Faith is, in fact, an intellectual impediment itself.
Faith is belief in something that cannot be justified intellectually. If a belief has some kind of intellectual, evidential, or other justification, then it isnt “faith” anymore.
For some reason, atheists have a handicap when it comes to defining faith. Somehow, they can never get it right. For instance, Derek Sansone stated in one of his recent posts “If you have faith (not certainty) that yours it the right hypotheses, then you also have faith (no certainty) that all others are wrong.” He defines it incorrectly as well.
Some Christians are partly to blame. Some Christians don’t know the accurate definition of faith, and therefore use the term incorrectly. Ever witnessed a Christian who, after being unable to defend his beliefs, simply responded with the statement “Well, it takes faith anyway!”? The statement is made as if faith is the excuse to become intellectually defenseless concerning your worldview. But Christians use it incorrectly in other manners as well. Atheists, have you ever been told that you “rely on your worldview by faith”? What is meant is that you do not have intellectual justification for your beliefs (which, of course, I believe you do not). But that doesn’t mean that unbelievers have too much of a good thing (faith). Faith, Biblically speaking, is never used in this negative sense. It’s never used in a manner to describe a bad thing (that is, unless it concerns spurious faith, but then it is modified by a negative adjective: “false faith,” “spurious faith,” “that kind of faith”).
What, then, is the definition of faith? I hope we haven’t already forgotten this oft-quoted famous verse:
Hebrews 11:1 Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
The object of faith, therefore, is unseen, not unknown. The whole point of Hebrews 11 is not that the main characters of redemptive history put their faith in a God that they did not know, but in a God that they did not see. I mean, who’s listed? Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, etc. Many of these were people who are described as speaking directly with God, and Moses more so than anyone else. It is obvious, therefore, that Hebrews 11 is not highlighting their uncertainty or what they did not know. What is it highlighting, then? Well, the first verse tells us that faith involves hope in the realm of the unseen. It takes faith to believe in God, not because we are not certain he exists or cannot defend his existence intellectually, but because we do not see him. God is an immaterial being; he cannot be experimented on empirically. Furthermore, his promises have yet to come to full effect, so that we see them as a present reality. The Bible sets up this “already/not yet” tension, where God has already accomplished his promises, but many are yet to be a visible reality. The Hebrews 11 chapter concludes of those in the hall of faith:
Hebrews 11:39-40 And all these, though commended through their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better for us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect.
These great characters in the story of redemption needed faith in order to accomplish what they did, not because they did not know God or could not defend him intellectually, but because they did not see him and had yet to see the visible reality of the fulfillment of God’s promises. Faith takes hope. The object of hope is naturally unseen:
Romans 8:24 For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.
The Scriptures, however, never use the term “faith” the way that Aaron Kinney and his apostate friends do.
Faith: Knowledge by description.
ReplyDeleteSight: Knowledge by experience.
It's really that simple. You have to assert that Christianity teaches some sort of "leap" to hold Kinney's defintion of faith. All he's done is borrow from Kant, so he's imputed a definition of faith we don't recognize and then chastised us for failing to measure up as some sort of internal critique.