Faith Reason and Worship

One of the arguments made by atheists against the existence of God is that there is just no hard, empirical evidence for His existence. Everything ultimately comes down to faith. One believes because one wants to believe—one has faith in God. While it is true that faith is necessary to believe in God, it is false and foolish to say that there is no evidence for God’s existence (Psalm 14:1).

Why is it foolish? The reason is simple: the evidence is all around us and all we have to do is admit our own smallness in order to better see the evidence. This is the point that Fulton Sheen makes in his commentaries: whenever we are full of ourselves, of pride, of our own sense of our greatness, we miss the evidence of God’s greatness.[footnoteRef:2] We diminish Him in order to build ourselves up.

By seeing the true proportion of things and the real perspective, we can instantly accept the preponderance of evidence that is all around us—from creation to the love we feel to the idea that everything had to have come from something, some infinite source, for nothing has come existence of its accord: everything has a First Cause, which is God.[footnoteRef:3] Thus, man can use his reason to come to the point of faith—but ultimately the act of faith has to be made.

Faith is not something one simply possesses like a token in a pocket: it has to be lived and demonstrated. Faith is an action. I make an act of faith whenever I pray to God. Faith is a communication of belief and trust—of belief and trust that are based on the evidence that has been placed before us, which we look at and examine with our reason.

To say that people who believe in God do not use reason is to make a highly subjective and grossly generalized statement that is truly wide of the mark. [2: Fulton Sheen, Life of Christ (NY: Image Books, 2008), 12.] [3: “First Cause,” Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/first-cause] St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, used extraordinary reason during the scholastic period of the Church’s history. Aquinas showed how much of theology could be explained by using reason.

Reason is the foundation of the spiritual life—not feeling or emotions or vague intuitions. Reason is the fuel of the mind. A mind that is operating without reason will end up driving the person into all sorts of problems in life. Reason is the bedrock of worship. 1 Peter 3:15 tells us to always be mindful of the reasons that we have such hope—such faith. We are not to forget them, because people will want to know.

People will see the joy and peace and hope that is in the heart of a Christian and they will not ask, “What feeling gave you this hope?” No, they will ask, “What reason do you have for this hope?” Reason is what drives people to act deliberately and with consideration. Reason is what faith is based upon.

Religion is practiced because we have reasons to believe that through divine worship we can draw nearer to God, to reflecting His love, to honoring Him the way He wants to be honored, and to bringing grace to our own souls so that we can get to Heaven. In Colossians 1:9, we are told that we should strive to be filled with spiritual wisdom and understanding. How can this be achieved without the use of reason? It cannot. Reason is as essential to worship as air is to breathing.

Those who came to believe and have faith in Christ came to that point because they observed what He did and said: people like Nicodemus, who came secretly to Christ at night to discuss the ideas that Christ said during the day because he was afraid of being harassed by the Jews if they saw him entering into a rational discussion with Our Lord (John 3:1-21). Christ tried to teach the Jews through parables and through direct speaking, but they refused to consent to His reasons.

They wanted to stay full of themselves, to see themselves as the saviors and true leaders of the Jewish people. They did not want to admit that Gentiles could be as important as they in God’s eyes. They did not want to stop being irrational—they wanted to remain stubbornly prideful—and so instead of worshiping God, they crucified Him. This is what happens when one does not use reason in worship—one crucifies God. Christ sent His disciples out to also reason with them.

Paul the Apostle went out to connect reason with divine worship, going into the synagogues to try to reason with the Jews even after Christ’s death and resurrection (Acts 17:17). Why? Because the evidence was there: Paul himself had to be blinded and knocked off his own horse before he would consent to see it—and his story is a representation of what we all must do: we have to give up our vainglorious self-pursuits.

If we only seek to fill ourselves with our selves, our end is death. If we seek to fill ourselves with God, then our end is eternal life, because God is eternal life. This is not a statement that is dependent upon faith, for one can make it and believe it and still not make an act of.