Christ Above All or The Integration of Faith, Values, and Learning: Toward an Epistemology of Belief (Part 6)

Last updated on: July 21, 2020 at 5:06 am by John Mark N. Reynolds

Christ Above All or The Integration of Faith, Values, and Learning: Toward an Epistemology of Belief (Part 6) 2020-07-17T19:08:23-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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Since the Enlightenment some have felt that reason is primarily about skepticism.

Of course skepticism does have great value to the reasonable man. It helps us escape dogmatic slumber. It helps us avoid intellectual faddishness and frauds. Most importantly, it also helps the thinker frame useful questions. Fundamentally, it can induce a sense of intellectual interest or joy in the journey of discovery that would be impossible without a sense of questioning.

For all its virtues, skepticism is merely a tool in reason’s toolbox. By itself, it can assert nothing. Skepticism should, after all, be skeptical about the value of skepticism. It cannot move humanity forward by itself.

For humans to move forward intellectually, there will have to be positive belief.
To reasonably believe a thing is not to know it for certain, but to put provisional confidence (faith) in it proportionate to the desirability of the idea and the evidence for it.

The Christian has an advantage over the skeptic. He assumes the world is a good place and that, even with the Fall, is goodness that is fundamental to reality and not evil. As a result, it is acceptable to believe a thing merely because you wish to do so, if it does any work at all in your worldview greater than the problems it causes. This is assuming there is no good reason to doubt it that overwhelms its benefits.

In this epistemological vision, skepticism guards us against kidding ourselves. We do run the risk of using it too little and becoming complacent or being cheated intellectually, however, the epistemological skeptic cannot consistently live out his epistemology at all. Better to run the risk of believing too much, than the danger of believing nothing at all. Better to trust the Bible too much, than to abandon it too quickly.

One good reason to be a creationist, even a young earth creationist, is the attractiveness of the idea on non-scientific grounds. In deciding the intellectual risks we want to take, we must measure the beauty of the account, what our religious experience tells us, the messages of those with prophetic and apostolic authority in the church, and the fruitfulness of the idea.

Bluntly a world with million of years of pain and suffering, even of animals, is much less beautiful than one without it. Our Victorian ancestors understood this well. We should be willing to live with a great deal of theoretical, scientific tension in order to avoid worsening the problem of evil.

No matter what ideas we adopt, we know that they will be provisional and prone to human error this side of the New Jerusalem. Revelation is certain, but our understanding of it is not. This combination of bold risk taking and epistemological humility is all too rare in my own life, but it is the ideal to which I strive. It is this way of thinking that I propose we place before our Christian students.

Based on a presentation at Loma Linda University and at the College at Saint Constantine.

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