Just How Valuable is Faith?

We discussed in class that Kierkegaard's target here is Hegel, and presumably like-minded philosophers who value knowledge over faith. It is assumed, he says, that knowledge is more "difficult" than faith, but Kierkegaard argues that this is actually the other way around. Faith is in fact more difficult than knowledge, and he exemplifies this by giving the alarming case of Abraham and his paradox that he must accept on faith despite the impossibility for his reason to accept both truths. (i.e., that Isaac will both live and die.) However, my challenge to Kierkegaard is that he seems to be fooling us by valuing faith as higher than reason without actually giving an argument as to why we should think so.

Kierkegaard thinks that it is through faith and not by knowledge that we bypass the "universal" and reach the absolute, but there does not seem to be any reason to think that faith is actually more valuable. Yes, he does give us some flowery language here and there about how great faith is, like, "Faith is a miracle, ... for that in which all human life is unified is passion, and faith is a passion," (17) but what reason do we really have to think that faith is more valuable than knowledge and reason? Kierkegaard's answer seems to be that the difficulty inherent in each activity, that is, faith and knowledge, is what makes faith more valuable, but that only raises more questions. If something is more difficult than something else, does this imply that the former is more worthwhile than the latter? If that's the case, then I can just as easily deduce that eating five whole chocolate cakes in a row is more worthwhile than eating a serving of vegetables simply by virtue that eating five cakes in a row is much more difficult than eating vegetables, or something equally ridiculous. There's nothing that should make me think otherwise if we accept that difficulty has such an effect on value.

It does not make sense for people that value reason so much to abandon it in favor of the complete opposite. If I am a rational person and am confronted with such a paradox in my own life, my first reaction is certainly not to tell myself that this paradox is acceptable as long as I realize that it is simply a matter of faith and that because it is so I should accept the paradox as it is despite my reason telling me that it could never be the case. It just seems that we would be doing a disservice to ourselves by dismissing one of our most valued powers, namely reason, that supposedly a divine being gave us for our benefit, in favor of something that is totally irrational. As Galileo said, "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended for us to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them" (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei). If I were a churchgoer in Kierkegaard's day and were made aware of Abraham's paradox, I would certainly be alarmed at the consequences for being faithful.