Faith and reason—though human beings can’t but live according to both, within the popular imagination of the contemporary Western world, each represents a sphere of human activity that is assumed to be entirely distinct from and radically at odds with that of the other.
Faith is confined, almost exclusively, to the realm of “religion,” while reason belongs to all things “science.”
And, according to this mindset, religion and science are mutually incompatible.
Religion is the function of “belief.” Science, in glaring contrast, trades only in “facts.”
Of course, as is readily revealed by just a moment’s worth of honest reflection upon our own lives, to say nothing of the slightest familiarity with the intellectual history of Western civilization, this dichotomy is flagrantly false.
“Fideism” (literally, “faith-ism”) is a term that was coined in the late 19th century. It was meant to refer to the position that faith is not just wholly separate from, but often contradictory of, rationality, and that it is the sole means by which belief in all matters pertaining to God can be secured. Though the term is of relatively recent vintage, and though there persists conflicts between philosophers and theologians as to how to most accurately recount the history of fideism, the fact of the matter is that it does have a long and storied history.
Fideism is best understood as a reaction of sorts to “rationalism,” the view that reason is the primary source of theological knowledge.
Nevertheless, by and large, it’s safe to say that, traditionally, the mainline of Christian thought has been beholden to neither fideism nor rationalism. The dominant position has always affirmed a mutually supplementary relationship between faith and reason vis-à-vis knowledge of the Divine—even while, at the same time, affirming the superior role of faith in completing or perfecting reason.
From this standpoint, while reason is sufficiently competent to, say, supply proofs for God’s existence, it is only by way of faith that we can know that God is Trinitarian, or that He became a man in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.
Reason can disclose to us universal moral truths, but it is only through faith that we can know, say, that idolatry is a sin.
Every human relation is predicated upon a collaborative effort between faith and reason. After all, human beings are not logic-chopping machines. Every time we enter a building; cross a bridge; eat food prepared by strangers; make friendships; drive cars; commute via planes, trains, busses, and boats; enter into romantic relationships and marriages; have children—we are invariably making decisions grounded in faith. Yet this faith, far from being irrational, is itself typically rooted in reasonable considerations. Faith is necessary because, being finite, humans never possess that absolute certain knowledge that our decisions will materialize as we hope.
Why should we expect for the relation between the human and the Divine to be any different, in this respect, than any other human relationship?
So, faith is an ineliminable feature of being human. It is not confined to issues that are explicitly “religious” in character, and it is not intrinsically antithetical to reason, which is an equally inescapable dimension of personhood. Faith and reason, while they can be in tension, need not be and, as it happens, are always working in tandem with one another. It is only because of the ubiquity of the synergy between the two, and the fact that this mutually synergistic dynamic frequently occurs subconsciously, that it has been possible for such radical misconceptions of faith, reason, and the relationship between them to proliferate among philosophers and lay persons alike.
Religion, then, does not preclude reason. Religious faith is reasonable.
Upon this point, theists over millennia and to the present moment have been tirelessly insisting. What has not been stressed—indeed, it’s all too often been denied—is that not only does science not preclude faith; it requires faith.
David Hume, undoubtedly the most significant figure of the Scottish Enlightenment (and an agnostic, to boot), changed the course of Western philosophy when, in the 18th century, he argued that our assumptions to the contrary notwithstanding, experience, including sensory experience, cannot, ultimately, justify any knowledge claims.
Hume was a leading exponent of empiricism, the theory that knowledge derives from experience. The empiricist tradition within which Hume operated held that our perceptions are like mental photographs that “represent” or “correspond” to the objects in the world. The problem with this, Hume argued, is that empiricists also insisted that what we actually, directly, experience are our perceptions, and not the objects themselves. This means that we can never know whether our perceptions accurately reflect reality. (For example, if what I know when I perceive a chair is the perception of the chair, then whether the chair itself is as I perceive it, or even whether the chair exists at all is not something of which I can have knowledge)
Hume’s conclusions were devastating, for he kicked the feet out from under the entire scientific enterprise. Since we can only know our perceptions, we can’t justify the belief that unperceived objects exist in space and time, that they are essentially the same things even as they change, and that, collectively, they constitute an orderly universe held together by necessary causal connections. We have no perceptions of such things. And this means, to put it another way, that scientists have no justification for holding that there is uniformity in nature, that the future will be fundamentally continuous with the past.
In other words, time, space, necessary causation, object-permanence, the uniformity of the world—these are not the fruits of experience; they must be accepted in advance of experience if experience is to be possible.
Indeed, these things have traditionally been the stuff of metaphysics. It’s not inaccurate to say that in order for science to get off of the ground, scientists must accept them on faith.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member