Faith and evidence

Both the Tom Wright and Francis Collins stories illustrate an interesting phenomenon. People of faith seem to have remarkably little of it - they are always looking for evidence. You would have thought that they would have the faith the Bible exhorts them to. As Hebrews 11 says:

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. This is what the ancients were commended for.

By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God's command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible. By faith Abel offered God a better sacrifice than Cain did. By faith he was commended as a righteous man, when God spoke well of his offerings. And by faith he still speaks, even though he is dead.

And yet, those supposedly of faith are not prepared simply to say "I believe this, and I don't care what the evidence says." Instead, they see how science, by its careful marshalling of evidence, has gained great prestige in the eyes of the people as a way of explaining the world, and they want some of that prestige to rub off on them. So Creationists try to persuade us of the "evidence" of design, and theologians offer arguments to buttress the assertion of God's existence, and religious scientists talk of scientific discoveries making them feel that God's existence is more plausible.

If they were sufficiently secure in their faith they wouldn't need to bother with this. And if they were sufficiently certain, the example of their faith ought (by their own line of reasoning) to be sufficient to attract others to share in it. But they don't. Curious.

Atheism as a faith position

One common challenge made to atheists is that it is as much a faith position to believe in no God as it is to believe in God. There would be some justification for this except that there are a multiplicity of possible Gods, and even within a single religion such as Christianity people have radically conflicting understandings of God. I don't think that the God of (say) Pat Robertson and Rowan Williams are in any way compatible with each other. On what basis should one be chosen over another?

Some atheists get themselves in a terrible tangle over this, as can be seen in the comments over on Richard Dawkins' site when a copy of part of I'm an atheist, OK? was put up there. In order to claim that they are not making a faith position, they try to distinguish between believing in no God and not believing in any God. In both cases, the number of Gods in whose existence they believe in is zero, but they are trying by grammatical prestidigitation to claim that the first formulation isn't a faith position (as it is a lack of belief in a presence) even if the second arguably is (because it is a belief in an absence).

This is completely unnecessary. A belief isn't a faith position unless you hold it with a strength unjustified by the balance of the evidence. If you conclude that you are an atheist because the preponderance of the evidence points that way, then that isn't a faith position, whatever grammatical construction you use in order to express it.

My response to the claim that atheism is a faith position is that I will believe anything for which there is credible evidence, and I don’t award an exemption from this principle to God. As I’ve described in my CiF articles, I haven’t found any convincing evidence for God, though some people mistakenly think of many things as evidence which really aren’t.

Show me the evidence and I’ll change my mind.