It depends on how you define "faith." By some definitions, there must be such an unbridgable gap, because those definitions exclude reason. Faith does not need to be defined that way, and ought not to be, if it is Bible faith that is meant.
I hope I have given no offense.
One's honest opinion should never offend anyone, and if anyone is offended by that, it is their fault. I cannot speak for others, but you have not been in the least offensive, but then, it's almost impossible to offend me short of using physical force. I wasn't even offended by your suggestion that I am a pagan, which I am not, although both betty boop and Alamo-Girl are pretty sure that I am.
I enjoyed your postings and they have provoked me to thought.
Likewise.
Hank
On the other hand, I agree with Hank that there is a certain amount of Manicheism and Platonism - I might say also gnosticism - that has permeated popular Christianity.
Cat baby, whar the hail is the basis that equates Plato[nism] with Manicheism?
There is nothing in Plato (or Christianity) that says "the world" of physical nature is (categorically) "bad."
After decades of study, I have found nothing in Plato that wants to "run away" from physis, that is, from natural bodily existence. In fact, the point I think he makes abundantly clear is that psyche-in-soma is indivisible in human existence -- that is to say, in human lived experience, mind (reason, consciousness) -in-soma (physical body) is seemingly innately understood as the process of becoming "itself" (that process of "in-between reality" that seeks to realize being in existence).
The two are parts of one synergistic Whole; and are therefore indivisible in principle.
Fast forward here to the famous curse of the modern age, that burning, seemingly irreconcilable issue first noticed by Rene Descartes. His was a take on reality that propounded a profound dualism in human life and nature, requiring the complete separation of body and spirit.
Plato would never have accepted Cartesian dualism as a reliable model by which "reality" might be reliably known and understood.
For Plato -- and later, Christianity -- the very notion of psyche-in-soma indicated a dynamic, synergistic whole constituted by seemingly mutually-contradictory parts.
For Plato, the "parts" of spirit and body may not be separated, detached from each other. For the "complete picture" of human and natural reality depends, in the long run at least, on the proper correspondance and correlation of two divinely-ordained principles that express and realize the divine paradign, "set up in heaven" -- described by the very language of the formulation, "psyche-in-soma."
So if you want to say that gnostics and Manichees espouse cosmic dualism as the reality behind nature and human experience, well, you're protected by the First Amendment. Plus you probably have a good deal of evidence on your side.
Just please don't impute this result either to Plato or Christianity. Neither espouses dualism in any way, shape, or form. Both seek the One source that alone makes intelligible what is actually seen in human existence and experience, as reflected and meditated by men who seek wisdom.