Christians see no conflict between reason and faith

Deacon Burke-Sivers

To take one prominent example of how Christians have longed cherished their religion because it embodies truth, "Augustine consistently defends [faith-trust] in Christ, the Bible, and the church as rational. This faith is epistemically on a par with faith in other areas of human life such as family relations, geography, and history—where trust reveals itself as both rational and practically necessary." [1]

Accordingly, Christians posit that the beliefs of this religion can be defended rationally, unlike the case of other religions. However, because it is a human endeavour, there have been lapses in the church in acceptance of evidence about the world over the centuries.

I want to quickly illustrate how Christian scholars have attempted to use the faculty of reason to demonstrate that their act of faith as to core beliefs is not irrational. Here are how some proofs developed by Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) can be applied in the modern context. Deacon Harold Burke-Sivers of Portland, Oregon, gave this talk in a video: A friend asked why Harold thought God exists...

So I took out my cellphone and put it on the table, and I asked him if my phone was moving. He said "No". So in order for my phone to move from a state of potential motion to actual motion a force had to be applied. I said, "Are there objects in the universe that are moving?" "Of course there are". I said that just like the phone there has to be a force that causes all objects to move. I said, "What is that force?" He said "The Big Bang". I said "OK, what caused the Big Bang?" He had no answer.

I then said, "Let's take the phone to the Amazon Basin and drop the phone on the jungle floor. A group of indigeneous people find it, pick it up. They have never seen or experienced anything like this technology before. Would they think this phone had created itself? Of course not. They would think that an alien, a god, or another human being had created it because things don't create themselves." I then asked him to tell me something that exists that created itself. He had no answer.

Finally I said, "When I bought my phone the battery was 100%, and as I [...] began to use it, the battery began to lose energy and move toward a state of equilibrium." I said, "[With] the universe there was a Big Bang and you would expect that after 13.7 billion years the universe would be losing energy, just like the battery on the phone. Instead, the universe continues to expand and there are billions and billions pieces of visible matter in the universe. How is it that universe is not losing energy after such a long period?" Again, he had no answer. 

I said, "Now you have to apply the [principle] of Occam's razor. [This] says that when you have a series of competing hypotheses, each with equally predictive outcomes, the one with the fewest assumptions is the one that is most likely to be correct." I said, "I gave you three assumptions and you could not give me an answer." 

The proofs for God as the first mover, the first cause and grand designer, another observer writes, are not a matter of "believing in the supernatural realm [as] some kind of philosophical ‘deus ex machina’– a God of the gaps – an answer for natural mysteries when we have no other answer. Instead the supernatural realm is a given within a philosophical view of the cosmos." 

The writer goes on: "It is the universal experience of the human race that the unseen realm is ‘there’. It’s part of reality. Deciding how it interacts with the visible realm and what it has to do with me and my destiny is where science ends and religion begins."

Though science may be able to identify "some sort of measurable pop and fizzle in the brain" accompanying an experience in an animal or human, "it is not the same thing as the experience any more than my increased heart rate when my beloved enters the room is that thing we call love".

[1]  Mark J. Boone, "Augustine and William James on the Rationality of Faith," The Heythrop Journal, Volume 61, Issue 4 "Special Issue: Apologetics", July 2020, pages 648-659