Biblical Faith and Reason
Oil painting of a young John Calvin. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Mark Twain quipped, “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.” Closer to our own day, the atheist author Sam Harris defined faith as “the license religious people give themselves to keep believing when reasons fail.” Richard Dawkins , perhaps the most famous atheist of our generation, claims: “Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.” The one thing all of these definitions have in common is the explicit or implicit idea that faith is in conflict with reason. Unfortunately, some Christians in the history of the church have said things that have provided support for this view of the relationship between faith and reason. Martin Luther , for example, made very strong negative statements about reason, many of which are quoted by skeptics in their attempts to prove that Christianity is inher