The perspective that faith brings to life

For many people, faith is seen as the way of the simpleton. If a believer doesn’t understand something, then instead of doing the hard work of investigation, one can simply say, ‘What a mystery,’ all the while smiling gormlessly. Or so the story goes. Here, faith therefore takes on the character of an answer, and not a very good one at that.

But there is another way of looking at it. G.K. Chesterton once wrote:

What modern people want to be made to understand is simply that all argument begins with an assumption; that is, with something that you do not doubt. You can, of course, if you like, doubt the assumption at the beginning of your argument, but in that case you are beginning a different argument with another assumption at the beginning of it. Every argument begins with an infallible dogma, and that infallible dogma can only be disputed by falling back on some other infallible dogma; you can never prove your first statement or it would not be your first. All this is the alphabet of thinking…

Much of our chaos about religion and doubt arises from this–that our modern sceptics always begin by telling us what they do not believe. But even in a sceptic we want to know first what he does believe. Before arguing, we want to know what we need not argue about.

A recent article by Judith Wolfe on C.S. Lewis makes the same point, in relation to his religious awakening:

Lewis came to the same conclusion: without God, there is no problem of evil. We may certainly ask, “If God exists, why does he allow evil?” — but we cannot answer that there is no God, or that he is a “brute and blackguard” morally inferior to any ordinary human, without also giving up our own sense of the outrage of evil. For if there is a creator God at all, then human reason, desire and moral intuition have their source in Him no less than the material world does; and if there isn’t, then any moral standard available to us can only derive from the same material processes that govern evolution, and so cannot ground the sort of outrage at the world’s futility that is irreducibly experienced as unconditional and absolute rather than merely relative and practical.

When Lewis accepted theism and later Christianity, then, it was not so much because God was a foolproof answer to the problem of evil, as because He alone made it possible for us to experience evil as evil: to ask the sort of questions and feel the sorts of desire and indignation that define our human experience.

In both cases, whether what is spoken of is termed dogma or belief, faith takes on the character of a perspective. It is the position from which one can see what one is seeing. It is the ground that allows one to stand where one is. Or better yet: it is what allows one to say ‘Amen’ to all that is life.