Ep 215: Does faith in God make sense?

Many claim that faith in God is irrelevant, irrational and even immoral. But what if the Christian faith makes sense of all that matters? We confront this big question with someone who found faith not only to make sense, but to make the most sense of the things we love.

Our guest: Simon Edwards. Simon is originally from Australia and worked as a lawyer before moving to the UK to study at the The Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics and later Oxford University. He’s a popular speaker and is the author of the book, The Sanity of belief: why faith makes sense

Invest in Bigger thinking for as little as US$1 per podcast on Patreon.

Bigger questions asked in the conversation

So Simon, you studied at the OCCA, and you work with OCCA - in Australia an ocker means something a bit different I think - so what does OCCA mean?

What are apologetics? Do you make a lot of mistakes?

Smaller Questions

Now to kick off Bigger Questions we like to ask some smaller questions - just to get us thinking. Today we’re asking Simon Edwards if faith in God makes sense. So Simon for our smaller questions, I’m going to give you two quotes which I found on a Reddit thread connected to today’s big question where a key word of the quote has been blanked out. All you have to do is tell me what the word has been blanked out.

Why does faith make sense

So Simon, to many today, faith in God and believing the Bible does seem like complete nonsense - so can you appreciate why people find faith in God difficult to believe or even feel ashamed about? I mean we can’t see God and there are so many weird and unusual things in the Bible?

So you respond to this in your book, The sanity of belief: why faith makes sense. What makes you think that faith in God makes sense and isn’t nonsense?

But why do you need God to find meaning? There are plenty of non-believers and atheists who live with meaning and purpose in their lives. So why do you need God?

The Bible’s answer: faith in Jesus

The Bible itself speaks to this big question and in the Gospel of John, one of the four biographies of Jesus that we have, Jesus makes a strange and yet audacious claim in in John 6:35 where he declares,

‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.

Isn’t this another example of nonsense? How can Jesus be bread?

Jesus talks about ‘coming to me’, ‘whoever comes to me’, will never go hungry or be thirsty - what does this mean?

The Big Question

So Simon, does faith in God make sense?