The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism by Edward Feser

Author:Edward Feser [Feser, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781587314520
Publisher: St. Augustine's Press
Published: 2012-08-14T14:00:00+00:00

Faith, reason, and evil

This brings us to the problem of evil, about which I need say only a little. For while that problem is beyond question of the utmost difficulty and seriousness from the point of view of practical human life, as a defense of atheism, the “argument from evil” is completely worthless. This is where faith of a sort at long last enters our discussion, though not in the way secularists think it would. For faith, properly understood, does not contradict reason in the least; indeed, in the present context it is nothing less than the will to keep one’s mind fixed precisely on what reason has discovered to it.

Let us digress for a moment, then, and elaborate on the nature of faith and its relationship to reason, argument, and evidence; then we’ll return to the problem of evil. Aquinas famously characterized the sorts of arguments we’ve been examining so far as praeambula fidei or “preambles of faith.” What did he mean by this?

The arguments we’ve been examining, if successful, show that pure reason can reveal to us that there is a God, that we have immortal souls, and that there is a natural moral law. These claims are, of course, elements in the teaching of the main monotheistic religions. But those religions also go beyond these elements, and claim access to further knowledge about God, the destiny of the human soul, and the content of our moral duties, which derive from a revelation from God. Does belief in such a revelation go beyond reason? Is this where faith comes in? The answer, again, is no . . . or at least, not necessarily. For the claim that a divine revelation has occurred is something for which the monotheistic religions typically claim there is evidence, and that evidence takes the form of a miracle, a suspension of the natural order that cannot be explained in any way other than divine intervention in the normal course of events. Christianity, for example, not only claims that Jesus Christ was God Incarnate and that what He taught therefore has divine authority; it also claims that He was resurrected from the dead, and that this incomparable miracle authenticates His teaching. Indeed, Christianity lays everything on this line. As St. Paul famously put it, “if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.”14 If the story of Jesus’s resurrection is true, then you must become a Christian; if it is false, then Christianity itself is false, and should be rejected.

But the mainstream Christian tradition has also always claimed that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is a historical event the reality of which can be established through rational argument. Indeed, the philosophical arguments we’ve been examining so far play a role in the case for Jesus’s resurrection. For that case can only be properly understood once it has already been established that there is a God and that human beings have immortal souls. Given that God

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