Faith without Certainty

We live in a time when the only ones who have certainty are fundamentalists. If we can admit that up front I think that we can get to a good place with respect to faith. This is not to say that there aren't thoughtful fundamentalists, but it is to say that just about everyone else recognizes that none of us have a perfect hold on what we could call universal truth. Perfect knowledge is beyond all of us, but even so, faith is possible. The syllogism that I used in the second post about whether there is a God does not prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is a God. But I hope that it does get us to a place where we can have an intelligent belief that God does exist. Faith makes sense in a world that is devoid of certainty, but faith in the intellectual environment in which we live still needs to be based on something more than personal desires or intuitions.

Christian faith, along with Judaism and Islam, is based on revelation. Christians, Jews and Muslims agree that God has revealed Himself (in the classical forms of these three faiths, God is rendered in the masculine gender). The test that intellectuals pose for these faiths is whether or not their beliefs make sense in the reality that we all experience. I believe that Christianity can measure up to the standards of reality as we experience it. What do you think?

This test by reality is what I will be writing about in subsequent posts.