does faith and reason belong together?

There is a lot of confusion around the ideas of faith and reason. You may not ponder this much, but your deep seated understanding of these two terms, especially in relationship to each other, makes a huge difference in how you think, feel, and act.

Let's explore some of the ways people mistakenly make sense of faith and reason and why it may matter to you.

What are some typical views that need closer examination? Many believe that faith is a religious term and reason is equivalent to science. I would propose that both of these are myths that can restrict understanding or confuse people and their discourse with each other.

By definition, faith comes from an ancient Greek word denoting a reliance on evidence that we cannot gain through our physical senses. Everyone has faith. Faith is NOT emotion. Faith is the beginning of all reason. Psychologists point to intuition or conscience. Business people claim "my gut tells me." Christians associate faith with revelation from God's Spirit and His word. The simplest way to understand your faith is asking this question in any situation, "what is obvious to me?"

When we put a source to our unseen evidence, then we have a type of faith. So, when we simply say, "have faith," we are generally trying to eliminate or minimize the role of reason or the need for physical evidence. We actually are making a meaningless statement because there is no target or source of the evidence in which we are applying trust. Often, there is an implied, trust your heart or some benevolent cosmic force, but the target of faith is likely unclear.

Typical views of reason as science and vice versa can also be misleading and confusing. Science is the process of collecting and organizing evidence gained through our physical senses to understand how different "things" relate to each other. Science uses reason to obtain its inferences (conclusions), but so does faith. Reason is the cognitive activity of drawing meaning from evidence, which can be gained through our physical senses (observable evidence) or our faith (unobservable evidence).

The point of this blog is that there are two kinds of evidence upon which humans apply reason to draw conclusions. Reason is applied to unseen evidence (faith) as much or more than to physical evidence (science). In fact, most often the purpose of reason applied to physical evidence or science is to confirm what we have reasoned or concluded from unseen evidence (faith). The human condition is biased (compelled) to confirming one's deep seated faith with what it observes.

This leads to differences in the meaning of trust. Human nature actually views trust as a "trust but verify." The soul that is transformed by the Gospel of Jesus views trust as "trust the Sovereign will of the Father." I've said this many times, the Christians who love to quote Proverbs 3: 5, but still struggle with how God is working in their circumstances, may just be relying on their own understanding of trust.

So, in many ways Christians and non Christians are alike in their humanity. In both cases the soul reasons evidence from unseen sources and from physical sources. The difference is that the Christian soul does not need the confirmation of science in order to trust the unseen evidence. For the Christian, science has practical application for temporal activities while on earth. Human nature orients the soul to trust their reasoning of the "outcomes of things" in the physical world. A Kingdom nature orients the soul to reason Holy Spirit revelation from the "source of all things" generated from their intimacy with Jesus.

While no person can escape the claim, "I am human," Christians can thankfully praise God by claiming, "I am not ONLY human."

The message of this blog does not come easily or naturally to the human mind, but it may be what Paul is calling the Christian to when he says, "do not conform to the systems of your nature, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind."

While you may yet to fully grasp this, you can at least ponder it .....