Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, says in his book: "faith is little more than the shadow cast by our hope for a better life beyond the grave ." Such is the way that faith has been perceived in our society as of recently. Since the time of the Enlightenment, the general notion among our society is that we have outgrown the need for religious faith and have moved to a new era of evidence and empiricism. After all, nothing is a mystery anymore, is it? We have evidence supporting all of our claims; why would we ever need faith? It seems as if, in our society, faith has outlived its purpose. If anything, faith is extraordinarily damaging to society. Just think of the tens of thousands of death that have occurred in the meaningless name of faith. The attacks on the "faithful" have grown in number and power as our society advances onwards. But before we go too far, let us stop and analyze our situation. Are these attacks really justified? Can we say that the religious are the only ones who live among the "faithful?" Upon examination of our universe we actually find that everything, ironically even atheism ,requires a certain degree of faith. In fact, under scrutiny, we find not only that the Christian belief is rational and sensible, but also that it requires more faith to be an atheist than it does to be a Christian.
Today's atheists continuously point to the irrationality of reliance on faith. They claim, essentially, that belief in God, or, usually, in the supernatural in general, is mutually exclusive with reason. They make a key assertion here, however, that is not necessarily true. The atheistic belief relies on this premise: the absence of evidence of the evidence of absence. It seems sketchy because it is sketchy. Any true scientist will tell you that it is bad science. Just because you do not have evidence for a phenomenon does not mean that it is not occurring, especially in the age of microscopic science. Here is a demonstration. Let us suppose that I am a chemist, working in a laboratory performing a new experiment, and am combining two chemicals compounds into one. I expect a reaction to occur, but, then again, I have never performed this experiment before. I predict, when this reaction occurs, that it will change color. However, upon combining my compounds, I discover that I did not get the color change I was expecting. Can I then, take this as direct evidence that no reaction has occurred? Of course not. Such a reaction has never been performed before and further testing is needed to ensure that either no reaction has occurred or that a reaction has indeed occurred but has not manifested itself in the way that we expected. To take the absence of evidence and claim that it is evidence of absence is simply preposterous.
However, there is a response to such an argument. Many atheists are willing to claim that "absence of evidence" assertion does always hold true. They tend to provide the following counterexample. Suppose there are several people in a room. One of them claims that there is an huge pink elephant in the center of the room. The others, tentative to accept this because they see no elephant, decide to examine the situation further. They scope out the area where the alleged elephant resides and, upon examination, find no such elephant. They therefore conclude that, due to absence of evidence for the existence of the elephant, they have solid evidence for the elephant's nonexistence. This makes perfect sense. We could also apply this same response to the previous argument as well. If we performed further tests upon the solution resulting from combining the two compounds, just as we further examined the case of the elephant, we would indeed be able to say with certainty that, on account of absence of evidence, no reaction occurred. It seems then, that this assertion may hold true after all.
But although this maxim seems valid in all cases, we do run into a problem when bringing it into the realm of religion, faith, and God. The central problem we encounter is that the existence of God is intrinsically unverifiable. It cannot be subject to the "peering eyes" of science, as Edgar Allen Poe would say. There is no further testing we can perform in the case of absence of evidence. Nobody has come back from the dead to verify or refute the Christian claim of eternal life after death or the existence or nonexistence of God. It's not a realm in which we have or can we obtain any solid, irrefutable evidence. The atheist commonly, however, disregards this point, saying to himself that nothing can fall outside the realm of science and therefore God cannot exist because He would be outside the realm of science. This naive viewpoint ignores another manifest observation about the world. Not everything can fall under science's peering eyes. Take, for instance, relationships. Sociology and psychology can tell us a great deal about how relationships function and operate, but when it comes to actually interacting with other people, it is not a science, but a learned art. Science aims to disconfirm our hypothesis, rather than confirm them, but this would never work if we applied it to relationships. Relationships are built on trust; science, inherently, is a lack of trust without solid, irrefutable evidence. If a man were not to trust his wife when she said she loved him, but rather perform a series of tests until he could disconfirm it, eventually he would be able to. His incessant distrust would tear apart the relationship. Relationships are not a realm in which science can dwell, and if that is the case, it should not be surprising that God , who, according to Christian teaching, desires a relationship with us, should also lie outside this realm. It is by nature unverifiable, and therefore, no matter which side you choose, you must make a leap of faith, whether you be an atheist or a theist.
This, however, is not the only leap of faith that the atheist takes. There is also an illegitimate metaphysical assumption involved in their argument. When I say atheist in this case, I am referring specifically to those who hold science as the absolute and promote the theory that human beings merely came into existence through evolution of the natural world; God had no part in it. The atheists in this reference are those of the mindset of Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris. I feel this distinction necessary to make because there is no "doctrine" of atheism. There is only one prerequisite, and that is the denial of God's existence. Anything else is up for grabs. One could believe that souls are constantly resurrected; one could believe they are mortal; one could believe that humans are the epitome of nature; or one could believe that humans are the filth of nature, ruining its beauty. There is no standard of belief that the atheist must abide by to be one other than the denial of God's existence. The most common ground for atheism, however, it seems is empirical one. We can explain everything in terms of science, and so we need no God anymore. God was just an illusion to begin with. We are now using science to fill in the holes that God used to fill; now He is obsolete.
This assumption rests on science as the absolute truth. Any hole that we have ever had in nature can be filled by science. Any hole we have ever had in ourselves can be filled with psychology. With science, there are no holes now, are there? It may appear that way, but if we examine science itself, we find that the very foundations of it on its own are rather shaky. Science on its own makes a key assumption that it has no authority to make. It assumes that the universe is entirely rational, has always been so, and shall always be so. The universe acts according to a given set of laws, and those laws are inalterable and can be predicted with extreme accuracy. However, this assumption itself has no solid basis. There is no reason to believe that this is the case except "it has never failed us before." The assertion that only the physical world exists and it is rational is itself a metaphysical assertion. There is no proof that we can point to telling us that the universe is rational, and much less that we can understand it. It is logical to assert that a rational mind could have evolved via natural selection, for a rational mind would have helped enormously in a rational world. However, there is no way to test this theory. There also exists a deductive argument proving that our self-consciousness cannot be a result of a merely physical mechanism, but we shall save it for another place and time. In short, then, although it may be rational to believe that the universe is rational, ultimately there exists no proof for it and can be no proof of it. It is intuitively known and understood, but then again this is a leap of faith. I am not saying that it is irrational or wrong by any means to believe in the absolute rationality and order of the universe. In fact, it is entirely logical. I am merely saying that to some degree it is a leap of faith. Whether you be a theist or an atheist, you cannot prove it, but only "know" it. You can try to rationalize it and come up with explanations, but ultimately, you can never know for certain. To claim, therefore, that it is only the theist who relies upon faith is simply ludicrous, for the absolute order of the universe can never be truly proven. Faith plays a role on both sides.
We have now asserted that it takes just as much faith to be an atheist as it does to be a theist. But that faith is not entirely blind, and there are rational reasons to believe in atheism. However, there are also legitimate reasons to believe in Christianity. The playing field is even here. Let's start with the history. Nobody can deny that Jesus Christ existed. Historians of all religious beliefs acknowledge that he walked the earth, had followers, and was crucified under Pontius Pilate. Jesus made a claim about himself; He asserted that He was the Son of God. Now if this is the case, there are only three possibilities. Either he was a liar, a madman, or truly the Son of God. There is no other alternative. One of Dawkins's claims is that perhaps he was just honestly mistaken. This cannot be. Jesus did not tentatively say "I think I'm the Son of God" and stand behind his row of disciples to protect himself from the mobs. He stood up on the mountain and proclaimed it, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. He who believes in me will never die," and he died for it. If he was "honestly mistaken,", it would fall under the category of lunatic, not this non-existent category. This means that if he was not the Son of God, then he was either a liar or a madman, in which case every Christian in the world is entirely misguided in almost every belief. However, the case does not end at his death. His disciples all also claimed that He rose from the dead. A fairly tall tale. But let's examine the situation. Jesus' resurrection would be a miracle, and the probability of his rising from the dead must be weighed against the probability of the disciples being mistaken or lying and be greater than it. Firstly, all eleven of the remaining disciples as well as Mary Magdelene and Mary, his mother, saw him simultaneously, and all reported the same thing. Group hallucinations are not easily explained. In the case of such large hallucinations, in front of several different people, it is entirely more plausible that the miracle actually happened than they were all misguided. However, the possibility still remains that they were all lying. People tend to lie, however, for their own benefit. The disciples literally gave up everything and dedicated themselves to Christ's ministry, gaining no wealth from it at all. In addition, eleven of the twelve were martyred brutally for the faith. The only one who died naturally was the one whom Christ predicted would, John. Taking this into consideration, it is also rational to say that it is more plausible that the disciples really had seen this resurrected Christ than were lying about it. They had nothing to gain whatsoever if it was false, and everything to gain if it was true. Thus, we find that it is actually more plausible that Christ's claims were valid than not, and thus faith in him is not without basis.
Not only can we say that Christ's divinity and claims are true based on his claims and those of his disciples, but there have also been countless, valid miracles performed in his name. Take for instance the Lady of Guadalupe, a Mexican tapestry of the Virgin Mary which apparated miraculously when roses were placed on a tilma and then removed in the 16th century. Similar pieces of artwork using the same type of tilma were only expected to last fifteen years, however this image has lasted over five hundred without blemish. It recovered itself in 1791 from an ammonia spill which made a considerable hole. Within two weeks, the image was complete once again. In 1921, and arsonist hid a bomb amongst several flowers in its shrine. The bomb destroyed the entire shrine, but the image remained untouched. In 1936, Richard Kuhn, who received the 1938 Nobel Chemistry prize, analyzed a sample of the fabric and concluded that the tint on the fabric causing the image was not from any known mineral, vegetable, or animal source. In 1979, Philip Serna Callahan studied the icon with an infrared light and determined that the face, hands, mantle, and robe had been painted in one step with no paintbrush strokes, sketch lines, or other corrections. In addition, apparitions of Christ's mother still happen daily in Medjugorje and have been happening as such since the 1980's. She appears regularly to seven different individuals and, on one occasion, the children even managed to tape-record her voice. These, and countless other real, miraculous events are documented. The apostles performed miracles, and similar ones continue to this day. Faith should not be based on miracles, but they do give evidence to the fact that Christianity's claim is a valid one.
In conclusion, we can say with at least scientific certainty that faith is required on behalf of both the atheist and the theist. Not only is such faith required on both halves, but they are actually required in relatively similar amounts, since atheism is a leap of faith on top of its reason and Christianity does have valid arguments to back up its claims. The playing field is even here, no matter what claims are made about the "irrational faith" of Christianity or even theism in general.