Topics Religion

Question I'm puzzled by the Kierkegaardian 'leap of faith' concept. If someone announces he is the son of God and violates the laws of science (i.e. by performing miracles) to prove it, then 'faith' doesn't come into it at all as far as I can see - one has no choice but to believe, like if the current Pope levitated to prove he is Christ's Vicar on Earth. Or does this 'faith' really boil down to the belief that these ancient miracles actually occurred, and that the 'son of God' claims are attendant on and pursuant to them? I don't see how anyone can dismiss Christ's miracles and base their belief solely on faith especially when the Resurrection (a miracle) is so fundamental to Christianity. Surely 'faith' presupposes lack of evidence and is blind. (I would add completely untenable, too.)

Accepted:
September 12, 2006

Comments

Yes, I think this is an important question. The issue of miracles as evidence for religious claims is a fascinating one.

But I wonder if there really can be an event that we could have good reason to believe violates the laws of nature. David Hume explored just this question in his little essay "Of Miracles" in the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748), and I tend to agree with his conclusions, though sometimes I still wonder.

Here's the thing suppose the Pope started levitating. Why should that prove that his religious beliefs and claims are true? Why not conclude that he or someone else has discovered a way to produce levitation using the laws of nature? You see, in the case of any observed event, X, we can either choose to think there's a supernatural cause or a natural cause. Just because an event is extraordinary, like levitating, it doesn't follow that there's a divine cause. There may well be a natural cause that we just don't know about about, a causal sequence we don't understand. Moreover, we have good reason for thinking that that's just what's happened. Look, the vast majority of phenomena we've put our minds to we've been able to explain with naturalistic causes. Many things that in the past were thought to be divine or miraculous (like thunder) have been explained. So, it's likely these others will be explained, too. And for those things we don't or can't understand, why not just say we don't understand? How can not understanding be a reason to impute divine causation?

About the resurrection, of course one of the problems is that we know of it only by second or third hand testimony, and testimony is a fairly weak form of evidence even when firshand. But even if we were to have observed the resurrection, naturalistic explanations can still be given. Maybe he wasn't really dead when they took him down but seemed to be. Maybe they mistakenly executed a double. Maybe someone has discovered a natural way to restore life to recently deceased corpses. These might seem farfetched explanations, but are they more far fetched than saying there's a supernatural cause? And, again, if we don't understand how someone can rise from the dead, why should we say anything else but that we don't understand how it happened? Why even accept the risen person's claim that it was divine causation without some further proof--if proof were possible at all?

Experience and reason just can't establish divine causation as a matter of fact.

But even if it did, would it really prove the religious claims one thinks? Might not Baal or Ahura Mazda or Zeus cause the Pope to levitate, even if he called upon the Abrahamic deity to cause him to float? Might not Shiva raised Jesus from the dead, even if he claims otherwise. Even if divine causation were detectable, how could we know which divinity was responsible?

Now, for Kierkegaard, matters are even more extreme. For him the very idea of the incarnation is a contradiction, an affront to reason. How can anything be both a finite, temporal being and an infinite eternal being? Only faith can affirm the notion.