Faith is the abdication of reason.

Question

Science proceeds by evidence, falsification, and revision. Religion proceeds by faith — which means believing things you have no good reason to believe. The two are not complementary; they are opposites. A scientist who believed things on faith would be drummed out of his field. The religious person celebrates as a virtue what every other domain treats as a vice.

Thomas Aquinas · Answer

Faith is assent to truth on the authority of a trustworthy witness.

The objection assumes that faith means believing without reason. This is not what the word has ever meant in the Catholic tradition. Faith is the assent of the intellect to a truth on the basis of testimony — specifically, the testimony of God, whose veracity is the ground of the assent. It is not opposed to reason; it is reason operating on a particular kind of evidence, namely the witness of one who knows.

You believe a great many things this way already. You believe that Australia exists, though you have not been there. You believe that the American Revolution happened, though you did not see it. You believe your mother is your mother on the testimony of those who were present at your birth. None of this is irrational. It is the ordinary operation of a finite mind that cannot verify everything firsthand and must rely on credible witnesses.

What faith adds is not the structure of testimonial assent but the witness — God himself, whose authority exceeds that of any human source. The reasonableness of faith therefore depends on the prior question of whether God has in fact spoken, which is a question reason can examine. The motives of credibility — miracles, prophecy, the holiness of the saints, the spread of the Church — are not faith itself but the rational grounds for entertaining faith.

John Henry Newman · Answer

Most of what we know, we know by accumulated probability, not demonstration.

The model of knowledge implied by the objection — that genuine knowledge is what can be proven by deductive certainty or experimental replication, and everything else is mere "faith" — describes almost nothing of what any actual person actually knows. Outside of mathematics and a narrow band of laboratory science, we know things by the convergence of independent probabilities, weighed by what I have called the illative sense.

You know that your spouse loves you. You cannot prove it the way you prove a theorem. You believe it because of ten thousand small evidences — looks, gestures, sacrifices, the texture of years — none of which is decisive alone, all of which together produce certitude. This is not irrationality. It is the ordinary structure of how rational adults arrive at the most important conclusions of their lives.

Faith in God is reached by the same faculty. Not by a single knockdown proof but by the convergence of conscience, history, philosophical argument, the witness of the saints, the experience of grace, and the coherence of doctrine. The man who demands a syllogistic demonstration before he will believe will also, if he is consistent, never be able to say he loves his wife.

The Logician · Answer

Every belief system rests on testimony.

Consider what the average educated atheist actually knows about, say, evolution. He has not done the genetic sequencing. He has not dug the fossils. He has not read the original Origin of Species, much less the technical literature. He believes evolution is true because credible authorities — scientists, textbooks, teachers — have told him so, and the institutions that produced them are reliable. This is exactly the structure of religious faith: assent based on trusted testimony.

The atheist's belief in evolution is not therefore irrational. Trust in expert testimony, when the experts are trustworthy and the institutions reliable, is a perfectly sound epistemic strategy. But it is not categorically different from the Catholic's belief in the resurrection. Both rest on testimony; both can be examined for the credibility of the witnesses; both involve a non-zero leap from "the witnesses seem reliable" to "I assent to what they say."

The Dawkins formulation — that faith means believing without evidence — is not a description of what religious people do. It is a definition rigged to make the conclusion automatic. Substitute the actual definition (assent on the basis of testimony) and the supposed gulf between faith and reason narrows to nothing.

C.S. Lewis · Answer

Faith is holding on to what your reason has accepted, against changing moods.

I want to distinguish two things that are often confused. There is faith in the sense of arriving at a belief, and faith in the sense of sticking with a belief once arrived at. The first is the work of evidence and reason; the second is the work of will and habit. The atheist's caricature confuses them deliberately.

When I am cheerful and well-rested, the case for Christianity seems obvious. When I am frightened, exhausted, or in love with the wrong person, the same case looks thin. This is not because the evidence has changed; it is because I have. Faith, in the second sense, is the discipline of holding to what I concluded in my best moments when I am no longer in my best moments. Every serious belief — scientific, moral, personal — requires this. The scientist who abandons his theory the first time the data look wobbly is not a better scientist than the one who holds on while checking his work.

The atheist who imagines that his unbelief requires no such discipline has not examined his own moods. He, too, holds his views against the pull of contrary feeling. He simply does not call it faith.

Faith is the abdication of reason.

The objection, in full

Faith is assent to truth on the authority of a trustworthy witness.

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