Faith and Reason Go Together, Says Int’l Evangelist

Scarlett Garvan on December 31, 2010 in Education News

Do faith and reason conflict?

Renowned Indonesian evangelist Stephen Tong addressed the age-old debate head-on Thursday at a preaching session at the National University of Singapore.

His answer: faith and reason operate in different spheres and actually complement one another. Faith is the more important of the two.

True faith is not counter-reason, the Rev. Tong, 70, expressed with the help of his English translator. In fact, faith “improves” reason and “makes it complete.”

“True faith will bring your reason that has been lost to be loyal to the truth,” he said.

Speaking to a lecture hall filled with students, he highlighted that every person exercises some form of faith in their day-to-day living. He was fielding a question from the audience during a segment designated for that purpose.

Mundane things people do like brushing their teeth and sitting down on a chair demonstrate faith. In the former, faith that the toothpaste is good for health is exercised. For the other case, faith that the chair will hold one’s weight is demonstrated.

Most people simply believe their parents are who they say they are. And most people believe the earth revolves around the sun without having actually seen it.

Indeed, the viewpoint that reason should come before faith is a contradiction in terms, he pointed out. This is because in holding such a view, one has already exercised faith.

It is an overly “arrogant” thing to seek to live purely by reason, Tong stressed.

Reason alone cannot bring fulfillment in life. This is because it is incapable of apprehending transcendent things such as love.

The evangelist told the story of a scientist whose mother wept over him. Being a rationalistic scientist, he simply stored her tears.

A teacher saw the bottle and asked him what it contained. When he told him the truth, he did not believe.

So the scientist brought the bottle to the laboratory in the hope of finding some proof that they were his mother’s tears.

Obviously, his investigation was lacking in the area that it could not detect his mother’s love. Here was a rationalistic scientist confounded by presuppositions he and the teacher had in common.

Tong told the story in response to a question about proof of the existence of the transcendent.

In contrast, people who embrace faith are passionate and committed individuals. They are so confident that they are willing to pay any price for their faith.

“A person without faith is not perfect,” said the evangelist.

Prominent philosophers Blaise Pascal and Immanuel Kant acknowledged this.

Pascal, who invented the mechanical calculator, expressed that the heart has its own reason. Conventional reason has the ability to perform mathematics. Yet human beings have another faculty in them that affirms that something is right or good or ought to be. In other words, there is a moral and ethical dimension to human existence.

At the end of his life, Kant, who had written extensively on reason, expressed that there were only four things he honestly wanted to know. First of all, what is a human being? Secondly, what can we know? Thirdly, what should I do? Fourthly, what is my hope?

Not even well-known atheists like Chairman Mao or Cold War Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev were consistent in their expressed beliefs.

Before his death, Mao told the late American journalist Edgar Snow that he was going to see God but had forgotten to buy a ticket. Khrushchev, when pressed to give an honest account of his religious beliefs, said: “God knows I’m an atheist.”

In fact, “evidence is not enough to prove everything,” Tong expressed. “Evidence is only a small part of the truth. Science is only to know a bit about the superficial.”

Here, the evangelist addressed both rationalistic Christians and critics during his talk and in fielding some questions.

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