Moreland on Warranted Christian Belief
I once told my children that if they ever got to the point where they thought it was unreasonable to believe that Christianity was true, then they should abandon the faith. Does that sound risky? It is, but what is the alternative? Should we tell our children to set their minds aside totally and accept the Christian faith without using their intelligence? It can be risky to encourage people to develop their minds and allow reason to help them decide what they believe and why. No one can predict where such an approach will lead in a specific individual’s life.
We need to keep two things firmly planted in the centre of our minds. First, we simply must reaffirm our committment to truth and right reason and be confident that our Christian beliefs both warrant that committment and will flourish in light of it. We are committed to Christianity in general, or some doctrinal position in particular, because we take that committment to express what is true. And we are committed to the importance of our God-given faculty of mind to aid us in assessing what it true. Second, we need to remember the consequences of abandoning a fundamental committment to truth and reason. This is extremely dangerous. If our allegiance to Christianity is not based on the conviction that it is true and reasonable, then we are treating the faith as a mere means to some self-serving pragmatic end, and that demeans the faith.
Any religious belief worthy of the name should be accepted because we take the belief to be true and do so by the best exercise of our mental faculties we can muster. In the long run, it is better to risk losing control, face our doubts, be patient, and do the best job we can of using our minds to get at the truth. Not only is the Christian faith secure enough to withstand such an approach, but the faith actually encourages it.
(Dr J.P. Moreland, Love Your God With All Your Mind, Navpress 1997)
