Any preacher I've talked to or researched has ultimately stated that religious doctrine, specifically Christianity, is not expected to have scientific proof. It is a belief, and in order to subscribe to it, you simply have to accept that belief - unfounded and unbacked by science.
As an Atheist, I reject religion largely due to a lack of proof. But that's the conflict: the religious assert that none should be forthcoming.
My question is...should anyone expect religion to produce any proof of its Deity, practices, or claims? Rather, should we just put religion on the platform of simple belief and keep it there?
What I'm trying to decide is if it's simply OK for society to be comfortable with the idea that Christianity does not back up its doctrine with science. While Atheists demand proof, maybe we shouldn't. Maybe Christianity should never attempt to find science validating its claims - and simply be reserved as a belief-system that you either accept or reject.
Ultimately, everyone has faith in something, whether that be an individual thing ("reason" or "God"), or a system of belief ("evidentialism", "scientism", or "Christianity"). This is the result of the epistemological problem of infinite regression. In other words, if you want to justify a belief, you have to use other beliefs to justify it. Which leads you to ask how you can justify those beliefs. So, you use other beliefs to justify those, and then are faced with the question of how you can justify those...etc. Infinite regression leaves you facing Munchausen's Trilemma.
Ultimately, there are three basic solutions to Munchausen's Trilemma (and several advanced ones I'll leave for the academics to argue over), foundationalism, coherentism, and infinitism. In essence, this is because we can restate the problem as follows: "Either the process of producing reasons stops at a foundational proposition, or it doesn't. If it does then the reasoner is a foundationlist. If it doesn't then either the reasoning is circular or infinite".
The first solution is to do as Descartes did and question every belief until you get to a belief that is "properly basic"; that is, a belief which requires no justification and can be considered self-evident. Descartes settled on the foundational belief "I think, therefore I am". This point of view is referred to as foundationalism. It still relies on faith, but it limits it to faith in a few beliefs considered "properly basic" which can then be used to support all of your other beliefs. When it comes to belief in God, this is where "Reformed Epistemology" sits; it is an epistemology that argues that belief in God is a "properly basic" (foundational) belief.
The second solution is referred to as coherentism. In this view, beliefs are considered justified only if they coherently fit into a larger system of beliefs that support each other. In this case, we assume that while we cannot show that any individual belief is justified on its own, we can create a system of beliefs that prop each other up and any belief can be considered justified if it fits within the larger system. This has traditionally been a less desireable solution because it leaves us with nothing but circular reasoning. Nevertheless, it does find widespread support. I don't know of any formal theological epistemology that takes this route, but it's not difficult to see how religious beliefs could form part of a larger system of coherent beliefs that could then be considered justified; in theology these systems of belief already exist and are referred to as "systematic theologies".
The third solution is infinitism which is basically the acceptance that there is no way out of the regression problem. Very little work, that I know of, has gone into promoting this position, primarily because its been considered akin to giving up and those who give up are more likely to embrace skepticism than to try to resolve Munchausen's Trilemma.
All this to say that, yes, we should be as comfortable with accepting Christianity without requiring it back up its doctrine as we are of accepting science without requiring it prove scientism. Ultimately all epistemologies are without a justification that is not either faith based or circular.
Futher reading if this interests you:
Epistemology (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
*Note: this is a great resource. If you want more information on a specific topic within the page (say you want more detail on foundationalism, for example), you can just type in the search box.
**Bah...didn't realize this was a really old post by someone that has long since been banned before I replied to it. Oh well, I'll leave my reply here anyway although the debate has long since evolved in other directions.
