Is Faith Rational?

Christopher Preston

Is belief in God rational? Is there really any evidence

for God at all? The age-old conflict between faith and

reason roars on stronger than ever today. This paper will

argue that a belief in the existence of God is indeed a

rationally justified and warranted position that is based on

the available evidence. First, a brief explanation will be

presented of the differences between philosophical and

biblical understandings of the essential term, “faith.” The

bulk of the paper will then explore three classical

arguments for the existence of God – the cosmological

argument, the design argument, and the moral argument – and

critique several objections to each.

Biblical faith is a concept that is often misunderstood,

even in traditional Christian circles. Biblical faith is not

the same as the philosophical concept of faith. It is not

what most people would think of as faith. For this reason, I

do not like using the term. However, because it is an

important concept, a necessary aspect of any religious

worldview, and a grammatical habit of my own background, I

would like to clarify what biblical faith really is.

A general philosophical understanding of faith is that

faith is belief not based on logical proof or material

evidence; a belief without sufficient evidence, or even

despite evidence which points to the contrary. It is with

this definition that scholars contest that it is

intellectually dishonest, and even immoral, to act on faith.

Using that definition, I must agree. As William K. Clifford

pointed out, the ship-owner who allows his ship to embark

without performing all the essential safety procedures

because he believed on faith that the ship was safe and ready

to perform its duty, has executed an intellectually

dishonest and even immoral act (Sullivan, 10/11/10).

Christians often make the argument that by faith we

believe that the sun will rise each morning. From a

philosophical standpoint, I would disagree with this

statement. Faith, philosophically, is belief that flies in

the face of reason. It goes against the available evidence.

It is obvious then why belief in the sunrise is not a belief

by faith. Thousands of years throughout which the sun has

never failed to rise, and even our own few years of

experiencing the consistent sunrise, give us sufficient

reason to believe, based on the evidence available, that the

sun will indeed rise tomorrow morning.

This trust, or assurance, in the sun’s consistency is

an example of what philosophical faith is not. It is also an

example of what biblical faith is. Many people, Christians

and non-Christians alike, believe that the Judeo-Christian

God must not care if we have any evidence for his existence.

They think that the ancient Jews and early Christians were

ignorant primitives who believed in God with blind faith,

never feeling the need to question any of the truths they so

readily accepted. In fact, The Jews were a very tangibly-

minded people, wanting things to be understood

experientially and proven empirically (Lennox, 5). The

Apostle Paul understood this, and voices it when he says,

“For the Jews demand signs, and the Greeks seek wisdom” (1

Corinthians 1:22, ESV). All the early church leaders

understood the importance of sufficient evidence in order

for a belief to have true warrant. At that time, there was

no harder evidence, nor a more scientific, rational warrant

for belief than that of eyewitnesses. John, a close friend

and disciple of Jesus writes, “The man who saw it has given

testimony… and he testifies so that you also may believe”

(John 19:35, ESV). In a later letter, John also writes:

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life – the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us – thatwhich we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ (1 John 1:1-3, ESV).

Paul defends the legitimacy of what was being taught about

Jesus by saying,

He appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom arestill living, though some have fallen asleep. Thenhe appeared to James, then to all the apostles,

and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born (1 Corinthians 15:5-8 ESV).

Peter, an eyewitness of almost all of Jesus’ activities

during his ministry, clearly expresses the importance of

rational evidence, “For we did not follow cleverly devised

myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our

Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty”

(2 Peter 2:16, ESV). For the early church leaders, hard

evidence was a necessary prerequisite to distinguish real

faith from credulity (Lennox). The early church leaders

clearly understood the significance of hard evidence. But do

we, in the twenty-first century, really have any evidence to

warrant a rational belief in God? The following three

classical arguments effectively provide evidence for the

existence of God.

It is first important to note that many philosophers and

theologians who argue for the existence of God understand

that his existence, and existence alone, is what these

arguments can conclude. Objectors to the classical arguments

for God are justified in pointing out that the arguments

fall far short of proving a God with all the attributes of

traditional monotheism, say, omnibenevolence or

omnipresence. But what atheists, and other objectors to

these arguments, must also understand is that this does not

undermine the validity of such arguments, nor does it change

the plausibility structure of what these arguments are

really giving evidence for – the existence for a supreme

Creator who intelligently created the universe with life in

mind – nothing more, nothing less.

Another point to note is that it should not be assumed

that any one particular argument is meant to prove God’s

existence.

Few philosophers today would view a single argument for God’s reality as a proof. This is partly because of recognition that even good philosophical arguments rarely amount to a proof, and partly because of recognition of the complexity of belief in God. “Theism” does not refer to a single proposition but a complex web ofassertions about God’s reality, character, and relations with the universe. It is unreasonable tothink that a single argument could establish such a complicated theoretical network. Rather, particular theistic arguments should be seen as providing a lesser or greater degree of support for the web as a whole only indirectly (Taliaferro, Draper, and L. 385).

A good way to describe the premise is a court analogy.

Isolated pieces of evidence may be insufficient on their own

to warrant convicting someone ‘beyond reasonable doubt,’ but

taken together the evidence may very well warrant

conviction. Likewise, one particular argument may not

provide proof for God’s existence, but put all the arguments

together, and the court may have to decide that God exists.

The first argument is the cosmological argument, one

version being called the first cause argument. This argument

takes the existence of the universe to entail the existence

of a being that created it. It does so based on the fact

that the universe had a beginning. There must, this argument

says, be something that caused that beginning, a first cause

of the universe (Sullivan 9/20/10). The universe consists of

a series of events stretched across time in a long causal

chain. Each event is the cause of the event that comes after

it, and simultaneously the effect of the event that comes

before it. The world as it is came from the world as it was,

which came from the world as it was before. If we trace this

series of events back in time, then what do we find? There

seems, at first glance, to be two possibilities: either we

eventually reach the first event in the series, the cause at

the beginning of the universe that set everything going, or

there is no first event in the series and the past stretches

back into infinity. The first cause argument posits that the

second of these is not possible, that the past cannot

stretch back into infinity but rather must have a beginning.

The argument then suggests that if the universe has a

beginning then there must be something outside it that

brought it into existence. This being outside the universe,

this creator, the first cause argument tells us, is God

(Sullivan, 9/13/10).

If I said that I had just counted down from infinity to

zero, and claimed that I had started with “infinity minus

zero” and counted down until I reached “infinity minus

infinity” (zero), then you would know that claim to be

false. Just as it is impossible to count up from zero to

infinity, so it is impossible to count down from infinity to

zero. If I could have really started counting down from

infinity and kept going, then I would still be counting to

this day; I could not have finished. This is because it is

impossible to traverse an infinite series. The idea that the

universe has an infinite past is just as problematic as the

idea that I have just counted down from infinity. If the

universe had an infinite past, then time would have had to

“count down” from infinity to reach “zero” – the present –

and thus would not have reached it. The fact that we have

reached the present seems to show that the past is not

infinite but finite. The claim that the universe had a

beginning has been confirmed by modern science; Even the

majority of atheistic scientists will not deny that the

universe had a beginning, which they trace back to a point

of origin in the ‘big bang’.

So the past cannot go back forever; the universe must

have a beginning. The next question is whether something

caused this beginning, or whether the universe just popped

into existence out of nothing. However, it is common

knowledge (in the intellectual realm at least) that nothing

that begins to exist does so without a cause; nothing comes

from nothing. For any thing to come into existence there

must be something else that already exists that can bring it

into existence. The fact that the universe began to exist

implies that something brought it into existence, that the

universe has an ultimate “causer” (McGrath, 20).

If this creator were a being like the universe, a being

that exists in time (and therefore came into existence),

then it too would have to have been created by something.

Nothing comes from nothing, not even God. This tells us that

the ultimate cause of the universe must have never come into

existence; the ultimate creator must be a being that exists

outside of time, an eternal being with neither beginning nor

end.

Critics of the first cause argument often try to rebut it

by asking a question: Who created God? This question is

supposed to present the theist with a serious dilemma. If

the theist concedes that God does have a creator, then is it

not God’s creator that we should be worshipping rather than

God? And who created God’s creator? The danger looms of an

infinite regress of creators, each postulated in order to

explain the existence of that subsequent to it. If there is

an infinite regress of creators, though, then there is no

first creator, no ultimate cause of the universe, no God.

Perhaps, then, the theist should maintain that God does not

have a creator, that he is an uncaused cause. If uncaused

existence is possible, though, then there is no need to

postulate a God that created the universe; if uncaused

existence is possible, then the universe could be uncaused.

However the theist answers the question of who created God,

then, what he says will undermine the cosmological argument,

and he would be forced to abandon it. So, at least, runs

this objection to the argument (McGrath 32).

However, this objection is far less powerful than it

first appears. In fact, it rests on a simple

misunderstanding of the first cause argument. If the first

cause argument was that everything has a cause, and that the

universe therefore has a cause, and therefore that God

exists, then the question “Who created God?” would indeed

present the theist with a grave dilemma. But that is not the

argument. The first cause argument is the argument that

everything that has a beginning of its existence has a cause,

that the universe has a beginning of its existence, and that

the universe therefore has a cause of its existence. The

theist can therefore confidently answer the question of who

created God with, "No one created God", without fear of

compromising the first cause argument. The theist’s position

is that everything that begins to exist has a cause of its

existence. If something comes into existence, then there

must be something else able to bring it into existence.

Nothing comes out of nothing – not even God. God, though,

unlike the universe, did not begin to exist. God is eternal.

He exists outside of time, and has neither beginning nor

end. The theist can therefore posit that uncaused existence

is possible in the case of God, without being forced to say

that uncaused existence is possible in the case of the

universe. God and the universe are two entirely different

sorts of things (McGrath, 35).

The cosmological argument is an argument from the mere

fact that a temporal universe exists to the existence of an

eternal creator of it. The next argument, the argument from

design, takes a much more detailed look at the universe in

search of evidence for God’s existence.

The argument from design focuses on the fact that the

universe is fit for human habitation. There are many ways

that the universe might have been – it might have had

different laws of physics; it might have had a different

arrangement of planets and stars; it might have begun with a

bigger or a smaller big bang – and the vast majority of

these universes would not have allowed for the existence of

life. We are very fortunate indeed to have a universe that

does.

Assume that modern science is correct in saying that

the universe began with a big bang, that the universe came

into existence with an explosion that sent pieces of matter

flying in all directions at an enormous rate. The big bang

might have been other than it was; it might have involved

more or less matter, or have involved a larger or a smaller

explosion, for example. That the big bang occurred as it did

was crucial for the development of life, because the rate of

expansion of the universe, i.e. the speed at which the

pieces of matter flew apart, had to fall within certain

limits if life was to develop. Had the rate of expansion

been too slow, then gravity would have pulled all of the

matter back together again in a big crunch; there would not

have been enough time for life to emerge. Had the rate of

expansion been too fast, then gravity would not have had a

chance to pull any of the pieces of matter together, and

planets, stars and even gases wouldn’t have been able to

form; there wouldn’t have been anything for life to emerge

on. The rate of expansion which actually occurred, of

course, was just right to allow life to develop; if it were

not then we would not be here now.

That this was the case, though, was either an

extraordinary fluke, or was intended by the big bang’s

Creator. It is highly unlikely that a random big bang would

be such as to allow life to develop, and therefore highly

unlikely that a big bang happened at random from which our

universe was formed. The fact that the universe is fit for

life requires explanation, and an appeal to chance is no

explanation at all. It is far more likely that the universe

was initiated by a being that intended to create a universe

that could support life. The fine-tuning of the universe for

life can only be explained with reference to a Creator, as

the result of intelligent design (McGrath, 37). This

argument strongly suggests that the universe clearly

exhibits the marks of intelligent design – that the universe

was created the way it was deliberately, for the purpose of

life.

The argument from design and the cosmological argument

conclude that God exists, and that he created the universe

with life in mind. They do not, however, tell us much about

how we ought to respond. This brings us to the moral

argument.

The moral argument appeals to the existence of moral

laws as evidence of God’s existence. According to this

argument, there could not be such a thing as morality

without God. To use the words that Sartre attributed to

Dostoyevsky, “If there is no God, then everything is

permissible.” That there are moral laws – that not

everything is permissible – provides us with strong evidence

that an ultimate moral being, presumably God, exists.

Some facts are facts about the way the world is. It is

a fact that cats eat mice because there are a lot of cats in

the world, and a lot of them eat mice. It is a fact that

Dublin is the capital of Ireland because there exists a city

called Dublin that is the capital of Ireland. For most

facts, there are objects in the world that make them true.

Moral facts are not like that. The fact that we ought to do

something about the problem of famine is not a fact about

the way that the world is, it’s a fact about the way that

the world ought to be. There is nothing out there in the

physical world that makes moral facts true. This is because

moral facts are not descriptive, they are prescriptive;

moral facts have the form of commands (McGrath, 45).

There are some things that can not exist unless

something else exists along with them. There can not be

something that is being carried unless there is something

else that is carrying it. There can not be something that is

popular unless there are lots of people that like it. The

moral argument seeks to utilize this fact. If moral facts

are a kind of command, then who commanded morality? Or, to

put it differently, if there is such a thing as a moral law,

there must be a moral law giver – so who is this law-giver?

To answer this question, it is useful to examine the

significance of morality.

Morality is of over-riding importance. If someone

morally ought to do something, then this over-rules any

other consideration that might come into play. It might be

in my best interest to not take the time to stop and help

someone who’s been hurt, but morally I ought to – so all

things considered, I ought to. If someone has one reason

action (a), but morally ought to do action (b), then all

things considered, he ought to do action (b). Morality over-

rules everything. Morality has the ultimate authority.

Commands, though, are only as authoritative as the

person that commands them. If I were to command everyone to

pay extra tax so that we could better fund the police force,

then no one would have to do so. I just don’t have the

authority to issue that command. If the government were to

command everyone to pay extra tax so that we could spend

more money on the police force though, then that would be

different, because the government does have that authority.

As morality has more authority than any human person or

institution, the moral argument posits, morality can not

have been commanded by any human person or institution.

Since morality has ultimate authority, morality must have

been commanded by someone who has authority over everything.

The existence of morality thus points us to a being that is

greater than any of us and that rules over all creation

(McGrath, 48).

One attempt to refute the moral argument suggests that

a naturalistic explanation of morality can be given by the

theory of evolution. Given a world in which the resources

necessary to support life are scarce and danger is all

around us, people will have to compete to survive. Those

that compete well will survive and reproduce more people

like themselves; those that compete poorly will disappear.

Groups of people that “play by the rules” are more likely to

survive and reproduce than are groups of people that do not.

Natural selection, then, will favor those forms of behavior

that we call moral, because they have survival value. Over

time, this process will lead to a moral instinct in human

beings, a natural inclination to act “morally upright.”

However plausible this explanation may be for some

elements of morality, there are other elements of morality

that cannot be explained in this way. Altruistic behavior,

by definition, is not in one’s own interest. The extreme of

altruism – giving up one’s life so that others might live –

cannot be the result of conditioning through natural

selection. Those who give up their lives for others are

eliminated from the gene pool. This sort of extreme self-

sacrifice is a trait that natural selection not only does

not encourage, but should even eliminate from society. The

selfish are more likely to survive and reproduce than are

the selfless. Even the foremost advocate of evolutionary

theory, Richard Dawkins, recognizes this. In The Selfish Gene,

he writes:

My own feeling is that a human society based simplyon the gene’s law of universal ruthless selfishnesswould be a very nasty society in which to live. Butunfortunately, however much we may deplore something, it does not stop it being true... Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish (Dawkins 3).

Furthermore, even if it were possible to explain our

moral instincts using evolution, this would not explain

morality as much as explain those instincts away. We tend to

believe that we are subject to moral obligations – that we

ought to act in certain ways. An evolutionary explanation of

those beliefs would entirely undermine them; it would tell

us why we have those beliefs but it would give us no reason

to think that they are true. In fact, it would do the

opposite; it would explain why we have those beliefs even

though there is no such thing as morality. If we believe

that there really are moral principles that bind us and

other people, then this appeal to evolution will not satisfy

us.

It is not often disputed that there is some sort of

objective morality by which humans are obligated to live by.

Even Friedrich Nietzsche, the renowned atheistic philosopher

who built his thinking on a philosophy of moral destitution

and despair, recognized the significance of God in any

discussion of the presence of a moral law. But think of what

happens when God is removed from the equation. Nietzsche

spent much of his life tracing out the implications of how

life would be if there really were no God. In his parable of

the madman, he uses somewhat stunning language to portray

the desperate condition of a world in which the notion of

God has been carved out of existence.

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: “I am lookingfor God! I am looking for God!” As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around there, he excited considerable laughter.

“Have you lost Him then?” said one.“Did he lose his way like a child?” asked

another.“Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us?”“Has he gone on a voyage or emigrated?”

Thus they shouted and shouted and laughed him to scorn. But the madman sprang into their midst and pierced them with his glances.

“Where is God?” he cried; “I’ll tell you. We have killed him -- you and I.

We are all his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us a sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns maybe? Are we not perpetually falling – backwards and forwards, sidewards and in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not more

and more night coming on us all the time? Must notlanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God’s decomposition? God’s decomposed too you know, and God is dead. He remains dead, and we have killed him.

“Now, how shall we, the murderer of all murderers compose ourselves? That which was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has ever possessed has bled to death under our knives:who will wipe away this blood from us? With what water can we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not this, the greatest of deeds, too great for us to handle? Must not we ourselves become god simply to seem worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed, you know; and whoever shall be born after us for the sake of this deed shall be part of a higher history than all historyhitherto.”

Here the madman fell silent and again regarded his listeners; they, too, were silent andthey stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern to the ground, and it broke and went out.

“I come too early. My time is not yet come. This tremendous event is still on its way – still traveling – and it has not yet reached the ears ofmen. Lightning and thunder require time; the lightof the stars requires time; deeds require time even after they have been done before they can be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the distant stars -- and yet they have done it themselves.”

It has been related further that on the same day this madman entered diverse churches, and there sang Requiem Aeternam Deo. Led out and quieted, he is said to have retorted each time: “What are these churches now if they are not the

tombs and sepulchers of a dead God? We have killedHim.” (Nietzsche 1, 120)

Without God, life is void of course or purpose. What

Nietzsche really is saying is that if we do away with the

idea of God, we do away with morality, direction, purpose,

and meaning to life itself. Nietzsche chided many of his

contemporaries who were ready to accept the termination of

the Christian God but unwilling to give up on objective

morality (Linville, 5). Nietzsche reprimanded them numerous

times, insisting, “When one gives up the Christian faith,

one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under

one's feet” (Nietzsche 2, 515).

Sartre, a philosopher born just a few years after

Nietzsche’s death, agreed with Nietzsche’s assessment, but

in contrast to Nietzsche’s optimism about the implications

of a Godless society, Sartre found them disturbing and

distressing. Sartre explains,

The existentialist thinks it very distressingthat God does not exist, because all possibility of finding values in a heaven of ideas disappears along with Him; there can no longer be a priori Good, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. Nowhere is it written that the Good exists, that we must be honest, thatwe must not lie; because the fact is that we are on a plane where there are only men (Sartre 22).

Sartre believed with Nietzsche that if we take God the

Father out of the equation, then someone else must have

formulated morality; and who is left but humans? The dilemma

that Nietzsche, Sartre and others have continually arrived

at is that if there is no God who has given us moral

commands, there really is no morality at all (Linville 5).

The argument from morality asks, since we do see an

objective moral law, what conclusion are we then left to

make? The existence of a moral law points strongly toward

the existence of a moral law giver. And, to use Humian

language – this being, we call God. The specific identity of

that God is up for further debate, but the moral argument

credibly illustrates that the existence of a supreme moral

being certainly is evident.

The moral argument provides strong support for the

existence of an author of morality, of a being that has

authority over and actively rules over all creation. Taken

with the cosmological argument and the argument from design,

this case for a Creator provides us with strong evidence

that there is a perfect, necessary, and eternal being that

created the universe with life in mind and has the authority

to tell us how then we shall live.

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Zacharias International Ministries. Wycliffe Hall, Oxford,

England. 2007. Lecture.

Linville, Mark D. Is Everything Permitted? Moral Values

in a World Without God. Ravi Zacharias International

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McGrath, Alister. "The Existence of God." Ravi

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England. 2007. Lecture.

Nietzsche (1), Friedrich. The Gay Science: With a

Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. New York:

Vintage, 1974. Print.

Nietzsche (2), Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols. The

Portable Nietzsche ed. Walter Kaufman. New York. 1976.

Print.

Sartre, Jean Paul. Existentialism and Human Emotions.

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Sullivan, Stephen. “Religion and Theism.” Edinboro

University of Pennsylvania. Hendricks Hall, Edinboro, PA.

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Taliaferro, Charles, Paul Draper, and Philip L. A

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