By Dr. Tanya Paynter
Growing up, my teachers told me that I couldn’t bring my faith into the classroom because science has no room for religion. My church leaders told me that I couldn’t accept scientific findings when they conflicted with biblical teaching. For years, I sought a way to reconcile the two because holding them as opposites made no sense to me if God created both Scripture and the natural world.
It wasn’t until much later that I learned about the Two Books Metaphor. Thought to have originated in the 200s AD, it states that all knowledge is revealed, either as general (natural) revelation or special (specific) revelation.1 General revelation includes the idea that God is revealed through creation and that we can understand God through the workings of the natural world. This is the realm of science, pursued intensively by scientists such as Kepler, Galileo, and Newton. Special revelation is what is revealed to us about God through Scripture or personal interactions. Neither was meant to be a substitute for the other, but were different ways to explore God, with different purposes.
Society, and sadly, many churches, tell us that faith and reason exist as opposites. At some point, we’re expected to choose between facts and Scripture. But neither Scripture nor the natural world supports that division. So what exactly is the relationship between facts and faith? What if facts were something we could provide for our rational mind, while faith is what God supplies to us in our search for truth?
It turns out, the Bible supports the idea that facts and faith are both necessary for a deep and abiding relationship with the Lord. Let’s take a look at these two complementary aspects of our search for God.
Facts: What We Bring to the Table
Every meaningful relationship requires the participation of both parties. If we apply this principle to our relationship with God, it stands to reason that both God and humans have a certain level of responsibility in the growth of our individual relationships.
Facts fall under the human responsibility in this equation. God has designed both our brains and the natural world in such a way that we can discover, know, observe, test, and reason toward a certain level of understanding. Facts are intentionally observable and, as we learn more, we refine our knowledge of the natural world and, through it, God.
Facts matter deeply for the Christian faith. God never expected us to blindly believe. In fact, he invites us to reason with him (Isa. 1:18, 43:26) and gives us Scriptural examples of men of the faith doing exactly this (Job 23:4, 6–7, Acts 18:4).
The Christian worldview relies on claims that can be supported with evidence. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ are claims that can be examined and evaluated. History, psychology, anthropology, textual criticism, and archeology provide a cumulative case for the resurrection as being more likely true than not. Philosophy, physics, and astronomy have provided us with knowledge of the fine-tuning of the universe and the theory of Intelligent Design, pointing to the existence of God as the most logical explanation for the origins of the universe and life.
At the same time, facts alone are incomplete. We can make observations and develop theories based on these explanations but there are limits to what empirical evidence can account for. Facts cannot explain why we long for meaning. They cannot give us reasons for the existence of a moral code or why being loved carries such weight beyond survival. They do not explain our need for a life of meaning and purpose. These are deeper longings that facts cannot answer. Facts remain surface-level observations — obvious things which lead us to begin a deeper exploration of reality. They can bring us only so far, and then we are left trying to fill the gaps of meaning.
Even non-theists acknowledge this difficulty with the naturalistic approach of using only that which can be observed. Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Camus, and Thomas Nagel all addressed the conflict between the human need for meaning and the idea that in a naturalistic universe, nothing ultimately matters.
This struggle to make sense of facts points towards something more than what we can strictly observe with our senses.
Where Facts Lead Us
Scripture affirms that reason plays a role in drawing us toward God. Isaiah 1:18 invites us: “Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord.” Romans 1:18–21 and Psalm 19:1 teach us that God’s attributes are clearly perceived in creation. Paul reasoned with both Jews and Greeks, appealing to evidence and logic (Acts 17:17). He went on to say that man should “seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him” (Acts 17:27).
We are to seek God with all our heart (Jer. 29:13, Deut. 4:29, Ps. 119:2). In Hebrew, the word for heart, lebab, refers to the inner being of a person, the part of man that encompasses thought, emotion, and will.2
Facts, reason, and our mind prepare the way for us to discover God but that’s just the start. A factual knowledge of the Lord is not a saving knowledge. It is entirely possible to accept the facts of Christianity and still remain unchanged. We can believe that Christ was a real person and a wise teacher. We can agree that, rationally, the evidence points to his resurrection. All of this is good and prepares our heart to accept him, but it does not get us all the way there. Facts may open the door, but they cannot make someone walk through it.
Faith: What God Supplies
This is where God works in a way we cannot accomplish through our own effort. When we have shown our desire to know him, to seek him by following where the facts lead with an open heart, God provides the faith. It is not something we can produce on our own through effort, intelligence, or investigation; it is a gift given by God.
“For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God” (Eph. 2:8).
John Calvin argues that faith is produced by the Holy Spirit, “assigning to everyone a measure of faith, not the intellect.” 3 Blaise Pascal argues that seeing God in nature is impossible without faith: “These folk who are without faith and without grace, if they try by their own best lights to find in nature something that can bring them to this knowledge of God, will find only darkness and shadows.” 4 Faith is not irrational; it is suprarational, going beyond what reason alone can uncover. This is where the misunderstanding between fact and faith really lies; we do not move from evidence to faith as though faith were the final logical conclusion. Instead, we move from evidence to reasonable belief. God meets us there with the final piece we need to step into a relationship with Christ—faith.
C.S. Lewis succinctly captures the role of faith when he writes, “Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes.” 5 We are not purely rational creatures. Our Creator knows how our emotions and beliefs may fluctuate. Faith holds us steady when those shifts occur. It allows us to trust God and begin the long process of surrender to his will. It begins to change our knowledge into wisdom. As our wisdom grows, our relationship with God grows, and so too does our faith grow. This is how we move from a “baby Christian” into a mature Christian full of godly wisdom. It is a balance of the facts that prepared our heart to receive Christ and grow in our knowledge and understanding of who he is and the faith that he provides to keep us steady and anchored in truth.
Conclusion
As Christians and apologists, we must be intensely aware of the trap of the two extremes. On the one side is blind fideism, rejecting observable reality in favor of our interpretation of Scripture (and it is important to specify our interpretation because while Scripture is inerrant, our understanding of it is not). We cannot deny what we can observe. Facts are important. If we ignore them, we run the risk of sounding irrational and misrepresenting belief in God as irrational. We also cannot be blind to the fact that humans cannot know everything through empirical evidence alone. This short-sighted view reveals an intellectual hubris that prevents us from knowing the mysteries of God (1 Cor. 2:7–8). The question is, how do we encourage non-believers in their pursuit of the knowledge of God without falling into one or the other of these extremes?
Our goal should not be conversion to Christianity. That role belongs to the Holy Spirit. Instead, we can be a resource to answer questions and clarify doubts. Encourage the unbeliever to start with the facts. Point them to historical and scientific evidence that supports the Christian worldview as the most rational explanation of our existence. Seek to understand their doubts and questions and address their objections, including the emotional and volitional objections that may be underlying the intellectual ones.
And finally, and most importantly, pray. Ask the Holy Spirit to move them towards understanding and acceptance. The final step is taken by the Holy Spirit when the heart is ready.
We were made for both fact and faith. It is not one or the other, but both combined that bring us into a relationship with Christ and deepens our understanding of who God is, strengthening our relationship as we mature in our faith.
Notes:
- Paul Copan, Tremper Longman III, Christopher L. Reese, and Michael G. Strauss, eds, Dictionary of Christianity and Science (Zondervan, 2017), 666-667.
- W. E. Vine, Vine’s Concise Dictionary of Bible Words (T. Nelson Publishers, 1999), 174.
- Jean Calvin and John Allen, Institutes of the Christian Religion (Vol. 1 of 2) (Gutenberg Project, 2014), 655.
- Blaise Pascal, The Project Gutenberg eBook of Pascal’s Pensées, collected by Léon Brunschvicg (Dutton & Co., 1958), 242.
- C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Touchstone, 1996), 125.