to some extent — we have access to truth. But this access is always a matter of faith — the validity of reason cannot be validated by reason itself. The process of this faith differs between those who believe in an omniscient and omnibenevolent God and those who do not.
I will speak here from the Christian perspective as it is the one with which I am the most familiar.
Read the rest at Mind Matters News, published by Discovery Institute’s Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence.
Yet I want to take it one step further. I believe it’s impossible to live a coherent life without belief in God. And belief in God does not merely mean that one is persuaded that He exists. It means that he has invested deeply in a journey of faith, in which he has gotten to know that without God, life is meaningless, pointless, and even quite impossible. The only way one comes to know these things is to read and study both the original source material (the Holy Bible) and the teachings of theological giants who have gone before.
Many intelligent men and women have started such a journey of discovery as skeptics, or even as outright atheists. Yet one by one, almost without exception, they discover not only that “It’s all true!” as Josh McDowell exclaimed out loud, but that the God we get to know in the Bible is not only able to create the universe, with it’s hundreds of billions of stars and galaxies, but is able to, moment by moment, keep it from decaying into entropy by the “Word of His power”. That’s what we call omnipotent.
His second attribute is omnipresence, which means that He does not live in a place, but is instead “with us” wherever we are, moment by moment. We also learn that God is omniscient, which means that He is all-knowing. Those are the three things that define deity.
But the God of the Bible is also
Eternal - From the beginning of man, we have wondered about eternity. Scientists have discovered that the universe had a beginning, so something or someone had to be here to cause it to begin, right? The Bible tells us that God was in the beginning.
Invisible - Various people from times past have seen powerful evidences of God, and some have even heard Him speak. But no one this side of eternity has seen God and lived.
Unchangeable - He is not a work in progress, as are all of us, and
Holy - He is separated from sin, and we who want to enjoy Him and his eternal rewards must be cleansed of our sin completely.
That last one is a toughie, because we “have all sinned, and fallen short”. But that’s why we need the atoning sacrifice that Christ came to make for us.
So as we approach the annual celebration of Easter Sunday, which is also called Resurrection Day, let’s renew our minds, refresh our spirits, and reinforce our hope. God lives, His only Son took on human flesh, and lived a sinless life, and then gave it as a ransom to pay the penalty for our sin. Then rose from the dead, proving that He had the keys to sin and death.
Those who have this gift of saving faith not only have the promise of the priceless gift of eternal life in the future, but live coherent lives in the present.
Right/write on.