Is Faith Really Better Than Doubt? Exploring the Truth Behind Belief and Skepticism ✨

How Can I Possibly Believe That Faith Is Better Than Doubt?<br />St. Paul wrote that if Jesus was not resurrected from the dead, the Christian faith is “futile”<br />and followers of Jesus are “of all people most to be pitied.”<br />Christians would say, in fact, that reason is affirmed in Scripture — “Come now, and let us reason together,” is how the prophet Isaiah puts it — and<br />that faith properly understood is consistent with and deepens our understanding of reality.<br />As the pastor Tim Keller told me, “Most of the things we most deeply believe in<br />— for example, human rights and human equality — are not empirically provable.”<br />“The supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason,” is how Blaise Pascal put it.<br />According to Philip Yancey, the author of “The Jesus I Never Knew,” “Faith requires the possibility of rejection, or it is not faith.”<br />Perhaps the key to understanding why faith is prized within the Christian tradition is<br />that it involves trust that would not be needed if the existence of God were subject to a mathematical proof.<br />“Faith without reason risks descending into superstition; reason without faith builds a world without windows, doors or skylights.”<br />But faith itself, while not the converse of reason, is still distinct from it.