Imagine that the Apostle John approached you and said, “Believe in Jesus. Later I will tell you who he was and what he did.” What would be the content of your belief? Faith must be in something. A level of understanding precedes faith. Faith then opens the door for greater understanding.
A famous 20th Century theologian, Cornelius Van Til, argued the reverse. He argued that, unless God exists, no understanding can be possible to man.
“Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”
Was he right to say this? Thomas didn’t tell us his epistemology. We don’t even know his attitude as he said those words. I suspect he was trembling, not indignant.
Was Thomas being reasonable? It seems ambiguous.
First Comment!
Hooray for my first reader comment!
I want to encourage interaction at my blog, so I’ll reproduce the comment and my response:
A friend asked:
“What does ‘faith’ mean in this context? To come later?”
He wanted to know what I mean by faith. I wrote back:
“Here faith means trusting God. It means believing that God has spoken, and believing God’s promises. Faith comes at the conclusion of a reasoning process–not as the presupposition to it.”
If you have read my Top 10 Lessons in Thinking, this is a deeper look. Again, the ideas are from Leonard Peikoff.
I sequenced this list so as to follow a flow. Enjoy!
Here are my favorite principles of logic and reasoning, collected from Leonard Peikoff’s Objectivism: the Philosophy of Ayn Rand.
While these do stand on their own, they become most useful if you study them individually and in depth. For that, I recommend Peikoff’s book.
