It’s no secret that I don’t mind a good debate, I mean I do have a blog and that blog is dedicated toward theology, in a way, I’m asking for it! While I like to think that I have gotten better at holding my tongue by choosing my battles, from time to time I still feel the need to interject some perspective whenever I think I see an error that can be easily addressed. My personal lesson from a recent Facebook interaction is, that if you are going to semi-regularly open your mouth, you need to be ready to defend what comes out of it.
Ultimately I decided to engage in conversation with this Facebook friend, because I love him. At one point we would have considered each other brothers in Christ, sadly that is no longer the case as he is a professing atheist. While everyone is responsible for their own choices, there are some external factors in place that I believe helped this young man leave the faith so easily. So maybe, in some small way, being that I knew him then, and I know him now, I feel responsible for what part I may have played in his poor understanding of Christianity. So, if I can do anything to help I will, and if I can do so faithfully, I hope God will give me the grace to continue.
A DEBATE OF DEFINITIONS
The first thing you must do In debate is establish common ground, you do so by agreeing on the set meanings of the terms and phrases being used in your arguments. In short, you simply cannot have a good dialogue if both sides are arguing from different understandings of the same thing. You have to endeavor to present your opponent’s position accurately.
For the atheist, if a Christian says you misrepresent their perspective, you should be charitable and listen intently, maybe you missed something. If truly intellect, logic and reason is on your side, then you, above all the worldviews, should desire to have all the correct information at you disposal so that you can apply it to your way of thinking. For the Christian, since in our worldview we are to value truth higher than anyone else, we too must also listen intently to represent our opponents position truthfully, and to search for our own errors honestly.
A DEBATE WITH NO DEFINITIONS IS A SILLY ONE
Jumping right into to our debated definitions of faith is tricky, and it is more important to me that you see how this failure to represent your opponents position will leads us nowhere fast. So to illustrate my point I want to make a bit of a silly example of what this looks like, and during my debate, it felt like…
Person 1: “Jesus was an actual living person.”
Person 2: “Well that is ridiculous, we all know that you think Jesus is really a carrot.”
Person 1: “No I don’t, and my scriptures don’t say that, so please stop arguing against my faith insisting that Jesus is a carrot.”
Person 2: “You can’t just change the definition to suit your needs, that’s unfair, you’re shifting the goal post in your favor.”
Person 1: “I am not, I am simply trying to show you that what you are saying is not actually what Chrsitians believe. I know there are some who may think Jesus is a carrot, but you wont find that in the scriptures, you have to evaluate my faith by it’s actual teachings, NOT what some people wrongfully teach about it.”
Person 2: “Your wrong, Jesus is a carrot and therefore cannot be a person and cannot be God, your worldview and objections have been destroyed.”
Person 1: “No you just destroyed a straw-man definition of my faith that I am telling you is NOT true. You really only tore down your own representation of my argument, not mine. So I agree with you, if Jesus was a carrot, he can’t be a person or God, but I am telling you that Jesus is not a carrot, and biblical Christianity does not believe that.”
Person 2: “Wrong”
As cartoon-ish as this seems, this is certainly how it felt from my perspective. Essentially if you define things a certain way, it changes your perspective on that particular subject. In a debate, if you have one meaning in your mind, and your opponent has another, you must be clear over which definition that you are discussing, or else the conversation will go nowhere. A simple example to use is the dual definition of “orange”, it is both a color and a fruit. If you are hungry and ask “May I have an orange?” and someone hands your a crayon of a particular hue, you had better clarify your definition if you are really trying to satisfy your hunger. Or, if you don’t want to appear rude, you can just eat the crayon.
DEFINING FAITHS
When it comes to faith you can go lots of place for definitions. A continual place my opponents went to was the dictionary, they wanted to crucify the Christians understanding of faith by the dictionaries understanding. But we were not arguing against a dictionary definition of faith, we were supposedly arguing against a biblical definition of faith. The same word was being used, but with two entirely different meanings, like orange
Without laying out every detail of the conversation, what my friend and opponent, hereby refereed to as my “fropponent”, argued against was the idea of “Blind Faith”. He asserted that the definition of Christian faith is the same as blind faith, or faith without evidence. This view of faith is non-traditional, even though the concept is very popular on our current western Christian context, the actual idea is nowhere to be found in the understanding of Christian faith that we see in the scriptures. It is, at best, something that sounds vaguely spiritual enough that people believe it is Christian, like “cleanliness is next to godliness” or “spare the rod spoil the child“, and at worst, a false understanding so detrimental to Christian thought, that it gives good reason to people who wrongfully reject genuine faith, based solely on a false idea of this counterfeit faith. In fact I even told my friend that if genuine Christian faith was in fact “blind” and without evidence as he asserted, then I would have no problem renouncing my faith today. He asked me to clarify.
I told him how the picture of faith we see in the bible is not a faith without evidence, but a faith that demands evidence. We see in scripture that YES, faith does require belief, but not an un-reasoned belief. We never see the command to follow something blindly, we are never told in scripture that we should shut of our brains and go with our hearts, we never see a teacher, prophet, apostle or Christ himself say anything without trying to demonstrate its validity. The parables are a good example of this, its Jesus knowing that what he is asking us to believe is difficult, so he tries to break things down in such a way that we might learn to understand it through his eyes.
Furthermore we always see Jesus inviting people to come and “taste and see”. This is his common way of asking them to verify what he is talking about with their own senses. If there was nothing there of substance to verify, even if he was speaking in analogy, why would he invite them to try to verify something that is allegedly unverifiable? Most notably we see this with Thomas, he believes Jesus to be dead, and when Jesus shows up resurrected, what does he tell Thomas to do? He tells him to come and touch his wounds! In other words he wants him to see and even touch the evidence for himself. The entire Gospel of Luke was written by Luke as he interviewed and researched the claims that Christians were making about Jesus. He went and found the evidence and wrote it down. We see Paul, when defending the Resurrection, or giving account to all that he has seen, frequently name people and tell others to simply go and verify his claims by talking to these other witnesses. Unfortunately we are unable to do this today, yet even when we go to the the “go to” passage on faith in scripture, we see that Faith is described as evidence, substance, assurance and conviction.
Hebrews 11:1 Now faith is the assurance(substance) of things hoped for, the conviction (evidence) of things not seen.
“But the bible is hard to understand, I don’t get it!”
I know, so if I may, let me use a parable of my own…
I currently cannot see my wife, we are not in the same room or even the same building right now, she could be doing anything she wants right now. Yet, I have an assurance in what I cannot actually see, I am assured that she is currently not sleeping with another man. Do I know this for a %100 conclusive fact? No. Can I see it with my own eyes? No, not currently. Well then, am I completely misguided to place my trust in my wife? Absolutely not. Even though I do not have %100 proof do I still have good evidence or reason to believe she is faithful? Yep. Could I be wrong? Yes, but the absence of visual evidence does not prove me wrong, nor does this mean that my faith in my wife is “blind”, I still have perfectly good reasons to believe that she is faithful to me that do not require my ability to see her in all ways at all times.
In summary, the idea of “blind faith” is not in the bible, and it is therefore entirely un-christian, and therefore has implications for both sides of the argument.
So Christians, stop using the term, it damages our faith, and if you go to a church that teaches blind faith as truth, find a different church.
Atheist, to argue against the Christian worldview by attacking the notion of “blind faith” is a fallacious argument. You simply dismantle something that is not in the Christian understanding of faith. Therefore, in your attempt to dismantle Christianity, you actually leave biblical Christianity untouched and only dismantle your own staw-man arguement.
A TRUE DEFINITION OF FAITH GIVES US A TRUE DILEMMA
If all of this is true, then my “fropponet” has a problem. He cannot concede his error with the definition of faith without also implying that his atheistic worldview may also be mistaken. After all, it was this definition that lead to his rejection of Christianity, and if that definition is invalid, then perhaps so is his assumption that led to his rejection. At the least, he would have to admit that his assumptions are wrong, and therefore his argumentation based on this assumption is also wrong, and at the most, commit to re-investigate his own thoughts and ideas about his own worldview in light of this new information. As Christians, we should also do the same whenever we assume something wrongfully.
He is committed to his atheism, and I to my Christianity, but where we differ is that I believe that there could be some evidence out there that completely disproves my faith. For example, if I were to find out for certain that Jesus did NOT exist, then to be intellectually consistent, I would have to reject Christianity altogether. I don’t think my fropponent is willing to make the same claim about his atheism. If he was convinced beyond a reasonable doubt, the honest thing to do would be to reject atheism. For him, I don’t know if there is any amount of evidence that could cause him to reconsider the positions he assumes, much more, lead to his conversion. This leads me to believe that the problem in our disagreement is more than just a problem about faith and evidence, but also a problem of the heart.
For more resources on what biblical faith ACTUALLY is, I would encourage you to look at the links below…
Is Faith a Leap like Sam Harris says?
A podcast if you like to listen…
And probably the best summary of the Christian Faith, a book for all of our readers out there…
Sadly, it would only take a simple google search to show any atheist that the notion of Blind Faith is NOT a Christian one.
{Stay tuned as I reflect more about this conversation when we look at the nature of evidence in our next post. If there is anything unclear, comment respectfully and I will try my best to clarify.}
Theist the Bearded 
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