Sir Isaac Newton.

The work of this great English scientist (1643 - 1727) in optics, astronomy, maths and physics lay the foundations of modern science. Until the scientific revolution of the 20th century, many thought that Newton had provided the complete explanation for the working of the universe, and from then on the only role of science was to fill in the details.

Newton was also a man of faith. 

He devoted as much of his time to Bible study as to science. He was fascinated by Bible prophecy. He was not merely conforming to the spirit of his times, which was an age of rationalism and skepticism - and his Christian beliefs were  unorthodox  (he rejected, for example, the doctrine of the Trinity). He expected the literal return of Christ to the earth to establish his kingdom.

So where would this great man, this giant of science, stand today, when faith has been attacked and ridiculed by a small but vocal group of scientists? Science, we are told, has delivered us from the superstition of religion, and proved God to be unnecessary. Faith is a relic of past ignorance, atheism is the only rational way forward. Newton himself had some quite rude things to say about atheists. He, like many of the early scientists who were also Christians, believed that the universe could be investigated precisely because it had been created by a rational mind, and therefore behaved in a logical way that could be analysed and explained. Scientists were “ thinking God’s thoughts after him” was the famous phrase used by Kepler.

The modern challenge to religion from Richard Dawkins and others has attacked the quality of faith itself, attempting to redefine the very meaning of the word faith in a quite arbitrary and unprecedented way. “Faith” he says “is the great copout, the great excuse to avoid the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of the lack of evidence... Faith is not allowed to justify itself by argument”.

Is there any substance to such immoderate and bizarre claims?

Faith everyday

Faith is a quality expressed in many different ways in everyday life.  Its religious aspect is just a specific, limited application of a universal human quality. Faith means trust, belief, confidence –“confident belief in the truth and trustworthiness of a person, concept or thing” (wiktionary). Everybody needs faith of some sort - it is impossible to go through life without at some time trusting someone or something. We trust people: our partners, our family, our friends. We trust institutions: the government, the forces of law and order, financial institutions, etc etc. In all sorts of ways we entrust aspects of our lives to people and organizations outside our control. ‘No man is an island’ - we cannot live our lives in splendid, self-sufficient isolation from the rest of humanity - it’s just not possible, let alone desirable.

But why do we trust one person and not another? Why do we put money in one bank and not another? Because of our past experience and knowledge. If we trust somebody we don’t really know, then we can hardly be surprised if they let us down. If our investments lose money because we haven’t done our homework properly, then we may have only ourselves to blame. Our confidence needs to be based on knowledge. We may well be influenced by prejudice and sentiment, but basically our confidence, our faith, needs evidence, a rational foundation.

Faith then in everyday life is based on evidence, on experience,. We have faith in other people because we think we know them, we believe we can rely on their support in the future because of their support in the past. We trust organizations because of what we know about them, their past record giving us confidence in their future performance. Belief and confidence without evidence is just stupidity and credulity - “blind faith” in other words. That very expression implies that there is a faith which is not blind - genuine faith based on evidence.

Religious faith

We move from life in general, to faith in its religious sense. Is it really something entirely different to the everyday variety of faith that we have been talking about?  Here is a christian definition of faith, published in 1930:

“Faith affects the whole of man’s nature. It commences with the conviction of the mind based on adequate evidence; it continues in the confidence of the heart or emotions based on conviction, and it is crowned in the consent of the will, by means of which the conviction and confidence are expressed in conduct.”     W.H.Griffith-Thomas 1861 -1924 

"Evidence” is the foundation. It is the word used by the apostle Paul in his famous definition of faith:

“now faith is the substance (confidence) of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”

Hebrews 11: 1  KJV

Evidence is just as much a requirement for religious faith as it is for faith of the everyday variety. What is different is the things that we place our faith in. Instead of the people we see every day, we are asked to place our faith in a supreme being who is literally invisible to us, and whose voice we cannot hear in any literal sense. Christians are asked to place their trust in his Son, whom we know only through records written nearly 2000 years ago, whom also we cannot literally see or hear. Hence Paul’s words about “things not seen”. But the necessity for evidence is just as real, perhaps more so, because the objects of our trust are so much more important, and the consequences for us of our faith in them so far-reaching.

The evidence for Christianity

The big question is, if faith without evidence is not genuine faith at all, what is the evidence for the fundamentals of the Christian religion? Note first of all that Christianity is different to other major world religions, in that it is dependent on a series of (what are claimed to be) historical events. It is not a philosophy , a social programme or a system of morality - it is the story of a God who is intimately concerned with events on this planet, who has intervened directly in human history through the life, death and resurrection of one very special human being, Jesus Christ. These events, if they are indeed historical, should stand up to the same test as other events from the same period - the evidence for them should be of the same type.

The apostle Paul tells us that there is one event in particular on which Christianity stands or falls: the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

“If Christ is not risen, then our preaching is empty and your faith is also empty... if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are yet in your sins!”                    

I Corinthians 15.14-17

The early Christians were not followers of Jesus because they admired his character or were swayed by his charisma.  They accepted Jesus because they claimed to be eyewitnesses of his resurrection, or, if they had not seen him themselves, they believed the first-hand testimony of others who had. The apostle Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus was not some ecstatic or mystical experience - he says he saw and heard the risen Christ, and was left with temporary blindness, a physical reminder of the reality of his experience. He refers to more than 500 people who also had seen the risen Christ (I Cor. 15.6) most of whom were still alive when he wrote. Nearly 2000 years later their eyewitness testimony has been preserved in the New Testament for our benefit. How can we assess its value? Are the source documents authentic and reliable? Is this evidence that we can trust, and place our faith in? Volumes could be and have been written on this subject, but here are the conclusions of two people, both members of the legal profession, used to weighing up evidence: