“is not faith enough?”

Surgeon Sherwin Nuland asks some questions about the way religious people use the tools of reason:

Why do [the religious] attempt logic and reason to prove matters which by their very nature are beyond any logic and higher than all reason? Why do so many of them feel that it is beholden on them to apply the rules of proof and evidence in arguments for which such rules were never intended? Is not faith enough?

I don’t think Nuland has this right. The tools of logic were not invented by atheists, nor are proof and evidence foreign to theology. Nuland seems exasperated because these tools fail the religious, so he wonders why they try to use tools that don’t work for them. After all, if whatever you say doesn’t really matter because you can’t actually ever lose an argument, your trump card being faith, which is impervious to all logic, fact, or evidence, why bother going through the motions? Your failure on the way to your success just makes you look bad. 

I rarely get into religious discussions with the actually religious. I don’t want to argue over this stuff. In fact, I have a policy against talking religion with people I don’t know well. I remember with some discomfort a discussion I failed to avoid. I was talking after class with another student in an American Sign Language course. The conversation might have gotten started innocuously with a question like, Why are you studying ASL? The other student seemed sweet and sincere, but she was “churchy” (as another classmate put it), and her communication goals had something to do with helping deaf people get with God. I soon found I was fending off her evangelical approach toward myself. Yes, she confronted me with arguments that seemed to offer proof and evidence, but when these arguments fell apart, and we were getting annoyed with each other, my churchy classmate pulled out her trump card, supposedly quoting scripture, “The faithful’s arguments will seem as nonsense to nonbelievers.” 

I bet my classmate asked me what my thoughts were and, seemingly friendly and sincere, overrode my policy against talking religion. She saw an opening to gain a convert. 

I am curious about faith, where it begins and ends, but I don’t want to get into an argument about it. I mean, I don’t get why one believes one thing without question while having no difficulty scoffing at something else. And organized religion is responsible for so much evil in the world … 

source: The Mysteries Within: a surgeon reflects on medical myths

by Sherwin B. Nuland

2000. Simon & Schuster, New York