Chicken and Egg

What comes first - faith or reason?

I was talking with one of the students here yesterday, and he got me thinking about this. What happens? Do we first reason ourselves into accepting the Lordship of Christ, and then faith follows, or do we take the step of faith first and then the logic comes after?

I can see arguments for both sides.

One of the best definitions of faith (as expressed Biblically) I have come across is the simple formula "Faith = belief + trust + action". If this is true then surely reason comes first, because we only trust and act on something if we have - taking the evidence into account - made the conscious decision that it can be trusted and should be acted upon. In other words, faith is expression of something that we have reasoned to be true.

On the other hand, I'm struck by the resurrection narratives making it clear that Jesus only bothered appearing to those who were already committed to Him. He didn't turn up in Pilate's chamber saying "Nyah, Nyah, Nyah, I told you so", instead he appeared only to those who were already His own. Yet they were demoralised and doubting - and as Matthew reminds us, even after the resurrection appearances some still doubted. It's as if here Jesus was providing confirmation after the act of faith. The reason to believe is given after the act of belief itself.

I suppose that I find myself concluding that faith and reason are actually too dependent on one another to decide which came first. Where you will find one, you will - by necessity - find the other. Even so-called 'blind faith' is the fruit of an individual's choice - which, in turn, is the result of some internal logical process, no matter how illogical it may seem to those around him.