Faith and Reason

Faith and Reason
It would be unwise to think any of the three great monotheistic religions had a single perspective on reason or the relationship between faith and reason. Within each we find varying approaches to the role of reason in religion.

Thus we find the Muslim thinkers Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and Ibn Rushd (Averroes) in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Through them the works of Aristotle were actually saved from oblivion. St. Thomas Aquinas appropriated Aristotle for Christianity by way of their influence. And let us not forget Moses Maimonides, who did the same for Judaism in the twelfth century. All these medieval philosophers drank heavily from the philosophical thought of Aristotle and promulgated it in the three great monotheistic religions.

On the other hand, in each of these religions we also find streams that have looked askance at reason in religion. The third century Christian Tertullian is well known for his dismissive question, "What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem, or [Plato's] Academy with the Church?" In the nineteenth century, Soren Kierkegaard promulgated a proto-existentialist approach to religion that suggested faith was blind and that a faith that could be understood was no faith at all.

We find these same irrationalist streams in varying degrees in all three religions. In Judaism we might mention Kabbalah and mystical Judaism as less rationally oriented traditions. The more philosophical streams of Islam in the medieval were dismissed in the centuries that followed. The prevailing understanding of Islam today is that true affirmation of Allah as the only god (one of the five pillars of Islam) requires that a person not doubt but be unwaveringly certain in faith. This precludes the kind of questions that follow the evidence to any different conclusion than that which affirms faith as currently understood.

A recent wind blowing within Christianity has tendencies toward the temperment we have just mentioned in Islam. This wind, called "radical orthodoxy," rejects Enlightenment reason as intrinsically unchristian. Thinking about the world can only be called Christian if a Christian brings his or her Christian person to bear on that thinking. The result is that a project like this one, where we are attempting to look at religion from as an objective standpoint as possible, cannot properly be called Christian. A Christian cannot think Christianly unless a basic core of fundamentals are always presumed by faith in that thinking.

Can I satisfy the radically orthodox, particularly those of the Reformed tradition? It is doubtful. They will find my enterprise by its very nature unchristian, as will most Muslims who interpret the shahadah confession conservatively. Orthodox Jews will no doubt also shut this book out.

Why continue, since arguably these are the groups that most need this book? I continue because fundamental reason is so basic a part of human existence that it is impossible to deny it and remain sane. All these groups use reason to connect ideas together, and it is the same basic reason. There is a point at which a line of thought or evidence is so compelling that to deny it is to deny one's very existence in the world. This is the claim that Bultmann makes in the statements at the beginning of this chapter. I cannot make myself think that my car runs on magic.

I would identify the problem with the Enlightenment and with modernity as a problem of presuppositions. The eighteenth century David Hume defined natural and supernatural in a certain way and the logical conclusion was that miracles were an incoherent concept by definition. If the natural is that which occurs on earth as a result of a continuing process of cause and effect, then miracles cannot occur in the natural world by definition. They are events outside the normal chain of cause and effect.

Yet who made these definitions and presumptions about the natural world. They are presuppositions that in themselves are subject to scrutiny.

If I can call the reasoning of the Enlightenment a kind of "macro-reason," reason as it takes place on a large scale in consequence of certain presuppositions, I would call the reason I am proposing to use in this book "micro-reason." This is the reason that we all assume in our daily lives and normal way of going about things. This is a reason that works so well that despite its ultimate "truth," it works to say they are true.

These are things like the relationships between causes and effects. These are the existence of space and time. Something is itself, and is not literally something that is literally different from itself. We could hardly make it through an hour of living without acting on this assumptions.

I suggest the following model, whose application to life is so intuitive, so basic that we cannot maintain sanity without its acceptance.

Almost everything that we believe about the world and about truth consists of some combination of faith and evidence. Rene Descartes suggested that the only thing a person could not doubt was his or her own existence: "I think therefore I am." I think he was slightly wrong even here, for I could be a computer program. He would better have said, "I think, therefore something I am calling thought exists." Something exists--this is the only thing I think is a matter of perfect, 100% evidence.

All other beliefs are a matter of the combination of evidence plus faith. A completely irrational faith would be a belief for which there was no evidence at all. The only claim of this sort I can imagine would be the claim that nothing exists at all, the opposite of the only claim with perfect evidence. For all other claims there is some evidence, with the difference between that evidence and the belief being a matter of faith. Faith as I am defining it here is thus that component of belief that is not supported by the evidence but which is inferred by the believer.

Various beliefs we hold thus stand in varied combinations of faith and evidence. One belief I have is that the earth is round and that the moon circles the earth at some distance from it. All these things I believe circle around the sun in the course of an earth year.

On what combination of faith and evidence does this belief lie? I have never been to the moon. But I have been in a plane where all my senses told me I was far above the earth. I have been to Europe many times and the sun has behaved exactly as I was told in school. Indeed, I have never encountered any data that has seemed to contradict these beliefs I have.

Further, there are people I have seen on television who claim to have visited the moon or at least to have orbited the earth. I have mourned two space shuttle disasters and seen people on television who seemed to experience these events and mourn them even more deeply than I.

I have never known any person who seemed "to know things" who doubted these claims. In short, it seems that I have really good reason to believe that these things are exactly as I was taught. I would with good confidence consider someone unreliable in their thinking if they seriously doubted such things.

And yet it is of course possible that all these things are a hoax. Perhaps the earth is flat and all the space shots are elaborate hoaxes with actors. But I would say my belief in these things is more based on evidence than faith. For me to deny these things would be to move toward insanity.

Other beliefs perhaps consist more of faith than evidence. As a Christian I believe that the Spirit of God in the world is the same God as Jesus, but yet a different person from Jesus. I believe this idea by faith. But it does not make sense to me rationally. Indeed, I do not really understand what I mean when I make this statement, not really. It would be much easier for me to believe that what Christians call the Holy Spirit is really just the same God as God is manifested in this universe, not a different person in a Trinity.

For this claim, I would say that my faith far supercedes the evidence in this belief. After all, some would debate whether the evidence even predominates over faith in the belief that God exists at all. Whether that claim is the case or not, certainly this specifically orthodox Christian belief is far more a matter of faith than evidence.

We mentioned earlier in this chapter that the three classic tests for truth--pragmatic, correspondence, and coherence--still "work" in a postmodern age, especially if we make some postmodern adjustments. I propose that these basic rules of logical thinking are indeed so fundamental to human living that we deny them at the risk of our own sanity. I propose to use them in this book as we examine the thoughts and practices of various religions.

The pragmatic test is the test of whether beliefs "work." Clearly the idea of God works for more people on earth than those for whom it doesn't. If it didn't work for them, the majority of humans would surely stop believing in God. From a technical postmodern standpoint, this is the only real criterion of truth ultimately.

The correspondence test is the question of whether a belief corresponds to what we experience in the world. Does the belief that God is good correspond to what we see in the world, where "good people" (as each religion defines them) suffer? This so called "problem of evil" has always been at issue in Christianity, and its force became critical to Jews after the Holocaust. We probably will acknowledge that a good deal of faith is required when it comes to accessing the views of all three monothestic religions on this particular subject.

The coherence test is the question of whether a belief is coherent, whether it has internal contradiction. We are suggesting in this book that the postmodern context reveals that any belief--except for the denial of existence itself--can be made coherent by adjustments in the relationship between faith and evidence. If we suppose enough by faith, then we can make any amount of evidence, no matter how little, coherent with our beliefs.

The key distinction I am making from previous discussions of faith and rationality--what makes this book aftermodern--is that I am not pitting faith against reason, but faith against evidence. Microreason is involved in all sane thought, in all thought that is functional in the world.

Yet from a postmodern perspective we must make logical room for things that are "insane" to us currently. All systems of thought, all individual paradigms and larger worldviews, involve some degree of incoherence from the standpoint of evidence and perhaps even micro-reason. Even micro-reason, while it works on a universal scale so far as we can tell, is ultimately a matter of faith, even though it works and thus passes for a pragmatic epistemology.<11>

However, as we have also suggested, there is also a Bultmann point for anyone who is sane. There is surely a point for all of us where the evidence could speak so strongly against a belief that we could not affirm it and remain sane. And while all systems of thought must allow for some degree of insanity, there is surely a point at which the insanity so dominates that a system of thought no longer can work for a person.

In the following pages, I propose to examine the various claims of the major religions of the world to measure the various relationships between faith and evidence in them. Chapter two broadly considers the coherence of fundamentalisms of all religions. The main focus is on the idea of grounding one's beliefs in a scriptural text.

Chapters three through five will then survey respectively Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in their various varieties. Chapter six then looks at other forms of religion in the world today, including Buddhism, Hinduism, and secular humanism. The final chapter then asks where we are and where we might go as a planet in relation to religion.

<11>It is insane to exercise faith toward that which contradicts micro-reason when we are dealing with deductive matters where all the data is included and self-contained. We can only maintain coherence in such cases by exerting faith that the very axioms of all thought are in fact mistaken. With inductive matters we can maintain coherence by asserting that we do not in fact have all the data before us and that the faith conclusion is a matter of that unobserved data.