Seventh, shouldn't we expect that a God who is Logos and is responsible for giving us the imago Dei, by which we have intellect and will, will not demand blind faith? If it is part of Christianity's greatest commandment—straight from the Old Testament and accepted by Jesus himself in the Gospels—that we should love him with all our minds, shouldn't this be intellectually significant? It strikes me as rather disingenuous for you to say that Christianity involves surrendering our reason. Some of the greatest philosophy and science, not to mention the university, has come to us as a result of Christianity. Only if you conflate Christianity with Christian fundamentalism can you "in good faith" reject faith's relation to reason.
When I was a Christian, I used to draw a distinction between faith and blind faith. I felt that faith was believing something to be true after first building a rational bridge to get me halfway there. For example, I believed the world was created by God because I could look around me and see that the world exhibited order to it. I could use my mind to understand mathematics, explore the bounds of my creativity, and reason through logical absolutes to help give me a better understanding of everything I experienced. Even though I didn't fully understand how any of this worked, I believed that there must be a higher power that had given me these gifts. I accepted this on faith.
Conversely, blind faith meant simply believing any random claim that was made about anything. Accepting that Zeus threw lightning bolts from high atop Mount Olympus would be a claim accepted on blind faith and all such notions were summarily rejected. But as I began to reflect on the merits of accepting something on faith, I noticed that this method of inquiry still shared a unsettling trait with its blind counterpart. Both faith and blind faith were not, as I had once believed, different in kind but rather only in degree. It was only when I realized that even if faith were not blind it still meant believing things for which I had no evidence that the line between the two began to blur. I realized that in no other area of my life did I apply such a standard. In my understanding of the human body, nature, physics, etc., I always used reason and evidence as a means of determining truth. Yet in the one area of my life where ultimate truth is concerned, I was being told that evidence is not enough. Faith was required.
My mistake was in believing that truth was subject to my desire to know it. It was an error that sacrifices understanding for the promise of assurance and conflates hubris with enlightenment, all under the guise of a supposed humility rooted in faith. Faith promised me a comprehensive understanding of my world when the weight of evidence had not yet provided me with the answers I was seeking. The thought of admitting ignorance on many of the fundamental questions of our existence was anathema to me and faith was a way to avert this dilemma. It was not until I realized that it is acceptable to admit to myself that I don't know all of the answers that I was finally able to cast aside the false promises of faith. Reason and evidence may never be able to provide me with all of the answers I am looking for but this does not mean that I should simply fill in the missing pieces with unsupported claims. I should simply admit that I don't know and keeping searching.
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