Christians are often accused of using ‘faith’ as opposed to ‘reason’ — which (it is said) thinking people use. But in fact, it’s quite the opposite. We will see in this article that ‘all truth is God’s truth’.
Last month, we saw that Christians and non-Christians alike use faith, reason and evidence in forming their view of the world. Christians exercise ‘true’ faith, whereas others exercise ‘false faith’ — faith in something other than God’s true revelation. We began to explore the idea that Christians alone have true knowledge (cf. Proverbs 1.7). How then do we explain the apparent success of non-Christians in making great advances in many fields of knowledge — most obviously, the natural sciences?
The answer is that for centuries Christian and non-Christian thinkers in the West have been building on the foundation of Christian faith. In his important book The Victory of Reason (Random House, 2005), Rodney Stark argues that it is no coincidence that commerce, modern science, capitalism, just rule of law and political freedom arose systemically in the Christian West. They occurred because, in the early centuries after Christ, Christian thinkers were unique in combining faith in reason with faith in progress (that is, that history is moving forward, rather than in cycles).1
