When we enter a search for religious reality, we need to sit down before a fact like a little child, exactly as the faithful scientist does. We need to recognize that we have the capacity of faith, which is God's way of helping us perceive the divine dimension of reality. We know things of the spirit in that same kind of humility that we know things with our eyes, our ears, our nose. Those organs perceive things beyond themselves and allow them to enter into our experience.

Faith is yet another avenue to knowledge; it is not an alternative to knowledge. Therefore, in making up your mind about the great alternate questions, I invite you to a kind of openness that believes that truth is more important than anything else, and that God is the source of all truth. If you will be honest in your asking, seeking and knocking, if you'll open the windows of your soul 360 degrees and know that God has ways of making God's own reality known to us through the capacity of faith, there will come... God's moment when God will make God's own reality known to you in ways that are profoundly authentic. It will be something from the outside in and not from the inside out.

Copyright ©2000 by The Rev. John Claypool

--from "How do we Know that God Is Real? Faith: Another Avenue to Knowledge" by the Rev. Dr. John Claypool
Read "How do we Know that God Is Real? in its entirety.