How To Finally Understand Faith

There are people who try to draw a sharp line between faith and modern science, and they conclude that those who believe in modern science are smart, and those who have faith in God are dumb. Modern science they claim is rational, empirically based, self critical, and self correcting etc. They celebrate science, deify science as a discipline that has come to liberate the modern mind. They see faith as something from another age that is hindering and holding back the modern mind. 

How can someone have faith in God? If there is a person that fascinates you, you spend sometime studying that person. You watch what the person does, how the person speaks, who are the person’s friends. You try to find out certain things about the person. You might even try to google the name of this person. And if the person is a public figure, you will find out a lot about him like place of birth, place of education, marital status etc. By using your reason alone, you will find out a lot about him. But if you really want to know this person at a higher level, you will try to meet him. When you finally meet him, some of the things you have already read about may be verified, but eventually something extraordinary will happen when he speaks. When he speaks, some of it will be in line with what you have already read. But the more you know him, the more he begins to open his heart to you. As you get to know him more intimately, what’s going to happen? He will reveal things about himself that you will never know in any other way. Your knowledge of him is no longer about where he comes from and what he does which you gathered from online sources. He will disclose to you truths about himself that only him knows. At this point, you have to make a decision: do I believe him or not? What he reveals of himself cannot be verified via a google search, so you have to decide whether to believe him or not. You can decide to believe him and trust him in such a way that you now accept his speech as true. 

This is a very fitting analogy for what serious Catholics mean by faith. We can know God on the basis of reason. A critical look at order, beauty and contingency in nature can convince us that there is God. From what we know, we can accept that God exists, that God is perfect, that God has intelligence, that God is good, that God is the governor and has providential care of the universe. We can determine all those things on the basis of reason alone. St. Thomas Aquinas spent a great deal of time writing about this in the First Part of his work called Summa Theologiae. The Catholic Church says that authentic fides (faith) never involves a sacrifice of the intellect. If you sacrifice your mind, if you are sacrificing your intellect in anyway, you are not dealing with authentic faith. That’s fundamentalism or fideism. One of the truths about God is that God is a person. God is paradigmatically a person. He is the ground of all personhood. He is the supreme person. If you really want to know God, what do you have to do? You have to wait for God to speak. You can read about significant figures on google, on Wikipedia etc. But you can only truly know that person when he speaks. Once that person speaks, you have to make a decision to accept or to not accept, to believe or to not believe, to trust or to not trust him. So it is with God. 

The claim of the Bible is that God has not remained entirely hidden or entirely in the shadow. God, by his own freedom and choice has determined to speak. He reveals things to us that we can never know simply on objective and analytical ground. Objective and analytical studies are important. Don’t get me wrong. But we cannot know the heart of God until God decides to speak. And after God has spoken, we have to make a choice: do I trust him or not? What is faith? Faith for us is that moment of trust. It is that moment when a person says, yes I accept the truth of the God who speaks. There is no other way finally to know and relate to a person other than faith. And this is true even in our human relationships as well. If you were to say in regard to a person, I will only go on what I can absolutely know through analytical reason, how much of that person will you be able to know? Very little! How much of that person will you be able to love? Again, very little! Why? Because you are in total control of the process of knowing that person. With this approach, you are actually objectifying that person. You are making that person an object of your investigation. 

So people who say, ‘unless you can absolutely prove and show me with pure analytical reason God’s existence, I will not believe’ are in error. We can actually know a lot about God by way of analytical reason. There are indisputable arguments for the existence of God. However, by insisting on pure analytical reason alone, you lock yourself in a little space of I will only accept only what I can control. You will never really know a person on those terms. Therefore, faith does not mean naïveté, gullibility, superstition etc. God is a person, and he invites you to have faith in him. Just as another person invites you to have faith. How did you end up marrying that man, that woman? Is it because you had absolutely analytical control of everything about that person? Give me a break! At some point, there was a mutual act of trust called faith or exchange of hearts. That’s so with God, everybody. Faith is, Lord, I accept, I trust what you revealed to me in your own freedom. Faith is not opposed to reason, although it goes beyond it. Just as trust in another person is not irrational, but it does go beyond reason. So it is with God. We have to finally have faith because we are dealing with a supreme person. Faith is an attitude of trust in the face of God. Faith is trust in God who has spoken. Faith mean God has spoken. I believe what he has said. I accept it. I trust it. It is true.