Evidence & Faith

Many religiously skeptical people I encounter are surprised to learn that I came to Christian belief on the basis of evidence.

What often follows from these people are (usually) polite questions such as:

• “So you think God parted the red sea and created earth in, like 7 literal days?“
• “The ‘Flood’? Really?“
• “Jesus rose from the dead, huh?“
• “Don’t you believe in science?“

Some people even say “There’s zero evidence for God”. To be fair, most of these encounters happen online, where politeness and charity are hard to come by. But even in person, with friends and family, people are often surprised and perplexed by my assertion that evidence can actually lead to religious faith.

Why is this?

Most people just don’t understand the nature of evidence, proof and faith. But we can hardly blame them for this.

A Secular Age

Most normal people are not philosophers. They don’t dwell deeply on the meaning of the words they use. This can easily lead them into false ideas about the world – which is bad enough. But even worse, when it comes to matters of existence and ultimate reality – it can be deadly to souls.

This problem stems from so-called experts and leading intellectuals who also don’t dwell deeply enough on the meaning of their words – on the exact “meta” aspects or “aboutness” of their areas of study. This confusion at the root of modern intellectual life bears bad fruit in the society at large by causing poor understanding in the mass of normal, non-expert people, because they take their cues and talking points from these confused but confident-sounding intellectuals.

And in this day and age, its the scientists who are the leading intellectuals. This is fitting. We are living in the latter days of the scientific revolution that upended “superstitious” religion and philosophy, on the long march toward the “end of history“, as Fukuyama put it. We are – so the story goes – perfecting our way toward a humanistic earthly existence by the power of our own mortal bootstraps.

So – what are the two most critical words that are routinely misunderstood and misused by our intellectual leaders, and which causes so much dreadful ignorance to trickle down to the people at large?

Evidence & Faith

Scientists Slaying Straw Men

Here is a short tour of the most popular scientists speaking with great confidence and seeming authority on the difference between evidence and faith:

What Tyson and Dawkins claim here is that, when Christians or other believers say that they have Faith in something – they are really saying that they have no evidence for a belief, and so have to fill in their lack of evidence with Faith.

These two clips are misrepresentations of what Faith means. They also are classic and frankly embarrassing examples of the “straw-man fallacy“, which is to misrepresent an opponent’s argument in intentionally weaker terms (to build a “man out of straw”), and then proceed to valiantly slay that harmless man with a supposedly knock-down objection. The comedic irony of valor against a flimsy argument is what makes these two examples so perfect. One can just feel the condescension dripping from Tyson’s lips…and of course Dawkins ratchets it up – as he often does – by taking the supposed moral high ground by calling his version of “Faith” evil. To act cocky when one is dead wrong is just embarrassing.

Dawkins and deGrasse Tyson are actually referring to Credulity or “Blind Faith“, which is to believe in the truth of a proposition in absence of or in contradiction to evidence. Now – I have no doubt that these two fellows have indeed encountered Christians and other believers who do display credulity. A shining example is young-earth creationist Ken Ham’s defeat in the debate with Bill Nye. But these Christians would be the “straw men” – weak advocates for weak and “head in the sand” positions on critical philosophical and scientific matters. There are, however, many “steel men” in the world (myself included) who are not credulous in regard to their belief in God’s existence and Christ’s saving acts in history. Dawkins and Tyson don’t typically engage these folks in debate, but when they do (e.g. when mathematician John Lennox debated Dawkins), they usually lose badly.

We All Live Our Lives By Faith

True faith in the Christian sense is best defined as “trust”. In the New Testament, the word is Pistis (Πίστις). Its a resting-in-truth of a conclusion, once that conclusion is reached by stepwise presentation and acceptance of evidence. And this is not limited to just Christian belief, but is actually applicable to everyday life.

Here is but one example of how we all instinctively use evidence all day, in order to arrive at truth conclusions about the world – and how we actually operate most of the time on faith.

Dating & Courtship

When my fiancé and I met, we spent most of our time collecting evidence on each other. Long months were spent sussing out each other’s personality traits, moral values, psychological makeup, physical beauty and personal history. Facts upon facts were compiled and stored away. Aside from falling in love in the process – we finally each arrived at the conclusion that we were both trust-worthy. And not trust-worthy just in the sense that we wouldn’t lie to one another, but trust-worthy in the sense that we didn’t need to collect any more evidence on the other person – that our pictures of each other as people were trust-worthy. We could stop mounting a case for each other’s compatibility with ourselves. We had proven the case, and now had Faith in each other’s personality traits, moral values, psychological makeup, physical beauty and personal history.

Were we 100% certain that our conclusions were correct? No. Nothing (except the useless truths of mathematics) is ever 100% certain. And that is the crux of it. This is where faith comes in.

For example, we didn’t know for certain if our moral values might change drastically, disrupting or potentially invalidating our initial conclusion of moral compatibility. As it turned out, my own values changed drastically and abruptly when I came to faith in Christ deep into my relationship with Emily – and it caused a crisis in faith between us that nearly broke us up. I wasn’t the same guy Emily had known, and never would be again. She had to re-open the case on me, collect more evidence, and reach a new conclusion.

But this is an unusual and rare circumstance. Generally speaking, we have to operate on faith in our romantic and marriage relationships – in all our relationships, in fact. To do otherwise would require an impractical, exhausting and ridiculous way of life. To not rest in faith in our friends and loved ones would mean that every day we’d be warily re-assessing them from top to bottom, eyeing them with reticence or even suspicion, unable to trust in the long chain of evidence we’d collected over the years. To act this way is a mental illness (Paranoia to be specific). But if we accept Richard Dawkins’ and Neil deGrasse Tyson’s definition of Faith, then we’d all have to become paranoid in regard to our loved ones. Every day would be like an upside-down Ground Hog Day.

I’ll wrote more soon about the different applications of an evidence-based approach to life.