Faith properly understood, does not contradict reason in the least; indeed, it is nothing less than the will to keep one’s mind fixed precisely on what reason has discovered to it.
Pure reason can reveal to us that there is a God, that we have immortal souls, and that there is a natural moral law. Does belief in such a revelation go beyond reason? Is this where faith comes in? the answer is no, for the claim that a divine revelation has occurred is something for which the monotheistic religions typically claim there is evidence, and that evidence takes the form of a miracle, a suspension of the natural order that cannot be explained in any way other than divine intervention in the normal course of events.
Given that God exists and that He sustains the world and the causal laws governing it in being at every moment, we know that there is a power capable of producing a miracle, that is , a suspension of those causal laws.
The case for the resurrection of Christ doesn’t exist in a vacuum then; it presupposes this philosophical background. Pure reason proves through philosophical arguments that there is a God and that we have immortal souls. This by itself entails that a miracle like a resurrection from the dead is possible. Now the historical evidence hat Jesus Christ was in fact resurrected from the dead is overwhelming when interpreted in light of that background knowledge. Hence pure reason also shows that Jesus really was raised from the dead. But Jesus claimed to be divine, and claimed that the authority of His teachings would be confirmed by His being resurrected. So the fact that He was resurrected provides divine authentication of His claims.
Suppose you know through purely rational arguments that there is a God, that He raised Jesus Christ from the dead, and therefore that Christ really is divine, as He claimed to be, so that anything He taught must be true; in other words, suppose that the general strategy jus sketched can be successfully fleshed out. Then it follows that if you are rational you will believe anything Christ taught; indeed, if you are rational you will believe it even if it is something that you could not possibly have come to know in any other way, and even if it is something highly counterintuitive and difficult to understand. Reason tells you to have faith in what Christ teaches because He is divine. That is what faith is from the point of view of traditional Christian theology: belief in what God has revealed because if God has revealed it, it cannot be in error; but where the claim that He revealed it is itself something that is known on the basis of reason faith doesn’t conflict with reason, then; it is founded on reason and completes reason.
Now of course Christianity does not teach that every believer must be able to make some fancy philosophical case for the existence of God, the resurrection of Christ, and all the rest. Most people probably could not even understand the arguments. Their belief is based on what they have been taught by some authority—the Church, or theologians or philosophers, say—and in that sense it is based on faith rather than reason. It is indirectly based on rational arguments. We find an exact parallel in science. Most people who believe that E=mc2, and who believe almost any other widely known and generally accepted scientific proposition, do so on the basis of faith in exactly the sense in question here. Everyone believe that it is legitimate to believe on the authority of those from whom they learned it. If it is legitimate in other aspects of life, there is nothing per se wrong wit it in religion.
What about “mysteries’ in certain Christian doctrines? Mysteries are themselves perfectly rational and coherent, our intellects are too limited to grasp them very deeply, so that they could not have been arrived at by unaided reason and require divine revelation. A three year old could not possibly discover by himself that people cannot breath on the moon; indeed he might not be able to understand how it could be true when you tell him. Still he does know from experience that you are trustworthy, so he believes it. That is exactly the sense in which Christianity claims we ought to have faith in the mysteries it teaches, precisely because we can know through reason that these mysteries have been revealed.
Now the problem of evil. The first premise that an all powerful and good God would prevent suffering is unjustifiable. It is part of the infinite goodness of God, that He should allow evil to exist, and out of it to produce good. God is infinite in power, knowledge, and all the rest—Pure Actuality, Being Itself, Goodness Itself, and so forth—and since human beings have immortal souls, so that our lives in the here-and-now are but a trivial blink of the eye compared to the eternity we are to enter there is not limit to the good result that might be made in the next life out of even the worst evils we suffer in this one. Romans 8:18, St. Paul says “the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us”.
The atheist argues in a circle. “There is no God because look at all this suffering that couldn’t possibly be outweighed by any good. How do I know there’s no good that could outweigh it? Oh, because there is no God.” if you think that’s a good argument, you need a logic course.
The atheist “can’t imagine” anything that might outweigh the sufferings of this life. If some creationist says he “can’t imagine” how an eyeball could have evolved (or whatever), Dawkins and Co. reply, quite reasonably that the limits of one person’s imagination don’t necessarily correspond to the limits of reality. Yet when the shoe is on the other foot, we’re supposed to take the limits of Dawkins’s imagination, or Hitchens’s, as infallible guide to what an infinite First Cause or Supreme Intelligence is capable of doing vis-à-vis bringing good out of evil.
In any event, it is precisely because of he abstraction and coldness of reason that a kind of faith is needed where evil is concerned. Faith is not emotional, it is an act of the will to follow reason’s lead when emotion might incline us to doubt.
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