I was talking to a friend last night about faith. We touched on different aspects related to faith, including doubt, atheism, and agnosticism. On my way home I got to thinking about it a bit more and I realised again that everyone of us lives by faith every day of our lives. Faith is not something that believers in God live by; that’s just a different aspect of faith. As I sit on my chair writing this post, I’m exercising faith that the chair won’t collapse under me. When you eat your cereal tomorrow morning, you will be exercising faith that there is nothing poisonous in it and that it won’t kill you. And so it goes on. Everything we do in life requires the exercise of faith. We are not consciously aware that all of what we do is done by faith, but it most definitely is.

In thinking about this and how it relates to what we normally call faith, that is, faith in God and its manifestation in our lives, I soon realised that a position of agnosticism is not enough. Someone told me years ago that agnosticism is not just sitting on the fence, it is taking a position. I believe life is to be lived to its full. I believe that life was actually designed to be lived to its full, and that means to go further in our exercise of faith than we have previously.

To that end, I believe that faith in a God I cannot see is the ultimate act of faith. It is not blind faith. That would be superstition. It is a reasonable faith, a rational faith if you like. It is a faith that is based on what someone has deduced as the evidence. It is thought through and then, having made a decision about it, it is lived out. We become more human the more we live by faith. As St Paul said long ago, ‘this life I live, I live by faith in the Son of God’.

The more we live by faith, the more we jump into the arms of a loving God, the more like Christ we become. It is said that we become like that which we worship. Our lives are a worship of something. When our lives are a worship of Jesus, we become more like him. It was Irenaeus who said “the glory of God is a human being fully alive”. When we exercise faith in Christ, when we live this out in our lives each day, we love more. We live out what St Paul called ‘the most excellent way’.

Faith allows us to become more human. It is a risk, it can be frightening, but it is life. We either move forward into it or we retreat into our cocoons. C.S Lewis said it brilliantly:

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless–it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”

This is what living by faith is. This is the adventure, not just of a lifetime, but of an eternity.

A recent debate on the existence of God between atheist Christopher Hitchens and Christian apologist William Lane Craig is reported with glee in Lee Strobel’s latest newsletter with the headline ‘Hitchens gets spanked!’. I don’t mind Strobel. I have been impressed with the books of his I have read, books such as The Case for Christ and The Case for Faith. He makes his case well by asking questions that a reasonable skeptic and/or seeker would ask. However it comes across as pretty severe gloating to me to say that Hitchens got ‘spanked’. Whilst I acknowledge that an atheist website that reported on the debate also used these terms in describing the debate, I still see a strong sense of gloating on the part of Strobel.

As long as there remains a sense of gloating each time one side wins a battle in this war of beliefs, each side will remain entrenched in its beliefs, and probably become more entrenched. If the Christian side of a debate like this is to show people that God exists and therefore you are invited into a relationship of life with God, I don’t think gloating over winning another debate is going to impress anyone. I am reminded of what Rikk Watts has said about this. He has made the point that some of the early Christians were actually not able to answer some of the philosophical attacks thrown at them by pagans. Yet still they turned the Roman Empire upside down and drew millions into faith in Christ. They did not win the empire by arguments; they won the empire through the quality of their lives. If I won an argument against an atheist and I gloated about it, other atheists would be fully justified in being repelled by the faith that I proclaim. They would be justified in saying “well, he had some great arguments but I sure wouldn’t want to be like him”.

As I stated in my previous post about debates over climate change, it is crucial that we listen with respect to those we disagree with. As St Peter says, let us respond with gentleness and respect to the allegations of people we disagree with. May this be so in our debates with our atheist friends.

One thing that I struggle with that alot of Christians say is that there is no such thing as an atheist. I think there is, but where atheists have it wrong is that they generally denounce the idea of faith as being flawed. What they fail to see is that they live by as much faith as believers. The believer has faith that there is a God who made the universe and everything in it, while the atheist has faith in the idea that there is a purely naturalistic explanation for everything that exists. As far as rational logic goes, agnosticism is a truer position. However agnosticism is also a position. It is not sitting on the fence.

A good book I have read about this is ‘Finding Faith’ by Brian McLaren. McLaren is a Christian, however he consulted with many of his atheist and agnostic friends before writing the book, and ran transcripts by them as he was writing. The result is a very balanced book, as shown by the reviews it gets on Amazon.