The search for ultimate truth is called science, the gathering of objective evidence about the world. The trouble with religion is that it is founded, by definition, on faith: that is, on belief without evidence. “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.” [Acts 16:31] “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not die, but should have everlasting life.” [John 3:16]
No less an authority than Paul of Tarsus defines faith as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen” [Hebrews 11:1]. But merely hoping for something doesn’t give it substance, and belief is not evidence. What Paul’s definition comes down to is that the very act of faith—of believing something without evidence—somehow itself becomes the evidence for these unseen things. Like Peter Pan’s Tinker Bell, they’re true because you believe them. The logicians have a term for this: it’s called petitio principii—begging the question, purporting to prove something by relying on the truth of the very thing to be proven. Every word in the Bible is absolutely true. How do I know? It says so, right there in the Bible.
The early church fathers spent their energies writing down creeds—the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Chalcedonian Creed—lists of things you were required to believe in order to be a good Christian. Even if they plainly made no sense, like God being three and one at the same time. The less sense they made, the more virtue in overcoming your intellectual pride and believing them anyway. Credo quia absurdum est, declares Tertullian: “I believe because it is absurd.” And Certum est, quia impossibile: “It is certain because it is impossible.”
This is why religious believers are susceptible to preposterous conspiracy theories: they are trained every Sunday to suspend their own (dare I say “God-given”) mental faculties and believe the absurd on faith, like Alice’s Red Queen keeping in practice by believing six impossible things every day before breakfast. Faith is not a virtue; it is an obstacle to the search for ultimate truth.
