faith and reason

From a Marvin Olasky interview of J.P. Moreland and Klaus Issler in World...

Jon Krakauer wrote in his best-selling Under the Banner of Heaven, "Faith is the very antithesis of reason." Biola University professors J.P. Moreland and Klaus Issler, authors of In Search of a Confident Faith take issue with that kind of thinking. They challenge "seven of the main doubt-inducing background assumptions of our culture," showing as they go that faith is not "a blind, arbitrary leap in the dark that has no basis in reason."

Krakauer expresses a common but incoherent view of faith, providing Moreland and Issler with an important but easy target.

Q: How do faith and reason go together?

...To have faith in some alleged truth, say, that cigarettes cause cancer, is to count on this claim, to retain a readiness to act as if the claim were true. Faith is essentially trust or confidence or reliance, and that its proper exercise crucially requires reasons, evidence, and knowledge. Faith is trusting what we have reason to believe is true. Christianity has always been a friend of reason and knowledge....

Doubt is not unbelief. We think it's helpful to make a distinction between unbelief, doubt, and lack of belief. "Unbelief" is a willful and sinful setting of oneself against a biblical teaching. But "doubt" is an intellectual, emotional, or psychological hindrance to a more secure confidence. (As in, "I believe something but just have some doubts.") "Lack of belief" indicates "I don't believe something but know I should and want to—I need help."...

Q: The conventional wisdom is that more education leads to less evangelical faith.

This does not bear out statistically. A few years ago, the statistics in sociologist Christian Smith's book American Evangelicalism showed that "evangelicals have more years of education than fundamentalists, liberals, Roman Catholics, and those who are nonreligious. . . . Of all groups, evangelicals are the least likely to have only a high-school education or less; the nonreligious are the most likely. Furthermore, higher proportions of evangelicals have studied at the graduate-school level than have fundamentalists, liberals, or the nonreligious."