What Do We Mean by “Faith”?

Leap of Faith

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen…. By faith we understand that the world was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was made out of things which do not appear.”

Hebrews 11:1–3

Few words have been more confidently misdescribed than the word “faith.” In the mouths of its critics it has become a synonym for credulity — believing things without evidence, or believing them harder because there is no evidence. Faith, one popular writer declares, is “blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence.” Stated that way, faith is plainly a vice — and whether anyone actually holds it that way is the first question this page asks.

Two definitions are in contest here. The skeptic’s: belief without evidence, held despite evidence. The Catholic and biblical one: reasonable trust — the free assent of the whole person to a God who has shown Himself worthy of it, the sense the Greek word pistis itself carries. Which definition describes what believers actually do, and whether faith so defined is the enemy of reason or its completion, is the argument of the panels below. The Atheist/Skeptic View states the charge in its strongest form, Clifford’s; the Catholic View answers it.

I invite your engagement with me on these questions. You may leave comments below, but please be sure to read our policy on commenting before doing so.

Atheist/Skeptic View

Jump to the Catholic View ↓

The skeptic’s complaint is not that the Christian happens to believe something false. Anyone can be wrong. It is that faith, as the skeptic defines it, is a method for arriving at beliefs which cannot tell a true one from a false one — and that a method with that defect is worthless whatever it happens to produce.

The objection begins with a definition, and nearly everything else follows from it. Faith, on this account, is belief not proportioned to evidence. Where the evidence is good, faith adds nothing, since the evidence settles the matter on its own; faith is called for precisely where evidence runs short, and the less there is of it, the more faith is required. Richard Dawkins put this without softening: faith is “the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence,” and it is “belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.”1 On the same account it is “blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence,” and comes near enough to a “form of mental illness.”2

The charge is moral, not merely intellectual. Its serious form is older than the New Atheists and belongs to W. K. Clifford. A shipowner is about to send an emigrant ship to sea. He knows she is old and not well built. Doubts trouble him; he puts them down, reflects that she has made many voyages and come safely home, and arrives at “a sincere and comfortable conviction” that she is sound. He watches her sail with a light heart. She goes down in mid-ocean, and he collects the insurance. Clifford’s verdict is that the man is a murderer, and that the sincerity of the conviction aggravates the offense rather than excusing it: he “had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him,” having got his belief “not by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts.”3

“It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”

On Clifford’s view the verdict does not turn on the outcome. Had the ship come safely home, the owner would have been no less guilty; he would only have escaped detection. What is wrong, for Clifford, is the believing itself, not the result.

The reply that everyone lives by faith trades, the skeptic says, on an equivocation. The believer answers that trust runs through ordinary life: the chair, the friend, the airline pilot. But that trust, the skeptic responds, is inductive — proportioned to a record, and revised the moment the record changes. Nobody would praise the faith of a man who kept sitting down on a chair that had twice collapsed under him. Religious faith, he argues, is commended in the opposite direction: the less it rests on, the more admirable it is held to be, and the believer who keeps it through evidence against it is the one held up as an example. Trust that answers to evidence and trust praised for not answering to it are, on this view, two different things.4

Nothing is allowed to count against it. Antony Flew put the question that has never been well answered: “What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or of the existence of, God?” Prayers granted show His kindness; prayers refused show His wisdom; prayers met with silence show that His ways are not ours. The child recovers and God is thanked; the child dies and God is trusted. A claim compatible with every possible state of the world, Flew argued, rules nothing out, and so says nothing about the world. Flew’s parable ends with a gardener refined by his defender until he is invisible, intangible and eternally elusive, and with the question of how such a gardener differs from no gardener at all. “A fine brash hypothesis may thus be killed by inches, the death by a thousand qualifications.”5

The skeptic finds the same picture in the believer’s own texts. Hebrews defines faith as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1) — the assurance arriving first, and the seeing being exactly what is absent. When Thomas asked for the evidence the other disciples had already been given, he was not commended for it; the blessing fell on those who have not seen and yet believe (John 20:29). Whatever theologians have since made of the word, the skeptic reads the texts themselves as praising belief on less.

A belief that appears where it is wanted is explained by the wanting. Faith gathers at deathbeds, in prisons, in poverty and in fear, and thins where life is secure. Freud drew the obvious inference: religious teachings “are not precipitates of experience or end-results of thinking: they are illusions, fulfilments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind.”6 The believer, on this account, wants a father who does not die, a justice that arrives late but arrives, and a reason for the loss he could not otherwise carry. For Freud that is a complete account of why he believes, and it does not require the belief to be true.

And the belief tracks the map rather than the evidence. Whatever reasons a person gives, the best predictor of which God he worships is where he happened to be born. Mill saw it plainly: “the same causes which make him a Churchman in London, would have made him a Buddhist or a Confucian in Pekin.”7 Christianity is dense where Christian missionaries reached and thin where they did not; the distribution follows trade routes and empires, which the skeptic takes as the mark of an inheritance rather than a discovery. John Loftus builds the modern form of the argument on two facts taken together: that the faiths are many and mutually exclusive, and that which one a person holds is predicted by the accident of his birth. From them he draws a test. Examine your own faith with exactly the skepticism you already bring to the others, since you dismiss every rival creed for want of evidence and then stop one short of your own.8

The claim, as Loftus frames it, is not that a belief is false because of how it was acquired, which would settle nothing. It is that a process which would have delivered the opposite conviction at another latitude is not a process that tracks truth, and that a man who knows this about his own believing has been given a reason to distrust it.

Faith, the harsher critics conclude, is superstition with better manners. Both, they argue, hold that the unseen can be reached by the right words said in the right posture, and the difference between them is chiefly one of respectability. A conviction that cannot be corrected by evidence, the argument continues, can be corrected only by force, and the crusade, the inquisition, the pogrom and the sectarian war were not the work of people whose faith was weak. Faith held up as a virtue, on this view, removes the one instrument by which a bad belief might have been put right.

What the skeptic asks of the believer is not that he prove God, which the skeptic grants he cannot do. It is smaller than that: to say plainly what would count against what he believes, and then go and look to see whether it is so. Until he does, the skeptic concludes, he is holding not a belief about the world but a preference.

Endnotes
  1. Richard Dawkins, lecture at the Edinburgh International Science Festival, 15 April 1992, quoted in “A scientist’s case against God,” The Independent (London), 20 April 1992, 17. The lines are frequently misattributed to The God Delusion, published fourteen years later. ↩
  2. Both phrases are Dawkins’s, quoted and criticized in Alister McGrath, “There is nothing blind about faith” (2011). The “blind trust” definition traces to The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976) and recurs in the later books; both phrases are given here in the wording in which they circulate. ↩
  3. W. K. Clifford, “The Ethics of Belief,” Contemporary Review 29 (1877), reprinted in Lectures and Essays (London: Macmillan, 1879). The shipowner opens the essay; the sentence quoted above is Clifford’s own summary of its rule. ↩
  4. This is the standard rejoinder to the reply that everyone already lives by faith. Ordinary trust is proportioned to a track record and abandoned when the record turns against it, which is precisely what religious faith is praised for not doing; so the two are held to be different in kind rather than in degree. ↩
  5. Antony Flew, “Theology and Falsification,” in New Essays in Philosophical Theology, ed. Antony Flew and Alasdair MacIntyre (London: SCM Press, 1955). The parable of the invisible gardener is developed from one told by John Wisdom in “Gods.” Flew later abandoned atheism, but the challenge is still the one most often pressed. ↩
  6. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (1927), James Strachey translation. The wish-fulfillment account is the ancestor of the modern charge that faith is a crutch. ↩
  7. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859), ch. 2. Mill is arguing about opinion in general and reaches religion as his sharpest case; the spelling “Pekin” is his. ↩
  8. John W. Loftus, The Outsider Test for Faith: How to Know Which Religion Is True (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2013), which sets out the fact of religious diversity and the fact of religious dependency in its opening chapters and derives the test from the pair. The argument is summarized here rather than quoted. ↩

Catholic View

The Christian answer is that the faith being attacked is not the faith anyone actually holds. The classical Christian tradition — Augustine to Aquinas to the Catechism — has never defined faith as believing without evidence, still less as believing against it. Faith is a free assent of the mind, deepened into trust in a person, and answered in a faithful life, resting on grounds that are real though not compelling. That it runs past proof is not its peculiar vice but the ordinary condition of every thinking person, including the skeptic who denies it.

Where the Objection Fails

The case against faith rests on a small confusion, and once it is named the argument does not recover. The former atheist Alister McGrath put his finger on it: the slogan fails to distinguish between the total absence of supporting evidence and the absence of totally supporting evidence. A belief can rest on real evidence that still falls short of proof, and nearly everything anyone believes is exactly like that. The critic’s definition quietly assumes that evidence either compels or is absent altogether, with nothing in between. Almost nothing we know is like that.1

You Cannot Prove Everything, and No One Does

Behind the demand “why believe anything you cannot prove?” lies a misunderstanding of proof. A proof reasons from things already accepted to something that follows. So every proof needs a starting point it does not itself prove. Demand a proof for those premises and you need premises for that proof, and so on without end. An endless chain of proofs is impossible.2

This is not a religious trick; it is how thinking works. The rules of logic cannot be proved, because you must use them to prove anything at all. That the world outside my mind is real, that my memory is not a wholesale fabrication: no one proves these before breakfast, and everyone stakes a life on them. The honest question is never whether to accept what cannot be proved, but which, and on what grounds.

What Faith Actually Is

The word carries three strands, and most of the confusion comes from crushing them into one. First assent: to believe is, in Augustine’s phrase, to think with assent, a free judgment that something is true, free precisely because the evidence, though real, does not force the hand. Second trust: the New Testament word, pistis, means reliance, the entrusting of oneself; its verb is less “to hold an opinion” than “to entrust oneself.” Third faithfulness: the same biblical words mean steady loyalty, said above all of God, “the faithful God who keeps covenant” (Deut. 7:9). Human faith answers that prior faithfulness. Put the three together and faith is confident trust in what one has good reason to hold true: “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1).3

Everyone Already Lives This Way

Belief, in the everyday sense, is a readiness to act as though something were so. Nobody lowers himself onto a chair he does not trust; you believe the friend who telephones to say the house is on fire. Science runs on the same fuel — it reasons from what it has seen to laws it cannot finish checking, and rests on a confidence no experiment can establish: that the universe is orderly and that our minds can grasp it.4

And unbelief is no exception. To disbelieve is a readiness to act as though something were false — as Dallas Willard put it, not acting is acting — and the critic’s own rule, that only what reason and evidence establish may be accepted, cannot itself be established by reason or evidence. He trusts that his mind is reliable, that the world is orderly, that logic holds, none of which he can demonstrate without already using them.5 This does not make the unbeliever wrong, but it levels the ground: believer and skeptic alike live by trust that runs past proof, and both are answerable for where they place it.

Faith Is Not Superstition

Superstition is the belief that some object or action not really connected to an outcome can force it anyway: that the right words will make someone love you, that the right dance will bring rain. Its heart is control: perform the rite correctly and events, even heaven, bend to your will. Christian faith is the reverse. It does not attempt to control God but to rely on Him, and Scripture itself condemns the attempt to buy or command divine power (Acts 8; 19).6

There is an irony here that cuts the other way. Consider the familiar demand: let God give me a sign, and then I will believe. It sounds hard-headed, but it is superstition in a lab coat, assuming God is a mechanism obliged to perform on cue if the right challenge is issued. Superstition tries to control; faith is content to rely. It is the sign-on-demand, not the believer’s trust, that falls on the wrong side of that line.

Neither Blind nor Unfalsifiable

Nowhere does Scripture hold up faith as belief against evidence. Christ appealed constantly to evidence (to His works, to eyewitnesses, to what was written; John 10:37–38; 20:24–29) and He reasoned, by analogy, by exposing contradictions, by driving an opponent’s premise to absurdity. If the Lord Himself argued from evidence, His followers can hardly claim His authority for discarding it.7

Nor is the faith unfalsifiable, whatever is said of individual believers. It stakes itself on a historical claim and says so in as many words: “if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain … we are of all men most to be pitied” (1 Cor. 15:14–19). That is a falsification condition, stated by the faith about itself. A creed that names the evidence which would destroy it is not the sort of thing the objection describes.8

One concession is owed. Fideism — the view that faith needs no reasons and may even be prized for lacking them — is a real position, and some believers hold it; Tertullian is quoted for it (usually misquoted), and Kierkegaard came near it. But it is not the Catholic position, and the Church has said the opposite in council: the First Vatican Council taught that God “can be known with certainty from the created world by the natural light of human reason” (Dei Filius, ch. 2, quoted at CCC 36), and that faith and reason can never truly contradict each other. The critic who quotes Tertullian against the Church is quoting a man the Church declined to follow.

Clifford’s Shipowner, and Freud’s Wish

The shipowner deserves a direct verdict, and the Catholic verdict is: guilty as charged. The man had evidence — the ship’s age, her build, his own troubled doubts — and he smothered it because attending to it would cost him money. That is not faith; it is the vice Scripture calls hardening the heart, and a believer who keeps his belief by stifling honest doubts is doing what the shipowner did. What the parable cannot show is that trusting a credible witness is like ignoring a rotten hull. The believer’s claim is that the witness has been examined — a contingent world, the testimony of the apostles, a Church that survived everything that should have killed it — and found trustworthy: belief on evidence, of the kind courts and historians act on daily. Clifford’s maxim, meanwhile, fails its own test, for “it is wrong always … to believe anything upon insufficient evidence” is not itself a truth anyone can establish by evidence; held strictly, it forbids believing Clifford. And where evidence cannot decide and life will not wait, refusing to decide is itself a decision — made on the same insufficiency.

Freud’s account asks a fair question — does the wish father the belief? — and it proves nothing in either direction, because a wish tells you about the wisher, not the world: a drowning man’s longing for a rope is no evidence there is none. And unbelief has its wishes too. Thomas Nagel, as honest an atheist as philosophy has produced, has written candidly that he hopes there is no God and would not want the universe to be like that — a cosmic authority problem, he calls it. If wish-fulfillment discredited belief, it would discredit unbelief with the same stroke. The evidence has to be weighed on its own, which is what the rest of this page does.

Three Remaining Objections

A crutch for those who cannot face reality. Everyone leans on something in the dark hours (money, status, confidence in oneself) and all are more fragile than they look. Belief in oneself saves nobody from death or loss. To call faith a crutch is only to say one would rather lean on oneself than on God. That is a preference, not a proof. The question is not whether you lean, but on what.

The great source of violence and war. The record says otherwise. When Phillips and Axelrod catalogue the wars of recorded history in their three-volume Encyclopedia of Wars, of 1,763 wars fewer than 7 percent prove to have been primarily religious; remove those waged in the name of Islam and the figure falls to a little over 3 percent. The bloodiest century in history was dominated not by religion but by militant atheist regimes. The culprit is fanaticism, which fastens onto secular creeds as readily as sacred ones.9

The Bible praises believing without seeing. The verse (John 20:29) is spoken to Thomas, who has just been given the evidence, the risen Christ standing before him. The blessing falls on later disciples who, not seeing the risen Lord in person, believe on the trustworthy testimony of those who did. That is not credulity but the ordinary reliance on reliable witnesses by which we accept nearly everything we know about the past.

The Accident of Birth

One objection deserves more than a paragraph, because it is the strongest of them. Whatever reasons a believer gives, the best predictor of which God he worships is where he was born; and a faith held only because it was handed over is not held for any reason at all. The correlation is real, and a Christian who has never once examined what he was given ought to be unsettled by it.

But notice what the argument costs to run. Taken strictly it reaches every conviction a person has, and not only the religious ones. Confident secular naturalism is clustered by time and place as tightly as any creed — dense in Western Europe and the American university, effectively absent from most of recorded history, and no likelier to occur to a man born in Riyadh than Anglicanism is. A test that discredits every position on the map discredits none of them. Nor is there an outsider’s chair to sit in and judge from: the skepticism of the outsider is not a view from nowhere but a particular and recent stance with a family tree of its own, and stepping out of one tradition means stepping into another.10

Take the moderate version of the test, though, and the Church agrees without hesitation, because it is what she has always claimed to invite. Faith is never credited here for going unexamined. Natural theology, the preambles to faith, an apologetics addressed to people who are standing outside — the whole apparatus exists so that the claim can be weighed by someone who does not yet accept it. An inheritance that asks to be tested is not the same thing as a prejudice.

And the factual premise leaks. People change, in very large numbers, and the fastest Christian growth of the last century has been where the faith was not inherited from anybody. The writer of this page is a small instance of it: the child of non-religious parents, baptized a Baptist as a boy on his own initiative, baptized a Jehovah’s Witness at sixteen against his parents’ determined resistance, and received into the Catholic Church in 2013. That story is told in full in the account of his life before and after Bethel. Whatever else it is, it is not an accident of birth.

One more word, for the reader who has watched exactly what the skeptic describes: a belief that survived every disappointment by redefining itself, so that 1914 meant one thing, then another, and “this generation” five things in turn. That is what faith looks like when it has been made unfalsifiable, and the skeptic is right to distrust it. It is not what the Church means by faith. She stakes her claim on things that could have been otherwise: an empty tomb, a resurrection Paul said would make the faith “futile” if it had not happened (1 Cor. 15:17), a succession of bishops any historian can trace. A faith that names the fact that would refute it is the opposite of the faith you left.

The Reply in Brief

Nearly every version of the objection turns out to depend on the definition it began with. Grant that faith means believing things without reason, and the case against it is finished before it starts; withdraw that definition, and there is very little left to answer. But no one who actually holds the faith has ever meant that by the word, and a criticism that only defeats a meaning its target rejects has not reached its target.

What is really being asked is a question the critic must answer too: what may a reasonable person believe when the evidence is genuine but falls short of proof? Nobody escapes it. Every serious conviction about the world (including the conviction that there is nothing beyond it) is held on grounds that cannot be closed off, by someone who must decide anyway. The dispute is not whether to live past the evidence but what to live past it toward.11

This is the short answer. The full treatment adds the Catholic account of faith as gift before achievement and living response before settled possession, why faith without works is dead, the old image of faith as root with hope the stem and love the flower, doubt as faith’s companion rather than its enemy, Screwtape’s warning about the believer who “asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys,” the cliff-and-branch parable and what it gets wrong, and full documentation for everything asserted here. It is available as a Word document at the end of this page.

Endnotes
  1. Alister McGrath’s distinction between “the total absence of supporting evidence” and “the absence of totally supporting evidence” is the point on which the New Atheist argument fails; see McGrath, “There is nothing blind about faith” (2011). The definition under attack is Richard Dawkins’s: faith as “blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence.” ↩
  2. On the impossibility of an infinite regress of proofs and the necessity of properly basic premises, see Roy Clouser, The Myth of Religious Neutrality (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press), and David H. Taylor, “The Definition of Faith,” on empiricism itself being held without empirical proof. ↩
  3. Augustine, credere est assensione cogitare, “to believe is to think with assent.” On the Greek pistis and its verb pisteuo, see F. R. Tennant, The Nature of Belief, and Richard Swinburne, Faith and Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), ch. 4. ↩
  4. The chair, telephone, and departure-gate illustrations are from Dallas Willard, The Allure of Gentleness: Defending the Faith in the Manner of Jesus (HarperOne, 2015), on irresponsible disbelief, everyday contexts in which belief is a readiness to act and the cost of not believing is real. Compare McGrath: belief is “just a normal human way of making sense of a complex world.” ↩
  5. Willard, The Allure of Gentleness, and “The Faith of Unbelief,” in Renewing the Christian Mind (HarperOne, 2016), ch. 27: “not acting is acting”; disbelief carries its own burden of proof; much confident unbelief is “morally reprehensible faith posing as a scientific worldview.” On the impossibility of a neutral, presupposition-free standpoint, see Clouser, The Myth of Religious Neutrality. ↩
  6. Definition of superstition from The American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd ed. On the demand for a sign as itself a species of superstition (assuming God can be obliged by our requests) see Don Talafous, O.S.B., The Risk in Believing (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1982). ↩
  7. Dallas Willard, “Jesus the Logician,” on Christ’s use of analogy, the law of non-contradiction, and reductio ad absurdum (e.g. Matt. 12:25–30; Luke 20:27–40). ↩
  8. 1 Corinthians 15:14–19 states the condition under which the Christian claim would be false, and Paul draws the consequence without softening it. Whatever may be true of the psychology of individual believers, a creed that identifies the evidence which would refute it is not unfalsifiable in the sense the objection requires. ↩
  9. Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod, Encyclopedia of Wars, 3 vols. (New York: Facts on File, 2005): of 1,763 wars catalogued, about 123, roughly 7 percent, are classifiable as primarily religious; removing those waged in the name of Islam lowers the figure to a little over 3 percent. Gordon Martel, ed., The Encyclopedia of War, independently arrives at about 6 percent. ↩
  10. John W. Loftus, The Outsider Test for Faith: How to Know Which Religion Is True (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2013), states the test the left panel summarizes. That the demand for an outsider’s standpoint has no standpoint of its own to offer is the same objection Roy Clouser presses in The Myth of Religious Neutrality against the possibility of a presupposition-free view. ↩
  11. Pope John Paul II, Fides et Ratio (1998), opening line. On Augustine’s “faith seeking understanding,” Anselm’s “I believe so that I may understand,” and Aquinas on truths above reason but never against it, see James Swindal, “Faith and Reason,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ↩

Summary

The skeptic defines faith as belief without evidence, even against evidence, and so as irrational by its very nature. But no council, catechism, or classical theologian ever taught that definition; it is a cartoon built to be knocked down. Set it aside, and faith turns out to be among the most reasonable things a person does: the trust of a whole person in a God who has shown Himself worthy of it.

The caricature confuses two different things. It runs together “the total absence of supporting evidence” and “the absence of totally supporting evidence” (McGrath). A belief can rest on real evidence that still falls short of proof, and nearly everything anyone believes is exactly like that. The objection assumes evidence either compels or is absent, with nothing between.

You cannot prove everything. Every proof reasons from premises it does not itself prove, and an endless chain of proofs is impossible. So everyone accepts some things without proof, the axioms of logic among them. Going beyond proof is the ordinary condition of every thinking person, not the believer’s peculiar vice.

What faith actually is. Three strands the critics collapse into one: assent of the mind to what it understands; trust in a person (the Greek pistis, the entrusting of oneself); and faithfulness, the answer of a creature to a God who first proved reliable (Deut. 7:9; Heb. 11:1).

Everyone already lives by faith. You sit on untested chairs, believe the friend on the telephone, act on laws science cannot finish checking, and hold moral convictions provable by neither observation nor logic. To single out religious faith as uniquely irrational, while running one’s whole mental and moral life on faith of the same kind, is a double standard.

Unbelief carries the same burden. To disbelieve is not to have no belief but to be ready to act as though something were false, and the cost of being wrong is just as real. The skeptic who accepts only what reason and evidence establish cannot establish that rule by reason or evidence; he trusts his mind, his senses, and logic without proving any of them. That does not make him wrong, though it does mean he stands on the same ground as the believer.

Not superstition. Superstition seeks to control unseen powers; faith seeks only to rely on a God who gives Himself freely. The skeptic’s “give me a sign and I will believe” is the more superstitious posture, since it assumes God is a mechanism obliged to perform on demand.

Neither blind nor unfalsifiable — and not fideist. Fideism is a real position, but the Church condemned it at Vatican I, teaching that God can be known by natural reason and that faith and reason never truly conflict. Christ appealed constantly to evidence (His works, eyewitnesses, what was written) and reasoned closely, even by reductio against the Sadducees. And the faith names the fact that would destroy it: “if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain” (1 Cor. 15:14). A creed that states its own falsification condition is not what the objection describes.

The remaining charges fail on the record. To call faith a crutch is only to say one would rather lean on oneself than on God, which states a preference rather than an argument. And of the 1,763 wars catalogued in the Encyclopedia of Wars, fewer than 7 percent were primarily religious, falling to a little over 3 percent once those waged in the name of Islam are removed; the bloodiest century in history was dominated by militant atheist regimes.

And the accident of birth cuts both ways. That belief correlates with birthplace is true and worth facing squarely, but the test proves too much: confident secular naturalism is clustered by time and place as tightly as any creed, and a standard that discredits every position on the map discredits none of them. There is no outsider’s chair to judge from. The moderate version of the test — examine what you were handed — is exactly what the Church has always invited. And people do change: the writer of this page was baptized a Baptist as a boy, then a Jehovah’s Witness at sixteen against his parents’ resistance, and entered the Catholic Church in 2013.

In short: faith and reason are not rivals but, in John Paul II’s image, two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth. Try to fly on one and you only turn in circles. Christianity has never asked anyone to stop thinking, only to think and then to trust.

The full Catholic exposition is available as a Word document: Download Faith: A Guide for the Perplexed (.docx) or (.pdf)

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