The Bible tells us about the God who stepped into real history. El Greco: Christ carrying His cross (1580). Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
Joel Kontinen
What is blind faith? It might have to do with relying on an explanation without examining whether the model actually describes reality correctly. One might choose to have blind faith because it could feel more comfortable than faith based on facts.
Professor Michael Horton discusses Christianity and naturalism in the December issue of Christianity Today.
“We live in a world that assumes reason is unbiased, when in fact our reason itself is enslaved to naturalism: a denial of the world's dependence on God for its creation and preservation, much less redemption,” he writes.
Echoing the words of Harvard biology professor Richard Lewontin, he goes on to say:
“Any valid argument or evidence ... must have a naturalistic explanation, even if that explanation is the least reasonable…
Left to ourselves, we use reason so irrationally that we determine that God cannot enter history, even before we examine whether he has done so. Again, it's not ‘neutral reason’ running the show here, but a blind faith in naturalism.”
In 1997 professor Lewontin wrote in The New York Review of Books that scientists often choose to make up “unsubstantiated just-so stories” because they “have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism… Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”
There is a name for this approach. It is called blind faith.
Sources:
Horton, Michael. 2011. Why We Need Jesus. Christianity Today (2 December).
Lewontin, Richard. 1997. Billions and billions of demons. The New York Review of Books, p. 31 (9 January).
Posts
