How can a repentant sinner come to faith without rebutting every argument against the existence of God?

This week's God or Not Carnival is on the topic of faith. While I haven't seen the blog entries by our skeptical friends, I am relatively certain that at least a couple of their blogs will make the claim that Biblical faith is akin to "blind faith." In other words, looking at the definition of faith in the dictionary and seeing several viable options for defining Biblical faith in a way that it is consistent with reason, the typical skeptic will seize the following definition as the one that stands for Biblical faith: "Faith -- Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence."

Of course, such a view of faith is not what Biblical faith is all about. At the same time, I cannot say that their confusion is that difficult to understand since Biblical faith is a bit amorphous. So, giving the benefit of the doubt that our skeptical friends are not intentionally misrpresenting Biblical faith to set up a straw man to knock down, for the benefit of our skeptical friends, I thought I would take a couple of minutes to give them some idea of what Biblical faith is really all about.

Biblical faith can actually be broken into several different faith steps each with its individual characteristics that distinguish it from other aspects of faith in the church. However, none of the faith steps can be seen as belief that is divorced from a rational look at the Christian message. In order to keep this blog brief, I will only discuss the first type of faith held by a believer -- saving faith.

Saving faith is the first type of faith reached by most Christians. It is the faith described in Romans 10, for example, where the repentent person who believes in her heart and confesses with her lips that Jesus Christ is Lord, is saved. In other words, this is the faith of the person who first acknowledges that (1) they are a sinner, (2) they need a savior, and (3) Jesus is that savior (the "three basic facts of salvation"). This faith does not call for the person exercising it to "check their brain at the door" (as the Josh McDowell book so artfully described it). The repentent person should do so with a full intellectual assent to the three basic facts of salvation.

Now, when I say that a person has to have "full intellectual assent", I am not saying that a person must be able to counter arguments against apostolic authorship of the Gospels or be able to reconcile the alleged contradictions of the Gospel accounts of the resurrection. There is not a pop quiz to coming to this type of faith. What the person coming to this type of faith needs to understand intellectually is whatever is intellectually satisfying to that person at the time of the coming of the faith. This means that as long as they are personally satisfied at that time of the truth of the three basic facts of salvation, they are acting rationally.

In some cases, the repentent person may find himself coming to this faith despite the fact that confessing the three basic facts of salvation is contrary to what he may have believed to that point. For example, suppose that the repentent person has always contended that the Problem of Evil proves that there is no God. Does that repentent person have to have a full grasp of how it is that God can overcome the objection presented by the Problem of Evil in order to be intellectually fulfilled? No. A person can reject prior intellectual positions without fully grasping the reasons that they have rejected them. Certainly, many of us regularly reject positions that we intellectually held when new information comes in that makes the old position no longer tenable.

Here is an analogy for how this works: Suppose a policeman strongly believes that Johnny committed a particular murder because all of the known evidence pointed to the fact that Johnny committed the murder. Suppose further that new evidence arises which in no way effects the old evidence, but which makes it intellectually untenable to continue to believe that Johnny committed the murder such as a DNA test that shows Johnny could not have committed the murder? Did the policeman have to be able to explain why each part of the old evidence no longer shows that Johnny committed the murder to conclude that Johnny did not commit the murder in the light of the new evidence? No, all that he needs to do to come to a rationally based intellectual assent that Johnny did not commit the murder is to accept the new evidence. It can wait until later for him to figure out why the old evidence was pointing him in the wrong direction.

The same is true in the case of faith. When the repentent sinner comes to a realization of the truth of the three basic facts of salvation, it is generally the case that it is based on a new understanding of the situation that she had previously rejected. If the repentent sinner finds that in light of the new understanding that the three basic facts of salvation are true despite objecting to the truth of Christianity for years, does she need to intellectually disprove every claim before becoming a Christian in order to be rational in accepting Christianity? Of course not. All the repentent sinner must do is be convinced on an intellectual level that the new understanding or evidence is true and that the contrary evidence must therefore be wrong in order to be intellectually grounded in faith.

Now, a person who never confronts the old evidence is like a baby in the cradle for their lives. As they grown in faith, they should examine these claims and learn why they are specious. But there is no reason to believe that a person must confront and counter every argument before faith is not just "blind faith." Faith goes beyond "blind faith" the moment the repentent sinner is convinced of the truth of the Gospel.