Faith versus Reason: My two little sense of worth.

We cannot accept the two to leave us because they will leave the church of God very weak, so we have decided that we will not take them to the grave but sit and wait for the Lords intervention, Apostle William Kimani, February 21, 2010.

The story of thousands of faithful who thronged the Kingdom Seekers Fellowship church in Nakuru town awaiting an ultimate resurrection miracle of their departed sisters got me thinking the following:

In matters of reason and faith, where do we place the boundaries? When should believers stop believing and start reasoning? Or where does reasoning start and which should reveal? Where is the balance?

Now I know this is a pertinent philosophical issue which has been debated hundreds of years before me but the immediacy and proximity of the circumstances naturally demand my humble reflections.

And no, it should not be just about me! Anybody who cares about the recent happenings in our country should care to give a thought to such a question. First it was a celebrated TV anchor who appears to have lost her marbles to blind faith bend on the occult.

And now an entire congregation- thousands we are told, gathered in Nakuru over the weekend to witness the resurrection of Pastors Patrick Wanjohi Wanja and Francis Kamau Ndekei who had died earlier on of a road accident.

According to Apostle’s and Pastors who set all this up, Christians have become weak and they no longer question when men of God die but just proceed to bury them.

“We are here to change that tradition and today, we have chosen to question why these two have died when their work was obviously not done, Pastor Stephen Mulungi from Uganda is reported to have said.

Obviously- and this is only obvious to me, the resurrection never took place because it could not have happened in the first place. It is not something the rational would even contemplate in the first place.

But I understand where the problem came from and this is the crux of the matter. Men and in this case the Christians have decided to double up as rationales and faithful at the same time. They want to be believer but also retain their reason.

In doing so, they have not set the demarcations as to where what stops. It is not clear to an ordinary mind which comes first. On one hand, faith appears to be more powerful but on the other, reason serves them daily.

Pupils and students go to school five days a week to practice reasoning but one day to practice faith, so they are set on a reasoning path through out their lives.

But beyond school, other fundamentals of life and most strikingly death trifle them beyond reason and faith steps in for solace. The power of reason starts to wane from here as they start to subject their reasoning to faith.

They rarely try to subject their faith to reasoning and the Nakuru incident goes on to vindicate this observation. If the worshippers placed the issue at hand (resurrection) at the pyre of reason, it would not have stood.

And this incident is just the tip of the ice berg. Many other such instances where faith tend to operate alone and leave reason out characterize our lives.

The failure to merge these two into one has created a situation where we have deficits and extremes in terms of how people practice religion hence the talk of fundamentalist Christians/Moslems, the talk of cults and the like.

These are the results of failure to balance these two. My own reflection is that the two- in a religious context, must necessarily go together. Faith cannot leave reason and achieve its ends at the same time.

I am not however very sure that the vice versa would apply in say, a scientific context. Faith might as well be dispensable in science.

I think Christians would be better Christians when they merge these two concepts of faith and reason in their practice of Christianity. If they don’t, they will be afflicted with confusion, imbalance and torment as the Nakuru incident crowds and as our ex-TV queen appears to be in.

Ends………./.