Faith and Reason

So yesterday I mentioned two books, for now I will write about one, The Reason for God by Tim Keller. I was given this book by my youth pastor because I am a graduating senior and going on to college. To be honest I was a bit disappointed. I thought “Oh great, another book full of ‘reasons’ but no faith.” Lately I’ve been pretty heavy on faith, almost to the point of rejecting reason. I “reasoned” to myself that faith is supreme, to bring up an old example of my fear of spiders, no amount of fact can change what I firmly believe: that is I will be bitten. Here’s the thing I’ve realized, and once again C.S. Lewis comes to the rescue. For my senior quote I chose a nugget of wisdom from C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity “Faith…is the art of holding on to something your reason once accepted despite your changing moods.” While faith is necessary for a belief in God and Christianity, reason too is needed. While you can never absolutely prove the existence of God (you can’t prove He doesn’t exist either), you still need reason. Without reason you engage in blind belief, you go along with something half-heartedly without even thinking about it. Not only is this not the way to go, it is a dangerous way to live life. Faith is not a substitute for reason; it is as the book of Hebrews puts it “being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” So then, reason is what we use when we initially believe in something and faith keeps us believing. I suppose that reason and faith both make up belief, without reason you engage yourself in blindness and without faith you have no hope of believing for a long time; I guess for an image, reason is a spark to a fire but faith is the addition of wood to keep it going.