Ed Gungor: What I Hate Most About Christianity

This is an original excerpt I wrote as a contribution to Ed Gungor's book: What I Hate Most About Christianity

Faith and Reason

There is a woman named Anne Robertson who recently wrote an article titled: Atheists: Define Yourselves. In this article, Robertson says,

Religion and faith are two different things: religion is merely the vehicle that human beings have created to convey the message of faith. It has significant flaws, as one might expect from a human creation, but so do other vehicles in our society. Just because the vehicle is in need of repair doesn’t mean the cargo is not worth delivering. (1)

Robertson does well to distinguish between the terms faith and religion. By and large, the rants of contemporary and influential atheist voices, such as Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, focus on the term religion as a man-made institution that is ultimately responsible for most of the world’s problems today. Furthermore, these guys tend to bundle all religions together into one messy package stocked full of heinous historical missteps, culturally irrelevant interpretations of religious dogma, and the like. The true essence of Christianity, however, is not a religion; it is faith—faith in the person of Jesus Christ.

The term faith flows against the grain of any and every professing atheist because reason without evidence is utterly irrational (2). In other words, we may give many reasons for our faith in God, such as a personal encounter or a simple observation of the complexity of nature; yet, those who interpret the data differently render such reasons completely irrational. The existence of God can only be demonstrated; it cannot be proved. That’s why we call it faith.

Faith to an atheist, if anything at all, is simply confidence in the present interpretation of evidence gathered, and a belief that the unknown and unexplainable will eventually have a perfectly logical explanation—apart from faith in any creator or unseen god. According to Christopher Hitchens, “If one must have faith to believe something, or believe in something, then the likelihood of that something having any truth or value is considerably diminished.” (3)


Sources

1. http://www.theolog.org/blog/2007/06/atheists_define.html

2. http://shamelesslyatheist.blogspot.com/2007/02/of-definition-of-faith-and-other-things.html

3. Hitchens, God is not Great, page 71.