Sanctifying the Crutch of Religious Faith
The perversity of this Christian virtue of faith, and the role of stories in knowledge
Christianity made a virtue of exercising faith in the preposterous, which is a perversion of critical thinking.
Mind you, the audacity of religious faith can be obscured also by the rationalist pretentions of Enlightenment philosophers. But just because a perfectly rational worldview is impossible, so that some intuitive leaps of logic are necessary at the outset, as we’ll see, that doesn’t mean irrationality should be sanctified.
For instance, Christians are expected to believe that God exists, that Jesus was God, and that Jesus died to save humanity from the consequences of sin and was physically resurrected from the dead. Christian authorities have provided numerous rationales for these beliefs, but officially these convictions are supposed to be grounded in something called “faith.”
That word derives from the Latin “fidēs,” which means trust, a meaning found in “confide.” Some early Christians like Augustine spoke of the “articles of faith,” which were creedal principles or “supernatural truths,” as the Catholic Encyclopedia calls them.
Elsewhere, that encyclopedia quotes Vatican Council III as saying that “The Catholic…
