Faith and Evidence

From CMI', Don Batten's Genesis: no fable:

I could see this man, leaning back in his chair, arms folded, looking quite puzzled as I spoke. At the end, in the Q&A, he asked, “What has evidence got to do with faith?” This man came from a church tradition that saw ‘faith’ as a work that earned merit with God. He seemed offended by the notion that faith could relate to real-world evidence. To him, ‘faith’ was believing despite the evidence, and the more difficult it was to believe, the more merit in the faith. With me providing evidence, it diminished his ‘faith’!

Because of the prevalence of this faith/evidence divide in some mainstream churches, it is not surprising that the media often portray Christian faith as like Alice in Wonderland, when, in Through the Looking Glass, the Queen said, “Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Supposedly, faith is believing things that have no evidential support.

This was not the apostolic approach.

I can only agree that this was not the Apostolic approach. However, I met it among Protestants in Vienna. Ma invited me to read Dale and Elaine Rhooton's Can We Know? most of which I still consider correct (I have since rejected the notion Catholicism persecuted the Bible). But, I was of course speaking to other Christians, as ma was back then still Protestant and I was still a child, I was so too, and I got confronted with "if there is evidence, it isn't faith".

That was the Protestant, not the Catholic, approach.

To a Catholic, on the contrary, Catholic Church remaining since Apostles is evidence the Bible was not a collection of Tolkien's fantasy or C. S. L:s space opera. Or even, considering the obvious fact there is some reference to real history, Edith Nesbit's Arden's Luck. Bc, Catholic Church never took any historical Bible book as a fable.

In a rediscovered book, or one where readership radically shifts community, one can imagine fables being misinterpreted retroactively as history, or even more, if there are miracles, history as fable. But the Bible was never either forgotten or hidden or forbidden by the Catholic Church./HGL