2.1 Faith and Reason

I had another philosophy live session with a group tonight. Tonight's session was on the philosophy of religion -- arguments for the existence of God and potential answers to the problem of evil and suffering.

This post is part of a series of pieces from my philosophy classes that I've decided to post whenever I have a live session of some sort, which is often. So far I've posted on some introductory topics and an epistemology one. The posts here on the blog will go well beyond class discussion, since I try to play more of a facilitator role there.
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2.1 Faith and Reason
1. The second leg of our philosophical journey is the philosophy of religion. Assuming that God exists, God is the most important Being -- in fact the only truly essential Being. There are some who have a lesser sense of God, of course. But the historic, Christian sense of God sees God as the ground of all existence, without whom nothing would or could exist. 

Classic Christian theology speaks of God's "aseity," meaning God's full self-sufficiency. This means that God has no need of anything outside of Godself. Everything else has a sort of "contingent" existence. Nothing else must exist. But God must exist, and nothing else could exist without God's existence.

So, it makes sense to turn directly to the philosophy of religion on our pilgrimage toward reflectivity. If God exists, we should assume it affects everything. If God did not exist, it seems that it would effect everything else on our journey as well.

It makes sense to get these options out on the table before we go any further.

2. In the first segment of this journey, we talked about the fact that we all have unexamined assumptions about reality and the world. This is certainly true when it comes to religion no differently from other key issues. 

For example, I can imagine someone saying, "Why should I believe in God?" On one level, this is a quite peculiar question. God's existence -- and the nature of God's existence -- is not dependent in any way on you or me. God either exists "out there" or God doesn't. 

But the question may reveal an unexamined assumption that God's existence is subjective -- a matter of my opinion. But think about this assumption. Would you come up to me and ask, "Why should I believe you exist?" You might, if you were high on something or suspected I was a holograph or an illusion.

But on a normal day, it doesn't matter "what's in it for you" to believe I exist. You sit there pondering, and I'll go have some lunch.

3. There was actually a philosopher in the twentieth century who suggested that God's existence was a matter of the personal and social "games" we play based on the belief that God exists. So, my belief that God exists might keep me from running someone over with my car. In a sense, it doesn't matter whether God really exists objectively. My belief that God exists changes the world through the impact it has on my actions.

Ludwig Wittgenstein -- the philosopher in question --believed that God existed in these "language games" that we play. God is real, he thought, because the idea has a serious effect on the world. We call those who see the existence of God in such terms "Wittgensteinian fideists." [1]

As a historic Christian, I believe that God exists outside of human discourse -- "out there," so to speak. However, I also suspect that Wittgenstein is right about a lot of people who claim to believe in God, including many people in the church. I suspect there are many prayers that are really monologs, and the person praying isn't even self-aware of it. [2]

I suspect that many a person who would say, "Why should I believe in God?" are more asking "what's in such belief for me?" They are implicitly indicating that they do not truly think of God as an objective Being but as a matter of subjective opinion. That is to say, they don't believe in the real God in the first place. They are discussing the concept of God. [3]

4. There are other unexamined assumptions we might have in relation to the proper relationship between faith and reason. That is to say, we are "unitary" thinkers on this question -- by which I mean we only know one way to think of the issue. We don't really know that there are even other options.

So, one person assumes that Christian beliefs are thoroughly provable by argument. "The evidence demands a verdict," as Josh McDowell put it. C. S. Lewis felt this way. Lee Strobel feels this way. If you come from this kind of Christian culture, you will assume that apologetics is an obvious endeavor in which to participate.

Then consider those whose unexamined assumption is that faith is blind ("blind faith"). This person may see faith as a gift. Some people have it. Others don't. It has nothing to do with reason. Some people just believe and that's that. For others, faith seems ridiculous to believe, absurd.

Then there is the vast middle ground. Their assumptions might be a little more examined because they might find some aspects of faith as very reasonable, and others rather more difficult to understand.

A related issue, it seems to me, is the extent to which faith should be evaluated by reason. We hinted at this question earlier when we asked if philosophy was even Christian. From one perspective, to evaluate faith is to stand over it and, thus, to put yourself in the position of a god over the God. From another perspective, such questioning can be an honest pursuit of truth from human beings whose minds are fallen and finite.

5. Let's start with one end of the spectrum. This view sees most claims of faith as nearly provable. It implicitly has a high view of the human ability to reason. We think of Thomas Aquinas in the 1200s as well as the other thinkers I mentioned above.

On the one hand, it makes perfect sense to think that all matters of faith are perfectly provable from God's standpoint. If we knew what God knows, if we could reason as God reasons, we would see that faith is totally provable.

However, our minds are finite and fallen. We do not have full knowledge. We do not reason perfectly. We do not know what we do not know. We are stuck in our heads.

It seems to me that there is sometimes an unexamined assumption that proving faith is the same as saving faith. But faith in Christ is not merely intellectual. In fact, it is far more a matter of heart commitment than mere cognitive assent. "The demons also believe and tremble" (Jas. 2:19). Head belief is far from sufficient for salvation.

So, you cannot argue someone to faith. Faith is a matter of the will and choice. If you believe in predestination, then faith is entirely a matter of the Lord's action with no real human action. In this case, any intellectual element would be entirely orchestrated by God himself. It is no cause of salvation.

If you believe that the Spirit empowers some choice, as my theological tradition does, then intellect still remains an insufficient basis for faith. Argument can remove obstacles to faith. There do seem to be some individuals who reluctantly come to faith as a result of their reasoning. But, again, reason seems to set up fruitful conditions for faith rather than being the actual cause of faith.

6. Still, the opposite extreme does not seem a better option. Is faith believable because it is impossible, a Tertullian suggested? Is faith a blind leap of faith, as Soren Kierkegaard held?

Karl Barth in the twentieth century promoted a faith that hung in mid-air without rational argument. "Dogmatics," he called it. Still, every sentence of his multivolume magnum opus uses reason. It is inevitable. 

It seems to me that there's some serious inconsistencies among these "presuppositionalists," as I call them. A presupposition is an assumption, as we saw earlier. Those who are borderline anti-reason sequester certain beliefs from evaluation but then use normal reason in every sentence of their arguments and claims.

My personal sense is that this is a dodge, a cop out. In some instances, it might actually be a lack of faith. What was the soil out of which Barth's theology grew but a sense that all the reason in play went against faith? What was the soil out of which "post-liberalism" grew in the late twentieth century? Was it not a sense that faith couldn't survive the normal reasoning that had led to liberalism?

Please excuse me for thinking that these are approaches born of defeat. We can't cut the mustard on the playing field of reason, so we will downshift into an argument that brackets the truth from reason.

7. In my own personal struggles, I concluded that faith should be reasonable although probably not provable given our current fallen and finite state. Faith is generally rational rather than irrational -- although there may be some instances where we simply need to exercise faith when the evidence seems against us. But we can be honest about those situations if and when they arise.

To some degree, this was Blaise Pascal's approach. If God made everything completely clear, then the nature of our will, our choice, would be less clear. But Pascal also believed that faith was reasonable.

I would like to think that God created reason. God created math, which is related to reason. While our reason may be clouded at times, I would like to think that its general structure was created and blessed by God.

I do not think that God is intimidated by human reason. God is not sitting in heaven nervous about his own existence. Rather, he is absolutely confident that he exists.

God is not insecure like a father who blows up at his children if they question his authority. That's a father who needs some therapy. God is not threatened by us. God is not insecure. The pictures of God as wrathul in Scripture are anthropomorphic. After all, anger involves response, and God has known every event that would happen since the foundation of the world.

This leads me to an absurd thought experiment. What if you could sit down with God and prove to him that he did not exist? How would he react? He would say, "Fair enough," and disappear.

Of course, that is a ridiculous thought experiment. The point is that God is not afraid of our questions or our search for truth. Rather, he supports it if it is truly seeking understanding. Remember "faith seeking understanding"? 

He also knows that the search is fake for many of us. He also knows that great caution is often necessary because of how easily deceived we are.

But I would like to think that God is very much on board with the pursuit of truth using both reason and evidence. Faith is reasonable, but usually not provable from a human standpoint.

[1] Kai Nelson, "Wittgensteinian Fideism," Journal of Philosophical Studies 42:161 (1967): 191-209.

[2] See D. Z. Phillips' application of Wittgenstein's thoughts on God to prayer in The Concept of Prayer (Routledge, 1965).

[3] On the other hand, there are those who would ask this question with a genuine question of why a person should conclude there is a God. For them, it is a question of truth while the other group I mentioned are asking, "What's in it for me in such belief?"