Is Faith in God Reasonable?

"What hath Jerusalem to do with Athens? Or what hath faith to do with reason? Drs. William Lane Craig and Alex Rosenberg debate this all important and pervasive question concerning the reasonableness of faith in God. The nature of the question in this debate is no mere academic matter.

The question of God is the most important question. One’s answer to it will impact nearly all other beliefs one holds from common notions of morality to politics and from our interest and investigation of our world to what we take to be our purpose(s) in life.

Is “faith” foolish? By this, should it be understood to be blind? Or is it reasonable and, if so, by what measure and to whom is it foolishness? For many, Mark Twain is right on the mark when he said that “Faith is believing something you know ain’t true.” Yet the great thinkers of Judaism and Christianity like Philo, Moses Maimonides, Thomas Aquinas, and John Calvin considered faith to be an extraordinarily important virtue (moral and/or intellectual)! Indeed, it is not only the condition by which salvation is appropriated in these Abrahamic faith traditions (which are taken by insiders to actually be knowledge traditions), but it is the basis for movements from Mother Teresa’s compassion and our concern for the poor to Isaac Newton’s inspiration in science in light of God’s creation of the world and man being made in God’s image. Is faith in God reasonable? Ought we to have faith in God? Captured February 1, 2013 on the campus of Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN."

(copied from: http://open.biola.edu/resources/is-faith-in-god-reasonable where this can also be viewed in its entirety- emphasis mine)

If you click in the highlighted sections below your browser will take you to other posts which are relevant to the debate at that point, this is useful for further background information.

Dr. William Lane Craig handles his subject with clarity and succinctness, Dr. Alex Rosenberg clearly struggles at times to articulate his view but the kicker for me was right near the end where a question from the floor totally devastated all that had gone before. To be fair and give Rosenberg his due Craig is a prolific and extremely experienced debater, and as Rosenberg was quick to point out a debate is not the ideal venue for exchanges of this sort.

I was intrigued, in fact delighted to see the whole question of Mathematics as one of the eight reasons for faith in God which I myself have had a look at.

At 2:40:43 in the debate, the crunch question to Dr. Rosenberg was asked by a young man, apparently a student which completely unravelled all the credible answers and postulations that he had given up to that point. This question which I have put in writing for the viewer to ponder was in fact the last question for Rosenberg and to my mind the most significant- and one which I feel Dr Craig himself should have asked and pushed.

"Dr. Rosenberg I wonder if you might help me to understand how your view is not incoherent, uh- do you really claim in your book that sentences have no meaning or truth value, even the sentences in your own book? How is that not incoherent, it's self refuting- um at least the sentences you've made tonight surely you think are true? Um but if even you don't think your position is true why should we?"

Rosenberg's discomfort and hostility is palpable and his reference to this "peurile" question (Childishly silly and trivial) makes it abundantly clear what he thinks of it. This whole question arises as a result of trying to fit  a naturalistic template over the mind/brain question. Rosenberg is a Philosophical or metaphysical naturalist. "Metaphysical naturalism holds that all properties related to consciousness and the mind are reducible to, or supervene upon, nature."(Wikipedia) You cannot claim something to be true and then deny the ability to know truth in the next breath, you cannot wax long and lyrically on the truth of atheism according to the findings of science and logic and then proceed to dismantle the foundation for believing logic. Reason gives us a handle on real states of affairs- to reason that atheism is true and subsequently conclude that consciousness is all illusion is self defeating. You cannot write a book on: The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions and then proceed to dismantle the idea that intentionality itself is illusional. This is precisely what C.S. Lewis alluded to many years ago when perhaps this idea was more in its infancy.



The nihilist Friedrich Nietzsche,(Twilight of the Idols, Ch. 2.) said- “I am afraid we cannot get rid of God because we still believe in grammar.”


I hazard a guess that Nietzsche eventually lost his belief in grammar as well as God, since he spent the last years of his life in an asylum spending long periods in silence. At least he was consistent.

“Human irrationalism and evil are the difficult things to explain in the Christian worldview, but the Christian can live with such mysteries because the only alternative is to renounce all meaning, to begin with atheism’s ultimate irrationalism. “Good,” “evil,” “reality,” “illusion,” and every other human word would be meaningless if atheism were true and the world were ultimately meaningless. The atheist believes that error and imperfection in the world imply the non-existence of a perfect, absolute God. Rather, error and imperfection in the world require a perfect, absolute God, because such concepts as “error” and “imperfection,” whether in the fields of mathematics, ethics, logic or science, would be meaningless without a perfect, absolutely rational standard by which to identify occurrences of imperfection, and without an ultimately rational structure to the world which allows concepts, whether positive or negative, to be applied, whether rightly or wrongly, to the changing realm of human experience. If God did not exist, it is not merely personal, psychological feelings of having a meaningful life that would suffer, but rational meaning would suffer.” Michael H. Warren Jr. (emphasis mine)

 I repeat C.S. Lewis:

“The validity of rational thought… is the necessary presupposition of all other theorizing.”

"I remember once being shown a certain kind of knot which was such that if you added one extra complication to make assurance doubly sure you suddenly found that the whole thing had come undone in your hands and you had only a bit of string. It is like that with naturalism. It goes on claiming territory after territory: first the inorganic, then the lower organisms, then man’s body, then his emotions. But when it takes the final step and we attempt a naturalistic account of thought itself, suddenly the whole thing unravels. The last fatal step has invalidated all the preceding ones: for they were all reasoning and reason itself has been discredited. We must, therefore, either give up thinking altogether or else begin over again from the ground floor."

To top it off it also brings to mind what I have quoted elsewhere what Malcolm Muggeridge once said. Malcolm Muggeridge referred to "having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keels over a weary, battered old brontosaurus and becomes extinct.” When your education reduces your humanity to mere animality as naturalism does we see the truth of Muggeridges comment of nearly 60 years ago.

All of this is not to say that Dr William Lane Craig did not have moments of weakness in his own defense of the question "Is faith in God reasonable?" And again just prior to the question that exposed the weakness of Rosenberg's position- a question was asked of Craig that I feel he answered particularly poorly. The question was: 

"My question for you Dr Craig is- the Bible says that Jesus loves us and wants a relationship with us and wants us to believe in him, he even showed himself to disbelievers like you mentioned, so to people such as Thomas after he was crucified to help him believe. My question is: why does Jesus not continue to physically reveal himself to people particularly on believers to show them that he is real?"

Here is a transcript of part of Craig's response:

"It's possible that in a world in which God's existence was as plain as the nose on your face, in which Jesus was constantly appearing in peoples bedrooms that they would get rather annoyed at the effrontery of this intruder popping into their- their houses all of the time uninvited and it wouldn't lead at all to a deeper faith or love in Him so I think that we can trust God's wisdom in providentially ordering the world in such a way that people are given adequate but not coercive evidence for His existence and the question then for us is: how will we respond to that, um it's not an adequate response to complain that you want more evidence, you need to look at the evidence that you do have and to make a decision on that basis. But I, I don't think that ah, um there's any reason here to think that God would do what you suggest, it- it may be that that would do do nothing in terms of ah bringing a greater number of people into a saving relationship with himself."

"Constantly appearing in peoples bedrooms" !!! I realize this is an off the cuff response but that is rather weak isn't it? People getting: "annoyed at the effrontery of this intruder [Jesus] popping into their houses all of the time uninvited" -? I don't believe Dr. Craig answered this serious question with the dignity it deserves or with the accuracy it entails. To many, the "hiddenness of God" is a question (at least on an intellectual level) which is a serious bar to faith. To be fair, this question came at the end of more than two hours of a sometimes grueling debate and perhaps it was too much too ask to keep that up, but on the other hand knowing Dr. Craig's theological perspectives I believe this really was a sign of the weakness of his own position.

The weakness exposed in Craig's position here is that on his terms Craig does not fully appreciate both the role of the Holy Spirit in salvation or the breadth of human depravity. To Craig, it only takes a clear defense and presentation of the Gospel and people will get saved or not depending utterly on the individuals own choice and their evaluation of the evidence, for him the influence of the Holy Spirit is a given. What is entirely missing on this view is the role of both the sovereignty of God and the extent and efficacy of the revelation of God. What would -in Craig's estimation- constitute "coercive evidence" ? Being knocked off a high horse, seeing an exceedingly bright light and hearing a voice which others said was like thunder yet was quite audibly clear to the one it was directed to? And what of being struck blind, would this not be coercive? St. Paul's Damascus road experience is not indicative of every conversion but it at least tells us that if God has a mind to, he will go to whatever necessary lengths He sees fit to accomplish and overcome resistance to the faith.

On the other hand Jesus makes it quite clear that if people- who say they see and yet don't believe on the basis of evidence they do have- a resurrection from the dead won't make a difference if God leaves them to their own devices:

 "...If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead." Luke 16:31

There is enough evidence in the world to convince those whose hearts are turned towards God by the Holy Spirit but there will never be enough, not even the resurrection personally witnessed, will suffice if the sinners heart has not been turned through the work of Grace in the soul.

In this we see the sovereignty of God at work.