Normal blogging service will hopefully be resumed as the end of term approaches and I’m hopefully a little less busy. I’ve got a long post I started writing on my birthday listing 21 things I’m thankful for that I’ll hopefully finish for. I want to comment on each one, so it’s taking a while to write!
In the meantime, I submitted a comment about an article on the BBC website arguing the merits of agnosticism: God. Who knows? My comment doesn’t seem to have been posted (“not all emails will be published”), but I’ll reprint my response here, with a couple of additional footnotes:
We don’t need to make a choice between fundamentalism[1] and agnosticism, between faith and reason, between confidence and openness to questions and new evidence.
I have faith the Christian Gospel is absolute truth. When I say “absolute truth”, I mean I take it to be true in reality and universally, regardless of human opinion or understanding. By “I have faith”, I don’t mean that I believe this blindly. I do not claim knowledge on an absolutely certain basis which makes faith unnecessary, but knowledge on a sufficiently certain basis that makes trust well-placed.
The Christian worldview explains and makes sense of the world in a satisfying way, and the historical event of the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus give me good grounds for faith, for trust in it as a system of belief. But while I am confident in my belief, it is not beyond questioning – I am happy to go back and re-examine my trust-commitments in light of new information.
We need to recognise that reason (what we believe on the basis of working it out for ourselves) and faith (what we believe on trust from sources outside ourselves[2]) work together. Reason depends on this faith to operate, and this trust should be granted on the basis of good reason rather than placed blindly. This protects us both from the shallow certainties of fundamentalism, and the crippling uncertainties of relativism and postmodernism.
[1] I’m using “fundamentalism” in a general sense of a position that holds not only that absolute truth exists, but that it can be known with absolute certainty, rather than fundamentalism in the historical sense of the movement in North American Protestantism in reaction to modernism in the early 20th century.
[2] The other element in the knowledge equation that I didn’t go into here for reasons of brevity is “revelation”, both in the general epistemological sense of information from outside ourselves, whether experiential or propositional, and in the special sense of God’s revelation of himself to us.