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I grew up in a culture that seemed to separate faith and reason. Faith was the requirement for a religious experience while reason was the more advanced and scientific approach to understanding the nature of reality. No one specifically taught me this but I gathered the comparison both from the classroom and the Sunday School class.

Obviously, I thought, science deals with reality and religion with that other realm of existence. We could measure reality but we had to experience spirituality. Matter could be empirically tested; we could weigh it, analyze it chemically, put it into safe categories. Spirituality was subjective; it did not have to prove itself by conforming to the laws of logic.
I was of the impression that the really bright people in this world had opted for science while the, shall I say intellectually challenged, found it easier to feel the truth than to understand it.

Now I understand how deceptive is this general attitude toward faith and reason. While it is true that “God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise” (read “spiritual insight” and “secular understanding” — 1 Corinthians 1:27), it does not follow that spirituality defies logic and that the two realms must forever be kept apart for a rational understanding.

Whether your world view is supernatural (there is a God) or materialistic (matter is all there is) in both cases you must begin with an unprovable assumption. In the area of origins the scientist begins with a leap of faith, i.e. there is nothing beyond the material. Obviously that can be neither proven or disproven. At his point both science and faith begin with “faith.”
So where does this lead us? It means that science as we know it works within the limited area of what can be measured, weighed, and empirically proven. It does not mean that there is nothing outside that realm. Nor does it mean that the rigors of science should not be applied to the realm of faith in so far as that is possible. In fact, we all recognize that the more important elements of life fall not in the empirically ascertainable realm but in that other realm in which the relatively crude instruments of evaluation are insufficient. Who can weigh the love of a mother for her child? Who can measure the size of an act of kindness?

I believe it is time for the believer to assert his role in the market place of ideas without being intimidated by a false understanding of reality. All truth is one whether it be gained by scientific method or revealed by God. There are not two kinds of truth. So when I assert that a God of love sent his only Son to die for the sins of the world what I have said is not less true that the fact that my desk is 5 feet 6 inches wide. That the latter may be empirically proven does not mean that it is more true. It may be more provable but that is because it is of less importance.

Lesson here? Yes. Refuse to be intimidated by a misplaced assertion that science is true and faith is hoping that it may be true. Remember that given the assumptions of faith (and both world-views have to start there) it is as logical and intellectually demanding as materialism, which also begins with a “faith.”

-- Robert Mounce