Faith, and the Line of Despair

What is Faith?

Richard Dawkins, in his book The God Delusion defines it as:

"Blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence"

The funny thing is, however, as Alister McGrath points out in his response The Dawkins Delusion is that, if a poll was taken of all the Christian Theologians throughout the ages, I don't think even a single one would agree with that definition. Alister cites W. H. Griffith - Thomas, an Anglican Theologian, who defined it this way:

"[Faith] affects the whole of Man's nature, It commences with the conviction of the mind based on adequate evidence; it continues in the confidence of the heart, or emotions based on conviction, and it is crowned in the consent of the will, by means of which the conviction and confidence are expressed in conduct."

But a question I've begun to ask is, how has the word "Faith" picked up such an irrational connotation? How did faith lose its connection to rationality?

For this answer, I think the answer might be found in the works of a man named Francis Schaeffer. In his book The God Who Is There, he introduces a concept he calls "The Line of Despair." In order to really get a good feel for the entirety of the idea, I would recommend Ch. 2 of The God Who Was There(Available online at Google Books), where it is explained in more detail, but long story short, he traces the development of Western Philosophical Thought through Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Jaspers, Sarte, Heidegger, and on and on and on. In this process, primarily existential philosophers began to come to the conclusion that the things that we can know, like, that my laptop is black, that a day is 24 hours long, etc. are necessarily without meaning. However, things that do have meaning like love, family, purpose, etc. cannot be known, and can only be experienced or known by taking a "leap of faith," and it is in this direct quote from Kierkegaard that we can see the rationality and reason of faith were declared dead.

Religion, as a traditional source of all meaning in life, was viewed as inherently irrational, not because there was no evidence behind it, or good logical reasons for Faith in God didn't exist, but as a natural consequence of the fact that it falls in the category of "things with meaning"

This whole line of thinking in some sense leads to a form of "Secularized Mysticism," which is why my ENG 1102 Professor commented that one of the characteristic features of Postmodernism (where this line of thinking led) was an "openness to meaning from unexpected places"....This strikes me as a remarkably new-age idea, but something that I think permeates the Atheistic community. They are faced with a substantial problem.

If God is dead, and I will die, and the universe will end, what purpose is there in life? for what reason do I draw my next breath?

Dawkins, in an interview with Fox News, claimed that religion poisoned people's lives, and if they liberated themselves of it, they could take hold of their lives, and learn to love freely, to seek after things that really matter, etc, etc. (see also Christopher Hitchen's God is Not Great) What both Hitchens and Dawkins fail to realize, is what they, themselves are doing, is taking a Kierkegaardian "leap of faith" into "love," "family", and so on, in without regard to the fact that none of these things, in their world view can be known.

The question I will leave you on is this: Why should we kill God, for which there is an abundance of Apologetic material in support of, and replace it with ideas of "love", "family," etc. for which Atheiests themselves admit they cannot know?