Re: Re: Faith: rational or irrational?

[djf500@york.ac.uk]

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Hi,

Reply to Matt on 'passive' God.  

I'm struggling with the idea of a passive/interventionist God. I'm not sure 
it's that clear cut. If Godly intervention is the normal run of things, and 
appears as a force of nature, then I think what I said about the difficulty 
of interpreting evidence for/against still goes because I can't see how a 
naturalised (please don't attack me - I don't use this term technically 
here!) Godly intervention would be distinguishable from 'normal' events. 
The only type of 'empirical' evidence for God that I can imagine is a 
genuine 'Hi i'm God...'[booming voice] situation, and even then we might 
not believe Him. But this rather unsubtle God doesn't appear to crop up 
much with believers.

As for what this does to 'faith', i'm not sure. First we might think that 
because God (apart from the unsubtle version) does not leave a trail of 
evidence, that means that faith has to be irrational. But that goes if we 
think 'rational' means 'based on evidence'. If we try to say that then we 
are committed, surely, to explaining the idea of 'evidence', and solving 
the problem of getting our foot on the ladder as to how to interpret 
evidence. If 'faith' is something that takes place *here*, rather than 
after the 'evidence' debate, then it seems that faith is just as rational 
as, for example, belief in the external world, or the willingness to accept 
logical principles as binding.

Cheers,
Daniel 


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