Is Faith In God The Only Coherent Basis For Reason?

This is a response to an article in Mind Matters News, by Michael Egnor. It is not a million miles from CS Lewis' argument. The article is here:

https://mindmatters.ai/2022/02/faith-in-god-is-the-only-coherent-basis-for-reason/

He starts:

Atheists commonly assert that there is a profound dichotomy between faith and reason. This is exemplified by atheist evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne ’s book Faith vs. Fact. He implies that we can have faith in the truth of something or we can have factual knowledge of the truth but we cannot have both. Faith and fact are, in his view, mutually exclusive. But that is not true.

Faith can have several meanings. I would suggest that Coyne is saying that if we have reason to believe something then faith is superfluous. Therefore, you either believe a claim is true because you have reason to think it is true, or you believe despite having no reason, and that is faith. In this sense the two are mutually exclusive.

One may ask: how do we know that what we perceive or what we believe corresponds to reality? The answer is that we can’t know, in the sense that we can’t use our perceptive or intellectual abilities to prove the validity of our perceptions or concepts. To do so would be to reason in a circle. If our perceptions and our concepts are not reliable, then how could we use them to validate their reliability?

This is readily addressed by noting the consistency of the world. The world is hugely easier to navigate once we believe it is real. A simple example is going through a door. If we believe the wall and door are real, we will walk through the door, not the wall. To do otherwise turns out to be painful.

And that is always the case. So much so that we do it without thinking. We walk on the ground confident it will support is, sit on chairs, and so on. A lifetime of experience has given us good reason to think that the world we perceive is reality.

Egnor also talks about relying on our ability to reason. The same argument applies. We all have a life time of reasoning successfully to give us confidence in our ability to reason. He may object that this is circular - we are using reason to support our ability to reason - but I think not. We are starting from the observation that we can reason, and working from there.

So we are left with radical skepticism — theists and atheists alike. We can conclusively prove nothing about our knowledge of the world. It might all be a delusion and we have no certain way to be sure that it is not.

Of course, we could be wrong; we might be living in the Matrix (where would philosophy be without that movie). We cannot be absolutely certain. However, we do have good reason to think that what we see is reality, we know it with a high degree of confidence.

The Christian has faith that he has access to truth because he believes that he has been created by a wise and loving God who guarantees this access to truth to him. Indeed this is a radical faith — we can be certain of nothing — but faith in God provides us with a coherent warrant to trust our capacity for reason. Christians have faith, and their faith makes a sensible and grounded belief in reason possible.

This is where it all goes very strange. After saying we cannot be sure anything is true, his argument seems to be that if we just believe - by faith - that God exists, then suddenly we can be sure.

He is claiming the existence of God gives him warrant to believe the world he perceives is reality - but where is his warrant for thinking God is real? His whole basis of reality is founded on something he has no reason to think exists, merely his own faith in it.

Atheists have just as much faith as Christians have — they believe that they have access to truth as well. But atheism provides no coherent warrant to trust the capacity for reason. In this sense, atheist faith is much more radical and much less coherent than the faith of Christians.

Atheists believe the world is probably real, based on a lifetime of experience interacting with it. It is not faith, it is reason.

Only atheist faith is opposed to fact; faith in God is the only reliable basis on which to trust our ability to know the truth. Thus, faith in God is the only coherent basis for reason.

I am not sure what "fact" he thinks atheists are opposed to, he does not say, but I would guess it is the supposed "fact" that God exists. A "fact" that we have no reason to think is true, only faith.

At the end of the day, this is apologetics -  Egnor is trying toi argue that God exists. And yet his argument is based on taking that on faith.