The Strength of Blind Faith

(This post is going to serve as a prelude to me reading Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript. I want to see how it changes my perspective on faith, and so before I read those I want to record my current thoughts.)

    The term "blind faith" has a lot of negative connotations. "Blindness" presumes willful ignorance in favor of comfortable lies, and that to believe without evidence fundamentally requires rejecting reality. It's natural that people want evidence, something material to cling on to in the face of doubt. For many, that need is filled by apologetics, or by anti-science Biblical literalism, or by the threat of being condemned to Hell making doubt too dangerous to fall into.

    However, this fear of doubt is misguided. Ironically, it requires the rewriting and rejecting of reality to fit a certain narrative of faith which requires worldly proof. No faith can be resolute if it contradicts the real world, and that is the benefit of blind faith.

    When belief isn't beholden to a need for validation it can much more easily coexist with reality. Endless attempts have been made to justify creationism, or a flat earth, or some comprehensible logical morality behind the problem of evil: they have all been wrong. Believing based on these things leads to a worldview inconsistent with material reality. Perhaps it didn't for a long time, but as science advances and we learn more objective truths about the world, Christians must adopt a stance which doesn't have any room for conflicting with either and which cannot be disproven, at the cost of not being able to be proven, either.

    This isn't some cynical pragmatism or the rejection of science, but merely the acceptance of reality. As we progress towards a better understanding of our world, we must accept that more and more metaphysical truths were not as easy to grasp as we thought they were. There is no true evidence of God except the words of the prophets, and there is no evidence that those words were true except that they resonate with us so strongly. If God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent, and we are not, then we can never even come close to fully understanding God beyond what we have been told directly by Him.  We are all blind, and our faith must be, too.

    Christians must no longer accept God as an explained phenomenon, but instead as an immaterial postulate: despite our blindness, we must know, with the same conviction we know that grass is green and the sky is blue, that God is real. All our further reasoning must come from this unevidenced knowledge.

    Questions and doubts of faith can become much easier to solve. My prime example is the problem of evil: if we know for a fact that God exists and is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent, and we know that evil exists in the world, we know there is an answer. The acceptance that we are blind means that we can accept if the answer is unknown to us, but we never need doubt that there's an answer somewhere. We are not any of those three things, and so we may simply be unable to comprehend the reason for them. The failure of apologetics is trying to apply our mortal, sinful reasoning to that which is neither.

    Contrary to what some might think, this doesn't make theology or philosophy useless, because trying to understand is still important. All of us undoubtedly can't comprehend God, but failing to do so doesn't invalidate the attempt, in the same way our sinful nature dooming us to failure doesn't make trying to be good Christians worthless. While our model of God and the Trinity is most likely wrong, it's the closest we can get, and that's fine. If God knows and understands all, then He understands why we can never understand Him, and if He is infinitely loving and merciful, He forgives that. It's only by trying to understand God that we can try to be good Christians, and even if we're doomed to fail, it's the trying that matters.

    Some might ask, "why even believe?", which is a fair question. They may feel that, with such a flimsy justification for believe, there can't be any reason to. However, do the people who believe in a justified God not also suffer doubts? Is their worldview which explicitly denies reality any more coherent? Of course not. We merely accept that the reason for our belief is internal rather than external, that we know it to be true without it needing to be proven to us.

    With blind faith, we accept that we may suffer doubts, but those doubts will never be caused by undeniable external evidence. We will already have the tools to reject that doubt because they're the same that led us to believe in the first place. It's better to have a perspective that's harder to believe than one that objectively can't be true.