Faith and Reason in the Ark

Noah sends out ravens and pigeons. Little experiments trying to figure out what’s happening. He could have said, “God shut me up in this ark – I’ll just wait for HIM to open the door”. But he didn’t. Instead, uncovering his ark and peering out, he tried to ascertain his circumstances through the evidence available to him.

Yet, he waited to act. The evidence told him that the earth was drying up. But Noah did not move until the Lord said, “Go out of the ark…”

Perhaps this is the original interplay of faith in God and reason born out of evidence. Noah has a need to know – to ascertain his circumstances, which causes him to experiment. Yet he knows via faith in an entirely different way.

Prima facia one might think of the knowledge born of faith as having a primacy. After all, it was this that caused Noah to build an ark in the first place. But what could faith-knowledge mean in the utter absence of reason and empirical evidence?

Maybe it isn’t a question of the primacy between two ways of knowing as much as an illustration of the balance necessary for an extraordinary life.