When defending the Christian faith, believers would at times say something like, “I do not have enough faith to be an atheist.” This includes some proponents of presuppositional apologetics, who would abuse the word by saying that every worldview must begin by taking its first principles on “faith.” However, this is both biblically false and strategically unwise.
When non-Christians make the accusation that we affirm Christianity only on “faith,” they are not using the biblical definition of the word, but by it they mean something like, “belief by pure assumption without any rational justification.” Some Christians then make a rational case for Christianity, and conclude, “It takes even more faith to be an atheist, and I do not have enough faith to be an atheist.”
When used this way, faith means mere credulity, and this implies that Christianity is affirmed by credulity, only that it takes even more credulity to be an atheist. This unbiblical use of the word encourages the audience to have a little credulity, so that he will become a Christian, but not too much, lest he becomes an atheist. But if this is what “faith” means, then why not renounce all credulity and have no faith at all?
The problem is further aggravated when Christians assert in the same context that faith is not mere credulity, but that it is rational. But if we plug this back into the statement, “I do not have enough faith to be an atheist,” then it becomes an admission that atheism is more rational, which is exactly what they denied when they first said, “I do not have enough faith to be an atheist.”
In Scripture, faith is always a good thing, and it is always good to have more of it. But suddenly, in the very context of defending “faith,” Christians assert that atheism must also begin with “faith,” and that atheists in fact have more of it, since it takes even more “faith” to be an atheist. Then, in the same discussion, they also say that “faith” is rational, and that the atheists do not have it at all because it is a gift of God. Or are they saying that a little of this divine gift would make us Christians, but a lot of it would make us atheists?
If we are using the biblical definition – if we are talking about the kind of faith that we have and want our hearers to have – then, the truth is that if I have any faith at all, even as small as a mustard seed, I would not be an atheist. The atheist has no faith, not more faith. If we are using the biblical definition of the word, then if you have any faith at all, you are already a Christian.
So, this misuse of the word “faith” may seem clever to some, but it is in fact unbiblical, foolish, confusing, and self-defeating. We should never use the word to denote credulity. Rather than saying, “I do not have enough of a good thing to be an atheist,” we should say, “I do not have enough of a bad thing to be an atheist.” Thus it is much more appropriate to say, “I am not stupid enough to be an atheist.”
It follows that we should never say, “We must all begin with faith.” No, we do not. We all begin from some first principle as the logical starting point of our thinking. Christians affirm Scripture as their starting point by faith-reason (a divine gift of intelligent assent to truth), but non-Christians affirm their various false and irrational first principles by their credulity and wickedness.