Is Faith in God without Experiencing Divine Manifestations Warranted?

Q&A • Addressing skepticism towards an invisible, non-empirical God, I argue that while personally witnessing miracles aren't necessary for faith, a universal sense of the divine and the existence of moral law point to God's existence.

Read time: 6 min

Many unbelievers are skeptical of trusting a God they have never experienced with any of their five senses. With the rise of the theory of Darwinian Evolution, scientific “naturalists wielded [Evolution] ‘as a…weapon for attacking miracle-mongering creationists’ believed to be strangling science.”[1]

Science, often and unfortunately juxtaposed to faith, attempts to explain the known world only by what can be observed, which for some calls miracles into question. Such skepticism assumes that anything outside of our sensory perception or scientific observation cannot reliably be known. Philosophically, this is a form of Empiricism. There are many who are troubled that Christians believe in God despite not having experienced what at least they perceive to be miracles. By miracles, hereafter, I mean visions, dreams, impressions, healings, answered prayers, etc. We may make a two-fold response: miraculous experiences are neither (1) in themselves sufficient nor (2) necessary to warrant faith in the Christian God.

First, miraculous experiences in themselves are not sufficient to warrant faith in the Christian God.

There is a short answer to the allegation that Christians believe in God without experiencing miracles. We could put a skeptic in touch with hundreds, even thousands, of Christians all over the world that claim to have had just such experiences. The problem, however, is that their testimonies too will invariably fall short of satisfying the central criterion of the skeptic’s worldview. Since he denies that we can know that anything exists outside of the material world and our sensory perception, testimonies of miracles too are readily discarded as misperceptions and the phenomena as better explained through scientific rationale. ‘You think you saw a vision of Jesus in the night? Well, that is probably a mixture of what you ate for supper and a traumatic experience with a felt board in Sunday school.’ Because of atheists’ prior intellectual commitments, it is easier for them to explain away a miracle than to alter their belief system. Practically speaking, miracles in themselves are often insufficient to warrant faith.

We might go farther and help skeptics see that their presuppositions about what is knowable prove too much: the inability to be sure about anything. If anyone demonstrated this it was Empiricist philosopher, Emmanuel Kant, whose “philosophy left the modern world agnostic about God and our ability to have the final truth about anything.”[2]

For if a God who establishes rational laws by which the universe operates does not exist, then the resulting irrational universe leaves us with no rational reason to trust even our senses! In such a worldview, we ourselves are simply molecules in motion and subject to the irrational firing of neurons in our heads—hardly a foundation for true knowledge. And if the skeptic sidesteps, as many atheists do, asserting that atheism is not itself a belief but only non-belief in the Christian God, then we might refer him or her to the reality check that atheism is a positive claim in need of evidence, just like any other truth claim. For “if atheism is not a claim, it cannot be true or false,”[3] and no atheist will grant that atheism cannot be true. Moreover, miracles—when void of explicit revelatory context—are usually ambiguous. The cancer disappears without medical explanation and the Christian church rejoices that God healed their sister, while the Buddhist nurse believes the lovely patient is being rewarded by good Karma. This is no foundation per se for a true faith.

Second, miraculous experiences in themselves are not necessary to warrant faith in the Christian God.

If miracles per se are not the basis for faith in the Christian God, then what is? In short, even prior to faith, there is what John Calvin called the sensus divinitatis, a sense of the divine that all humans experience, being created in God’s image (Gen. 1:26; Ps. 14:1).[4] We humans likewise can hardly deny the reality of objective morality and a moral Law-giver to whom we are accountable (Rom. 2:14-15).

Reformed Epistemology asserts that

“We are born with a capacity rather than actual content (like the ability to do arithmetic), and our experiences stimulate that awareness of God.”[5]

With this capacity we observe and reason from the cosmos around us and intuit a First Cause. who put it all here and into motion. We gather also that some intelligent Mind has designed life on earth to work in such a fine-tuned way, despite being surrounded by a cold, unfriendly universe. On this score, the Classical Apologist agrees and “assumes that a nonbeliever’s mind functions well enough to process the evidence, under the grace and influence of the Holy Spirit.”[6] This awareness of God is so evident that Scripture states that those who suppress this truth are without excuse (Rom. 1:18-32). 

Into this context of awareness of God, according to Calvinist theology, an unbeliever upon hearing the gospel is moved upon by God’s sovereign Spirit and enabled to truly believe (2 Thes. 2:13-14). Upon believing and being adopted into the family of God, the Spirit then “bears witness with our spirits that we are children of God,” giving strong certainty of the truth of what is believed to a degree no mere miracle could ever achieve (Rom. 8:16). ❖

References

1. Theodore Cabal, Peter Rasor II, Controversy of the Ages: Why Christians Should Not Divide over the Age of the Earth (Bellingham: Lexham Press, 2017), Kindle edition, 1018.

2. Brian K. Morley, Mapping Apologetics: Comparing Contemporary Approaches (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2015), Kindle edition, 153.

3. Andy Bannister, The Atheist Who Didn’t Exist: The Dreadful Consequences of Bad Arguments (Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2015), Kindle edition, 35.

4. Morley, Mapping Apologetics, 19.

5. Ibid., 124.

6. Ibid., 188.