Faith is neither blind nor restricted to religion

As always in the Trump era, doubts are being raised about the integrity of the US midterm elections, this time especially over alleged illegal voting. Few democracies have a more corrupt system for establishing electorates than the United States, where the political party in power in each state defines boundaries, and gerrymandering is rife.

Donald Trump’s constant complaints about election fraud have helped contribute to the lowest level of trust by Americans in their electoral system for decades, surveys say.

What a contrast in Victoria, where we go to the polls in just under three weeks. Australians can and do have strong and justified faith in Australia’s system, run by an utterly independent electoral commission whose integrity seems beyond doubt.

Our electoral commissions decide electorate boundaries purely on demographic grounds, not at the behest of or for the advantage of any particular party. My own electoral boundaries have changed a few times over the years, but no one ever suggested any malign influence.

For the November 28 election, the Victorian Electoral Commission is putting on at least 27,000 extra staff and running more than 300 education sessions in all 88 state electorates about the voting process. Sessions are being held in neighbourhood houses, in 18 prisons, in Indigenous communities, for people with disabilities, and for people whose first language is not English.

I call my trust in the electoral commission “faith” because I cannot verify all the facts myself. It comes from 50 years of voting and observing, watching the conduct of the election and the processes leading up to it.

And this is the point: true faith is seldom blind. It grows from experience, observation, evidence and sometimes even intuition.

Similarly, the Christian faith is not blind. It is based on all sorts of evidence and arguments which weigh with people – or not – for reasons that are often beyond the purely rational. As the atheist Enlightenment philosopher David Hume observed, reason is always the slave of the passions.

For Christians, evidence includes the irreducible complexity of creation. The Psalmist wrote: “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day, they pour forth speech; night after night, they reveal knowledge.” The Apostle Paul says God’s eternal power and divine nature are clearly seen in what has been made.

There is the eyewitness testimony in the New Testament, and the way the whole Christian narrative coheres beautifully if given the initial premises – it is not irrational or illogical – and the innumerable human lives given meaning, consolation and hope through the faith.

The Christian faith is not belief without evidence but a response to the evidence.

Barney Zwartz is a Senior Fellow of the Centre for Public Christianity.

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Barney Zwartz, a senior fellow of the Centre for Public Christianity, was religion editor of The Age from 2002 to 2013.