Wilken’s view on Faith

In Wilken’s piece of writing, The Reasonableness of Faith, he describes how, contrary to many other thinkers at the time, early Christian thinkers believed that reason began with faith. There were plenty of people who believed that faith was detrimental to discovering the truth since it worked with ideas that could not be proven as fact. Wilken, however, believes that faith is unavoidable and is actually necessary for logical reasoning when in search of the truth. He argues that many things, such as history, cannot be entirely proven as true, saying, “What we know of past events depends on the testimony of those who have witnessed them.” St. Augustine also shares this view with Wilken as he uses the example of Cicero killing anyone who conspired against him, saying, “it is not proper to say ‘I know it’; rather one must say, ‘I believe that wicked conspirators were once put to death by the virtuous Cicero.” One cannot know for sure that past events as we know them are how they actually played out. Instead, we believe, or in other words have faith, that is how they occurred since there is no way to prove past events happened exactly the way we believe them to have occurred. Augustine makes a distinction between historical knowledge and mathematical knowledge since historical knowledge is “dependent on the veracity of the witness” while mathematical knowledge is “certain and demonstrable.”  Not only do Wilken and Augustine believe that faith is unavoidable, but they also believe that it is beneficial because it builds trust within each other and without it we would not be able to function as a society. Wilken quotes Augustine, saying, “Nothing would remain stable in human society if we determined to believe only what can be held with absolute certainty.” Wilken and Augustine also believe that faith is necessary for learning since, according to Augustine, one cannot learn a foreign language without hearing it spoken by a native speaker and one trusts that is how the language is actually spoken. Trust is a necessary component of societal functioning and without having faith, trust no longer exists in our world, showing that faith is both unavoidable and necessary for our world to flourish.