"Is the faith commitment to the omnicompetence of reason reasonable?"

Submitted by Lactantius Jr (United Kingdom), Apr 17, 2010 at 10:19

To Dr Whaley

Thank you for your email, and the very fact that we can exchange emails points to the reality of a creator, we are here, how did we get here? why is there something instead of nothing?

If the naturalism to which you have made a faith commitment is true, we have no reason to trust our reasoning ability, reasoning ability which presupposes a higher origin of our faculties, and theism offers this higher origin.

Logical laws don't only exist in our minds, logical laws transcend our world which means there's a logical mind which transcends our world.

Faith over reason? Faith is a confident trust I put in God based on what I know of Him, and nothing of what I know of God conflicts with reason. Christianity is very much evidence-based, and God "went public" around 2,000 years ago, when He paid us a visit as Jesus Christ, Whose life and an appalling death by crucifixion is recorded in the primary source of reliable information we have of Him, the New Testament, in which the Apostle Paul refers to His resurrection from the dead following His crucifixion, the event on which Christianity absolutely stakes its claim to validity, Paul saying that if Christ wasn't raised from the dead, his (Paul's) teaching is useless and so is our trust in God.

Faith is not as you say, "a belief in the absence of evidence or in controversion of evidence," "faith" as I express it, is confident trust and confident hope and has solid foundations, based on the life, death and resurrection from the dead of Jesus Christ, events which are all open to scrutiny, and which have defied the attempts of sceptics down the ages to disprove them.

Christian hope, unlike worldly hope is solid and trustworthy, not of the "I hope it doesn't rain at

the weekend variety," such sure and certain hope answering the question, "How can I get the very best out of the rest of my life, and prepare to die, so that on the other side of this life, I will have everlasting joy in the presence of God" - and in that hope become the kind of risk-taking, humble, loving, sacrificial person that the world so desperately needs?

The answer of the Bible is to take God at His word by trusting Jesus Christ. Trust Him that everything He says He has done, He has done; and everything He says He will do, He will do; and everything He says He is, He is. Trust Him, and we will be saved.

And we will live the rest of our lives in the place of greatest healing. Where is that Lactantius Jr you ask? It's the solid, durable, invincible, anvil-like place between thankfulness toward the past and confident trust toward the future. As John Newton wrote in "Amazing Grace," 'The Lord has promised good to me, His word my hope secures, He will my shield and portion be, as long as life endures.'

There is no place of greater, deeper, more lasting healing than to be in Jesus Christ, with sins forgiven and heaven secured, living in the land of the dying, looking forward to being in the land of the living, living moment by moment looking back with thankfulness on all that God has done for us, and looking forward at all God promises to do for us because of Christ.

It's a great place to live. I invite you, I urge you, trust Christ and take your eternal place between bygone grace and future grace, where gratitude and trust, thankfulness and confidence fill the soul and make it well.

With warm kind regards and all good wishes

Lactantius Jr

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