Mark Jones at his blog
"Good Grief, Linus" has written a reasonable response to Monsignor Roderick Strange's
Times article published on the 17th april, with the conclusion that faith is a contradiction and so irrational. If the monsignor is correct then Mark has a point. Here is my response to that.
It seems to me that most Christians don't really know what faith is: they think of it as some mysterious gift of God that magically gives belief, or perhaps think it is a word meaning ‘religious belief’. Some think of it as a movement of will to belief: a decision to believe. Some even think it is possible to have faith and doubt; President Barack Obama among them.
This confusion among Christians is understandable since even the agents of authority based denominations, like Catholics, often don't teach the meaning of faith with any clarity. For example it's no good responding, as a bishop did recently, with
Hebrews 11:1 since it doesn't actually define faith.
Lacking a simple definition of faith non-religious definitions have gained currency even among Christians, for example "Belief without knowledge" or Dawkins favoured definition "Belief without evidence". These are simple and appealing definitions and seem to make sense in consideration of the lack of Christian's concrete evidence for the existence of a god. Considering the amount of nonsense ill-educated Christians tell people Dawkins cannot be blamed for his preferred definition of faith even though it's not Christian.
The problem is made worse still by the bible exhortation to “always have a ready answer”, and the ill-educated Christian's response to that. Most Christians ready answer should be “I don’t really know”, with perhaps the offer of a speculation since in the main that is as much as they can do. Instead they give waffly made-up guff as gospel truth and useless bible quotes. I feel sure Mark Jones has noticed. I’ve done it myself in my youth and still find it something of a self-discipline to say “I don’t know”.
And here we come to Monsignor Roderick Strange. Some, who should know better, are propagating these non-christian definitions in direct contradiction of their own Church's :
Roderick Strange's Times UK
article is a screaming piece of heresy. His own church officially and explicitly teaches the opposite of what he is saying. That fellow is/was in charge of a college teaching future catholic priests. Astonishing really.
Religious faith is properly defined as :
“Assent and adherence to divinely revealed truth”
Catholic Catechism Section 1, Article II, para 150.
In direct contradiciton of the Monsignor paragraph 157 adds "Faith is
certain", not my emphasis.
In other words it is not an act of belief: rather it is the free-will act of conforming to what has been proven (the proof being the source of certainty). Divinely revealed means proven. The person naturally believes what is proven if the mind and will are healthy and unbiased but conformity to the revelation is left to freewill.
"Divinely revealed truth” doesn’t of itself address the necessity for that proof to be objective. The film
The Matrix is a nice illustration of the problem of objective knowledge, and also the atheist’s “Voices in the head” objection to rational religious belief. However, assuming for the sake of argument that there is such a thing as objective proof even in the face of insanity……
The definition of faith assumes that the proof is objective since a god would theoretically have the ability to give objective proof. The ‘faith’ bit is not about belief but about “assent” which is in keeping with the pre-religious meaning of ‘faith’: to be loyal/steadfast (keeping faith with). [One can also speculate that a person might dissent even from a god’s proof, but I won’t go in to that.]
So to summarise: faith is about freewill not belief.
All this nonsense about faith not being required if there is proof, a la Monsignor in that quoted article above, is just that: nonsense. It is a confusion of faith with the word belief and then the use of non-christian definition of faith ‘belief without evidence’ to scramble everyone’s brains, and this direct from an educated Christian?!?!?! Dawkins may as well not bother. Disregarding the issue of whether a god actually exists or not: historically Christian belief is supposed to be based on proof. Even the ancients understood that the god reveals itself.
There is also the confusion caused by the common perception that Christian proof is to be found in the Bible. It is not!!! It is found in the word of God, sometimes delivered through the Bible and sometimes through a person, as witnessed by God himself. It is God's witness to the words that give the proof, not the words themselves. Of course the Bible is unable to prove itself.
A half-baked Christian can blabber on about God all he likes but unless he does it with the help of God's Holy Spirit nothing much will happen. The Bible (or the person) is an instrument for God's power, but it is God that completes the witness. Equally if the bible is read with a view to finding contradictions you can be sure that there won't be much witnessing going on.
So then what about some awkward doubting Christians, for example Mother Theresa, Padre Pio (now Saint Pio), Saint Theresa of Lisieux and Mark Jones's Christian buddies? In the first place there is a distinction between temptation to doubt and actual doubt, a distinction monsignor Roderick Strange doesn’t seem to know about. The experience of temptation to doubt is not dissimilar to actual doubt. In the end, however, the tempted person may say to themselves “yet somehow I know that God exists even despite these seemingly reasonable objections”.
In the second place perhaps some of these saints did actually doubt, in which case they lost the faith since belief (which has the quality of certainty) and doubt are mutually exclusive, and faith presupposes belief. However since they ended up as declared saints a Catholic assumes that they must have been restored to belief and faith at some point because canonisation is an infallible pronouncement as far as a Catholic is concerned. Mother Theresa is not yet canonised and though being a fan I have doubts about whether she ever will be since it is most unclear that she ‘made it’: that bogus 'miracle' is a bad omen and her diaries are quite disturbing.
Mark Jones's doubting Christian buddies, to whom he refers in his blog, may very well not actually have the faith but it’s difficult to tell in any case. Certainly if they are wilfully breaking Christian laws - fornication etc - then they cannot have objective proof; though they could still have what St Paul refers to as ‘dead faith’ which does not include objective proof only the subjective ‘proof’ of the senses and mind. Since all evidence is dependent on the human purveyor it is a good exercise to examine or test the integrity of the ‘witness’.
As an aside scientific evidence often falls at that hurdle also: there are lots of biased, self-deceiving (often due to pride or pride’s child: avoidance of shame) or fiscally compromised scientists that even peer review and consensus can’t defeat; after all even scientists dabble in political manipulations. Dawkins scientific 'evidence' is as dependent on human witness as the Faiths, which is why it is adequate to point to the existence of religious believers as evidence of a god (but not as proof, of course). Dawkins "not a shred of evidence" is slightly incorrect.
Science as a golden standard of truth is just simple-minded nonsense that ignores a tall heap of philosophical objections not the least of which is the problem of insanity: it's impossible to know that one is sane or even that one isn't hallucinating a whole ‘human’ life while being locked up in a jellyfish loony bin because one is in fact a mad jellyfish (this is to ignore the difficulty that jellyfish don’t have brains).
Excepting the hypothetical existence of a god I think it’s unlikely that there is any such thing as a fact despite the tortured twistings of modern epistemology (philosophy of knowledge for the unwary reader). I reckon a nearer golden standard of truth is personal integrity, but even if Dawkins’ integrity is spotless I still can’t tell that he actually exists and isn’t just a figment of my brainless jellyfish mind.
Anyway, with all that I hope you can see that among the many objections to religion the proper definition of faith is not itself irrational, nor is religious belief defined as something irrational. Kierkegaard's
'Leap to Faith' and Pascal's
wager may have confused just about everyone with their silly ideas, but the authentic definition of faith is just fine irrespective of whether or not a god exists.
[A detail I have ommited is the mechanism of objective proof. However since I don't know that the dear reader is a genuine seeker of truth I am not about to cast what I believe to be a pearl before what may be swine. The genuine seeker of truth should study what it means to be baptised if they really want to know.]
