Quora Answer: Is It Not Impossible for Faith to be Completely Reasonable?

بِسۡمِ ٱللهِ ٱلرَّحۡمَـٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ 

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “Is it not impossible for faith to ever be completely reasonable?” 

Reason is the ability to arrive at conclusions through logical thinking, deductive reasoning, and evidence.  Faith, on the other hand, is conviction in something in the absence of conclusive evidence, or despite the inability to prove it beyond reasonable doubt.  On the surface, they seem irreconcilable, but the world is not based on absolutes. 

There has to be a basis of reason in faith, otherwise faith is no more than superstition.  For example, the average person believes others when they tell them things about themselves in the absence of corroborating evidence.  It is natural that people want to believe the best of each other, in the absence of evidence otherwise.  This good thoughts is extended in the theists’ belief in a Divine. 

The atheist argues that there is no proof of God; however, there is also no proof that there is no God.  That belief in a non-Divine, in the absence of proof, is itself a form of faith.  Our belief in the extrapolated hypotheses of science is also a form of faith, but a faith based on previous knowledge.  Sometimes, it is knowledge based on previous hypotheses.  As such, much of the workings of the physical universe, or multiverse, or omniverse, is also based on faith. 

In that light, I would argue that faith an be reasonable.  It is reasonable to believe, for example, in the fundamental forces of the universe, despite not having comprehensive  knowledge of them.  It is perfectly reasonable, for example, to believe that your spouse loves you when you have no knowledge of what they really think.  That faith is based on an extrapolation of what we can attest, we can measure, and we can verify.