source: Jimmy MacBounds

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence. Richard Dawkins, 1992

The proofs of God’s existence… can predispose one to faith and help one to see that faith is not opposed to reason. Catechism

Pope John II, 1998, ‘Faith and Reason’ – ‘Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth – in a word, to know himself – so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to fullness of truth about themselves….in the far reaches of the human heart there is a seed of desire and nostalgia for God.’ Philosophy is one of the noblest of human tasks’ which is ‘driven by the desire to discover the ultimate truth of existence….The truth made known to use by Revelation is neither the product not the consumption of an argument devised by human reason’

‘And the proper response to revelation is . . faith, faith being not an intellectual assent to general truths, but the decisive commitment of the whole person in active obedience to, and quiet trust in, the divine will apprehended as rightfully sovereign and utterly trustworthy at one and the same time.’ HH Farmer (1935)

 Faith … is not a kind of stretched belief, or assent to a set of dogmas without sufficient evidence. It is the basic intuitive awareness of God experienced as actively approaching humanity and seeking the human response of acknowledgement and trust. Peter Donovan

 “Then Jesus told him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” John 20:29

 “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” Hebrews 11:1

‘For Kierkegaard, because of human sinfulness and the whole otherness of God, God’s truth and human thought can never be smoothed out into a rational synthesis.  Instead, the paradoxical truths of God’s self-revelation must be embraced in a leap of faith by the finite human mind.’ Grenz/Olsen