Page 15 - Eclipse of God

xiv Introduction to the 2016 Edition

with science, arguing that the former is an outdated, crude ex-
planatory system that science has overcome. As many critics
have noted, this sort of position fundamentally misunder-
stands what religion or “faith” actually are. In other writings,
Buber elaborates on the biblical term for faith, “emunah,”
which is more properly translated as “trust.” “Emunah,” Buber
contends, is not blind belief that something is true. Instead,
faith is more like trusting someone “without being able to
8
provide a sufficient reason for my trust in him.” Trust is fun-
damentally relational. Let us recall again Buber’s reading of
Exodus 3:14. When God states, “I am that I am,” God does
not ask Moses to believe something about God that will offer
a rational explanation of everything that goes on in the natural
world. Rather, God tells Moses to trust God because God is
there with him. Trust in God is not proof of God’s existence,
but, Buber might add, there are many things that philosophers
and others take for granted for which we do not have definitive
evidence, such as sense perception, memory, or the inner lives
9
of other people. With their dogmatic and narrow focus on
definitive evidence, the new atheists, from Buber’s perspective,
misunderstand the natures of faith and much of human expe-
rience. In doing so, the new atheists eclipse God’s reality.
Buber’s conception of faith also complements recent work
in the anthropology of religion that suggests that faith in God
is something acquired, not through philosophical or theolog-
ical instruction but by actively cultivating a relationship with
God, even when there is no evidence of God’s existence. An-
thropologists have described how, for the faithful, a relation-

8 Two Types of Faith (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1961), 7. Buber contrasts
this view of faith with another conception that he associates with the development of
Christianity.
9 For contemporary Christian theological arguments to this effect, see Alvin
Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff, eds., Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in
God (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991).