RWC,
Jesus' statement was not an endorsement of blind superstition over sound skepticism. To say that you would have to have proof that Jesus believed that faith in him was blind supertistion which he clearly did not believe. The statement was directed to those throught he ages who would not have the benefit of seeing him in the flesh yet who would trust him for their salvation. It was an encouragement to those, not a criticism of Thomas.
It was at best a mild rebuke for Thomas. Christians have almost universally believed that Thomas' demand for hard evidence reflected something negative about his character. He is called "the doubter", and it is not intended as a compliment.
Contrary to what you assert, John's Jesus did say that those who accepted the claims about his resurrection on hearsay were better than those who demanded evidence. That is there for all to see.
It is important to analyze this as a literary piece. It was devised to discourage doubt and encourage faith without sufficient evidence. Now, "belief without sufficient evidence" is precisely the defintion of "blind faith" as I see it. Thus, Jesus encouraged blind faith. Whether Jesus believed in himself is a moot point.
As for faith, whether you are religious or not you have faith in your everyday life. It takes faith that the pilot is trained and can fly the plane to get on one, it takes faith that the pills you take were properly made, are safe, properly prescribed and are needed to cure any ailment, it takes faith that the food you eat meets the safety standards of your country and is safe for consumption. In everything you do you are exhibitng faith that people have or will do what they say they have done or will do. You are demonstrating trust.
This is merely a game with words. Yes, I believe the sun will rise tomorrow. This is based on personal experience of this having happened thousands of times, and pretty solid evidence that it has happened billions of times. The probability of it not happening tomorrow is so small I reject it as an irrelevance.
All our "normal" beliefs are based on estimating probabilities. Some claims do not require strong evidence. If a friend tells us, say, he has met another mate at a specific place, and talked about so-and-so, this is the kind of information we accept. We have experienced that this friend is trustworthy, and there is really nothing spectacular about the story. To compare this to "faith" (in the religious sense) is strongly misleading.
On the other hand, perhaps this same, reasonably trustworthy friend told you he had met Elvis. Now, since we know Elvis is dead (at least most of us do) this is a pretty extraordinary claim. As such, we would be unlikely to believe that our friend was telling the truth. Depending on our experience with him or her, we'd conclude there was a msitake, a joke, or even delusion behind this story. Why? Because we live by the rule that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
This is a skeptic's slogan, but it simply formulates what we all do in our daily lives. This is how we evaluate information into various degrees of probability, based on our previous experience. It has nothing to do with "faith."
When it comes to religion, however, people seem to follow a totally different set of rules. The common sensical skepticism we all have, to a greater or lesser degree, goes out the window. Obviously, in religion some very strong social and psychological mechanisms makes us accept even the wildest claim on very thin evidence indeed. That is religious faith!
You cannot divorce faith from religion just as you cannot do so in everyday life. But that doesn't mean that faith in a religion is by definition blind. As for Christianity, that type of blind faith is not necessary nor is it encouraged in most demoninations. Christianity is a religion that is based upon historical evidence, documented facts and secular confirmations of events. It encourages the growth of faith by reading the Bible, worshipping and praying.
I agree that in theory, religious faith did need to be blind. In some cases, perhaps, it is not. But when we talk about the resurrection of Christ, which is an extraordinary claim par excellence, we are definately talking belief in an extraordinary, supernatural event, and the belief is based on evidence that is somewhere between flimsy and non-existent. We've had a number of threads on this subject on this board, this included, and anyone can see with their own eyes that there simply is no such thing as "historical evidence, documented facts and secular confirmations" of the resurrection. We have wildly superstitious, inconsistent writings that were produced decades after the alleged events by people who do not even claim to have seen it with their own eyes.
Even commonplace claims would be very questionable in such circumstances, and when the claims are of an extraordinary nature, there is simply no basis whatsoeevr for taking them seriously.
The best explanation of faith in the Bible is Hebrews 11 where Paul says that faith is a trust in what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. This comes from hearing the message.
Certainty based on hearsay. It is obvious that the "certainty" is created through emotion and social/psychological processes, and has nothing to do with a sober evaluation of evidence.
It is no different than the faith exhibited in everyday life or in some aspects of science. For example, take the theory of evolution. Even a cursury study will reveal that it is based upon the idea that though it cannot be proven yet it will be in the future and even though we do not know what creature first lived or how the mutations occurred we are confident they did, even if we have to base the theory on unproven science and on a disbelieve in some of the science we believe in today. Believe in the theroy of evolution is faith at its finest, yet any one who touts its validity is not promoting the idea of gullability. That appears to be left to those who promote faith in God.
This is totally untrue, and as an example of "faith" it backfires horribly. Evolution is based on an overwhelming amount of hard evidence. It is based on more than a century of corraborating evidence from anthropology, geology, biochemistry, genetics and a host of other sciences. You seem to base your beliefs on fundamentalist propaganda, and betray a total lack of knowledge of the subject matter. I encourage you to check out the facts for yourself before pursuing this line of thought further.
The almost universal acceptance of evolution, to which science was initially skeptical (as it should be) was precisely because Darwin and others were able to put forth evidence, extraordinary evidence even. And today, we have had other sciences, genetics in particular, confirming evolution to such a degree that nobody aware of the evidence can sanely reject the fact of evolution.
If you really want to debate evolution, I suggest you open a new thread, as it really has very little to do with the supernatural events described in the New Testament.
- Jan
