"“Faith doesn't require believing more strongly than the evidence suggests.  What faith requires is being willing to act on the basis of the evidence you have."

"God is not "dead" in academia," lamented atheist philosopher Quentin Smith in 2001. "He returned to life in the late 1960s and is now alive and well in his last academic stronghold, philosophy departments."  Lara Buchak, an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, is a striking example of this phenomenon. Smart as a proverbial tack, she holds an undergraduate degree in Mathematics and Philosophy from Harvard College and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Princeton University. The center of her research is also the center of her life, both inside and outside the academic world: the exercise of faith.

What faith is and isn't

"Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence." This is Richard Dawkins' definition of faith. Lara disagrees. She points out, first, that we all exercise faith in various ways in the normal course of our lives. We might, for example, have faith in a friend, or a spouse, or even in a car. Our faith in our friend might lead us to trust them to pick us up from the airport, without arranging a back-up plan. Our faith in our spouse might lead us to believe that they aren't cheating on us, without hiring a private detective to follow them, and even if we encountered some suspicious circumstances. 

"There’s a naïve idea out there that faith means believing more strongly than the evidence suggests," Lara observes, "or even believing without any evidence at all. But when we think about ordinary cases of faith like faith in a friend or faith in a spouse, this isn’t really what’s going on. When you have faith in a friend or faith in your spouse, you do so precisely because you have a lot of evidence that they’re a trustworthy person."  

Lara argues that having faith needn't mean believing beyond, or in spite of, the evidence. Rather, it means being willing to act on the basis of the evidence that you have.

When is faith rational?

Lara argues that faith is often rational. Of course, the more evidence we have, the more rational our faith will be. But it's also rational to stop looking for additional evidence before taking a step of faith, if the additional evidence you might collect would likely turn out to be inconclusive, or there is a significant risk tied to delaying your action. For instance, you would be foolish to marry a random person you met on the internet without a great deal of evidence that they would make a good spouse. But you would also be foolish to put off marrying someone with whom you had a great relationship - year after year - because you were always looking for more evidence.

When it comes to faith in God, Lara argues, similar factors are in play. It's certainly more rational to examine evidence before making a decision of faith. For example, before becoming a Christian, it would be rational to examine the historical evidence for the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It might also be quite rational to consider the main alternatives to Christian faith, religious and otherwise. But it would be foolish to keep on postponing your decision, year after year, and risk finally losing out on the relationship with God that Christianity offers. Lara points out that making this kind of faith decision is "a particularly poignant case, because the stakes are really high."

The Most Compelling Ethic

Lara's research interests include pressing ethical questions, like what we owe to the worst-off in our society; when it is ethical to allow subjects to enroll in medical research, and whether altruism should focus on improving global health or on mitigating existential threats to all humanity. But Christianity ultimately shapes the conversation in all these areas, even for atheist philosophers. As non-Christian popular historian Tom Holland has observed, it's because of Christianity that we have this overarching sense that the poor and sick and marginalized - even people we have never met - deserve our care. 

I asked Lara what she personally found most compelling about Christianity, and part of her answer was this: "The idea that we are all made in the image of God, and that we should love our neigbor -- our neighbor who is each person, regardless of any particular facts about them that I might like or dislike -- is to me the most compelling ethic." But ethics without salvation doesn't get us very far. If Jesus had only come to provide teaching and an example, we would still be dead in our sins. And it's the gospel itself that draws Lara to Christianity over any other possible understanding of the world. "I think that the Christian story of sin, forgiveness, and reconciliation," she writes, "is a deep truth about the human condition."

The Quiet Desecularization of Philosophy

Twenty years ago, atheist philosopher Quentin Smith sounded an alarm for the academy. "By the second half of the twentieth century," he wrote, "universities and colleges had been become in the main secularized. The standard (if not exceptionless) position in each field, from physics to psychology, assumed or involved arguments for a naturalist world-view." To be sure, there were scholars in various fields who were theists in their private lives. But for the most part, they "excluded their theism from their publications and teaching," because it just wasn't "academically respectable." From Smith's perspective, all was well and good. But then disaster struck, in the form of the world-class Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga, and - as Smith put it - "the secularization of mainstream academia began to quickly unravel."

How did atheist philosophers respond? To Smith's frustration, "naturalists passively watched as realist versions of theism, most influenced by Plantinga's writings, began to sweep through the philosophical community, until today perhaps one-quarter to one-third of philosophy professors are theists, with most being orthodox Christians."  

Lara was an undergrad at Harvard when Smith voiced this concern. Since then, she has been part of a new generation of well-respected Christian philosophers that God has raised up, both in Christian institutions (like Meghan Sullivan, Sam Newlands, and Michael Rea at Notre Dame) and in secular universities (like Hans Halvorson at Princeton, John Pittard at Yale, or Japa Pallikkathayil at the University of Pittsburgh, which boasts one of the top philosophy programs in the US). Despite New Atheist attempts to discredit faith as a mindless cop-out, Smith's lament that God was not dead in the university 20 years ago still rings true today.

Let's pray for our brothers and sisters, like Lara, working at the cutting edge of academic philosophy. And - whatever our own vocation - let's seek to love God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength. Because Christianity isn't anti-intellectual. It's the greatest intellectual movement in all of history!

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