sources of justification for belief. Because both can purportedly
serve this same epistemic function, it has been a matter of much
interest to philosophers and theologians how the two are related and
thus how the rational agent should treat claims derived from either
source. Some have held that there can be no conflict between the
two—that reason properly employed and faith properly understood will
never produce contradictory or competing claims—whereas others have
maintained that faith and reason can (or even must) be in genuine
contention over certain propositions or methodologies. Those who have
taken the latter view disagree as to whether faith or reason ought to
prevail when the two are in conflict. Kierkegaard, for instance,
prioritizes faith even to the point that it becomes positively
irrational, while Locke emphasizes the reasonableness of faith to such
an extent that a religious doctrine's irrationality—conflict with
itself or with known facts—is a sign that it is unsound. Other
thinkers have theorized that faith and reason each govern their own
separate domains, such that cases of apparent conflict are resolved on
the side of faith when the claim in question is, say, a religious or
theological claim, but resolved on the side of reason when the
disputed claim is, for example, empirical or logical. Some relatively
recent philosophers, most notably the logical positivists, have denied
that there is a domain of thought or human existence rightly governed
by faith, asserting instead that all meaningful statements and ideas
are accessible to thorough rational examination. This has presented a
challenge to religious thinkers to explain how an admittedly
nonrational or transrational form of language can hold meaningful
cognitive content.
This article traces the historical development of thought on the
interrelation of faith and reason, beginning with Classical Greek
conceptions of mind and religious mythology and continuing through the
medieval Christian theologians, the rise of science proper in the
early modern period, and the reformulation of the issue as one of
'science versus religion' in the twentieth century.
1. Introduction
Faith and reason are both sources of authority upon which beliefs can
rest. Reason generally is understood as the principles for a
methodological inquiry, whether intellectual, moral, aesthetic, or
religious. Thus is it not simply the rules of logical inference or the
embodied wisdom of a tradition or authority. Some kind of algorithmic
demonstrability is ordinarily presupposed. Once demonstrated, a
proposition or claim is ordinarily understood to be justified as true
or authoritative. Faith, on the other hand, involves a stance toward
some claim that is not, at least presently, demonstrable by reason.
Thus faith is a kind of attitude of trust or assent. As such, it is
ordinarily understood to involve an act of will or a commitment on the
part of the believer. Religious faith involves a belief that makes
some kind of either an implicit or explicit reference to a
transcendent source. The basis for a person's faith usually is
understood to come from the authority of revelation. Revelation is
either direct, through some kind of direct infusion, or indirect,
usually from the testimony of an other. The religious beliefs that are
the objects of faith can thus be divided into those what are in fact
strictly demonstrable (scienta) and those that inform a believer's
virtuous practices (sapientia).
Religious faith is of two kinds: evidence-sensitive and
evidence-insensitive. The former views faith as closely coordinated
with demonstrable truths; the latter more strictly as an act of the
will of the religious believer alone. The former includes evidence
garnered from the testimony and works of other believers. It is,
however, possible to hold a religious belief simply on the basis
either of faith alone or of reason alone. Moreover, one can even lack
faith in God or deny His existence, but still find solace in the
practice of religion.
The basic impetus for the problem of faith and reason comes from the
fact that the revelation or set of revelations on which most religions
are based is usually described and interpreted in sacred
pronouncements, either in an oral tradition or canonical writings,
backed by some kind of divine authority. These writings or oral
traditions are usually presented in the literary forms of narrative,
parable, or discourse. As such, they are in some measure immune from
rational critique and evaluation. In fact even the attempt to verify
religious beliefs rationally can be seen as a kind of category
mistake. Yet most religious traditions allow and even encourage some
kind of rational examination of their beliefs.
The key philosophical issue regarding the problem of faith and reason
is to work out how the authority of faith and the authority of reason
interrelate in the process by which a religious belief is justified or
established as true or justified. Four basic models of interaction are
possible.
(a) The conflict model. Here the aims, objects, or methods of reason
and faith seem to be very much the same. Thus when they seem to be
saying different things, there is genuine rivalry. This model is thus
assumed both by religious fundamentalists, who resolve the rivalry on
the side of faith, and scientific naturalists, who resolve it on the
side of reason.
(b) The incompatibilist model. Here the aims, objects, and methods of
reason and faith are understood to be distinct. Compartmentalization
of each is possible. Reason aims at empirical truth; religion aims at
divine truths. Thus no rivalry exists between them. This model
subdivides further into three subdivisions. First, one can hold faith
is transrational, inasmuch as it is higher than reason. This latter
strategy has been employed by some Christian existentialists. Reason
can only reconstruct what is already implicit in faith or religious
practice. Second, one can hold that religious belief is irrational,
thus not subject to rational evaluation at all. This is the position
taken ordinarily by those who adopt negative theology, the method that
assumes that all speculation about God can only arrive at what God is
not. The latter subdivision also includes those theories of belief
that claim that religious language is only metaphorical in nature.
This and other forms of irrationalism result in what is ordinarily
considered fideism: the conviction that faith ought not to be
subjected to any rational elucidation or justification.
(c) The weak compatibilist model. Here it is understood that dialogue
is possible between reason and faith, though both maintain distinct
realms of evaluation and cogency. For example, the substance of faith
can be seen to involve miracles; that of reason to involve the
scientific method of hypothesis testing. Much of the Reformed model of
Christianity adopts this basic model.
(d) The strong compatibilist model. Here it is understood that faith
and reason have an organic connection, and perhaps even parity. A
typical form of strong compatibilism is termed natural theology.
Articles of faith can be demonstrated by reason, either deductively
(from widely shared theological premises) or inductively (from common
experiences). It can take one of two forms: either it begins with
justified scientific claims and supplements them with valid
theological claims unavailable to science, or it starts with typical
claims within a theological tradition and refines them by using
scientific thinking. An example of the former would be the
cosmological proof for God's existence; an example of the latter would
be the argument that science would not be possible unless God's
goodness ensured that the world is intelligible. Many, but certainly
not all, Roman Catholic philosophers and theologians hold to the
possibility of natural theology. Some natural theologians have
attempted to unite faith and reason into a comprehensive metaphysical
system. The strong compatibilist model, however, must explain why God
chose to reveal Himself at all since we have such access to him
through reason alone.
The interplay between reason and faith is an important topic in the
philosophy of religion. It is closely related to, but distinct from,
several other issues in the philosophy of religion: namely, the
existence of God, divine attributes, the problem of evil, divine
action in the world, religion and ethics, religious experience and
religious language, and the problem of religious pluralism. Moreover,
an analysis of the interplay between faith and reason also provides
resources for philosophical arguments in other areas such as
metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology.
While the issues the interplay between faith and reason addresses are
endemic to almost any religious faith, this article will focus
primarily on the faith claims found in the three great monotheistic
world religions: Judaism, Islam, and particularly Christianity.
This rest of the article will trace out the history of the development
of thinking about the relationship between faith and reason in Western
philosophy from the classical period of the Greeks through the end of
the twentieth century.
2. The Classical Period
Greek religions, in contrast to Judaism, speculated primarily not on
the human world but on the cosmos as a whole. They were often
formulated as literary myths. Nonetheless these forms of religious
speculation were generally practical in nature: they aimed to increase
personal and social virtue in those who engaged in them. Most of these
religions involved civic cultic practices.
Philosophers from the earliest times in Greece tried to distill
metaphysical issues out of these mythological claims. Once these
principles were located and excised, these philosophers purified them
from the esoteric speculation and superstition of their religious
origins. They also decried the proclivities to gnosticism and elitism
found in the religious culture whence the religious myths developed.
None of these philosophers, however, was particularly interested in
the issue of willed assent to or faith in these religious beliefs as
such.
1. ARISTOTLE AND PLATO.
Both Plato and Aristotle found a principle of intellectual
organization in religious thinking that could function metaphysically
as a halt to the regress of explanation. In Plato, this is found in
the Forms, particularly the Form of the Good. The Form of Good is that
by which all things gain their intelligibility. Aristotle rejected the
Form of the Good as unable to account for the variety of good things,
appealing instead to the unmoved mover as an unchangeable cosmic
entity. This primary substance also has intelligence as nous: it is
"thought thinking itself." From this mind emerges exemplars for
existent things.
Both thinkers also developed versions of natural theology by showing
how religious beliefs emerge from rational reflections on concrete
reality as such. An early form of religious apologetics –
demonstrating the existence of the gods — can be found in Plato's
Laws. Aristotle's Physics gave arguments demonstrating the existence
of an unmoved mover as a timeless self-thinker from the evidence of
motion in the world.
2. STOICS AND EPICUREANS.
Both of these schools of thought derived certain theological kinds of
thinking from physics and cosmology. The Stoics generally held a
cosmological view of an eternal cycle of identical world-revolutions
and world-destructions by a universal conflagration. Absolute
necessity governs the cyclic process and is identified with divine
reason (logos) and providence. This provident and benevolent God is
immanent in the physical world. God orders the universe, though
without an explicit purpose. Humans are microcosms; their souls are
emanations of the fiery soul of the universe.
The Epicureans, on the other hand, were skeptical, materialistic, and
anti-dogmatic. It is not clear they were theists at all, though at
some points they seem to be. They did speak of the gods as living in a
blissful state in intermundial regions, without any interest in the
affairs of humans. There is no relation between the evils of human
life and a divine guidance of the universe. At death all human
perception ceases.
3. PLOTINUS.
Plotinus, in the Enneads, held that all modes of being and value
originate in an overflow of procession from a single ineffable power
that he identified with the radical simplicity of the One of
Parmenides or the Good of Plato's Republic. Nous, the second
hypostasis after the One, resembles Aristotle's unmoved mover. The
orders of the world soul and nature follow after Nous in a linear
procession. Humans contain the potentialities of these creative
principles, and can choose to make their lives an ascent towards and
then a union with the intuitive intelligence. The One is not a being,
but infinite being. It is the cause of beings. Thus Christian and
Jewish philosophers who held to a creator God could affirm such a
conception. Plotinus might have been the first negative theologian,
arguing that God, as simple, is know more from what he is not, than
from what he is.
3. The Rise of Christianity
Christianity, emerging from Judaism, imposed a set of revealed truths
and practices on its adherents. Many of these beliefs and practices
differed significantly from what the Greek religions and Judaism had
held. For example, Christians held that God created the world ex
nihilo, that God is three persons, and that Jesus Christ was the
ultimate revelation of God. Nonetheless, from the earliest of times,
Christians held to a significant degree of compatibility between faith
and reason.
1. ST. PAUL.
The writings attributed to St. Paul in the Christian Scriptures
provide diverse interpretations of the relation between faith and
reason. First, in the Acts of the Apostles, Paul himself engages in
discussion with "certain Epicurean and Stoic philosophers" at the
Aeropagus in Athens (Acts 17:18). Here he champions the unity of the
Christian God as the creator of all. God is "not far from any one of
us." Much of Paul's speech, in fact, seems to allude to Stoic beliefs.
It reflects a sympathy with pagan customs, handles the subject of idol
worship gently, and appeals for a new examination of divinity not from
the standpoint of creation, but from practical engagement with the
world. However, he claims that this same God will one day come to
judge all mankind. But in his famous passage from Romans 1:20, Paul is
less obliging to non-Christians. Here he champions a natural theology
against those pagans who would claim that, even on Christian grounds,
their previous lack of access to the Christian God would absolve them
from guilt for their nonbelief. Paul argues that in fact anyone can
attain to the truth of God's existence merely from using his or her
reason to reflect on the natural world. Thus this strong compatibilist
interpretation entailed a reduced tolerance for atheists and
agnostics. Yet in 1 Corinthians 1:23, Paul suggests a kind of
incompatibilism, claiming that Christian revelation is folly the
Gentiles (meaning Greeks). He points out that the world did not come
to know God through wisdom; God chose to reveal Himself fully to those
of simple faith.
These diverse Pauline interpretations of the relation between faith
and reason were to continue to manifest themselves in various ways
through the centuries that followed.
2. EARLY CHRISTIAN APOLOGISTS.
The early apologists were both compatibilists and incompatibilists.
Tertullian took up the ideas of Paul in 1 Corinthians, proclaiming
that Christianity is not merely incompatible with but offensive to
natural reason. Jerusalem has nothing to do with Athens. He boldly
claimed credo quia absurdum est ("I believe because it is absurd"). He
claims that religious faith is both against and above reason. In his
De Praescriptione Haereticorum, he proclaims, "when we believe, we
desire to believe nothing further."
On the other hand, Justin Martyr converted to Christianity, but
continued to hold Greek philosophy in high esteem. In his Dialogue
with Trypho he finds Christianity "the only sure and profitable
philosophy."
In a similar vein, Clement of Alexandria in his Stromata called the
Gospel "the true philosophy." Philosophy acted as a "schoolmaster" to
bring the Greeks to Christ, just as the law brought the Jews. But he
maintained that Greek philosophy is unnecessary for a defense of the
faith, though it helps to disarm sophistry. He also worked to
demonstrate in a rational way what is found in faith. He claimed that
"I believe in order that I may know" (credo ut intelligam). This set
Christianity on firmer intellectual foundations. Clement also worked
to clarify the early creeds of Christianity, using philosophical
notions of substance, being, and person, in order to combat heresies.
3. ST. AUGUSTINE.
Augustine emerged in the late fourth century as a rigorous defender of
the Christian faith. He responded forcefully to pagans' allegations
that Christian beliefs were not only superstitious but also barbaric.
But he was, for the most part, a strong compatibilist. He felt that
intellectual inquiry into the faith was to be understood as faith
seeking understanding (fides quaerens intellectum). To believe is "to
think with assent" (credere est assensione cogitare). It is an act of
the intellect determined not by the reason, but by the will. Faith
involves a commitment "to believe in a God," "to believe God," and "to
believe in God."
In On Christian Doctrine Augustine makes it clear that Christian
teachers not only may, but ought, to use pagan thinking when
interpreting Scripture. He points out that if a pagan science studies
what is eternal and unchanging, it can be used to clarify and
illuminate the Christian faith. Thus logic, history, and the natural
sciences are extremely helpful in matters of interpreting ambiguous or
unknown symbols in the Scriptures. However, Augustine is equally
interested to avoid any pagan learning, such as that of crafts and
superstition that is not targeted at unchangeable knowledge.
Augustine believed that Platonists were the best of philosophers,
since they concentrated not merely on the causes of things and the
method of acquiring knowledge, but also on the cause of the organized
universe as such. One does not, then, have to be a Christian to have a
conception of God. Yet, only a Christian can attain to this kind of
knowledge without having to have recourse to philosophy.
Augustine argued further that the final authority for the
determination of the use of reason in faith lies not with the
individual, but with the Church itself. His battle with the Manichean
heresy prompted him to realize that the Church is indeed the final
arbiter of what cannot be demonstrated–or can be demonstrated but
cannot be understood by all believers. Yet despite this appeal to
ecclesiastical authority, he believe that one cannot genuinely
understand God until one loves Him.
4. PSEUDO-DIONYSIUS
Pseudo Dionysius was heavily influenced by neo-Platonism. In letter IX
of his Corpus Dionysiacum, he claimed that our language about God
provides no information about God but only a way of protecting God's
otherness. His analysis gave rise to the unique form negative
theology. It entailed a severe restriction in our access to and
understanding of the nature of God. In his "Mystical Theology"
Pseudo-Dionysius describes how the soul's destiny is to be fully
united with the ineffable and absolutely transcendent God.
4. The Medieval Period
Much of the importance of this period stems from its retrieval of
Greek thinking, particularly that of Aristotle. At the beginning of
the period Arab translators set to work translating and distributing
many works of Greek philosophy, making them available to Jewish,
Islamic, and Christian philosophers and theologians alike.
For the most part, medieval theologians adopted an epistemological
distinction the Greeks had developed: between scienta (episteme),
propositions established on the basis of principles, and opinio,
propositions established on the basis of appeals to authority. An
established claim in theology, confirmed by either scienta or opinio,
demanded the believer's assent. Yet despite this possibility of
scientia in matters of faith, medieval philosophers and theologians
believed that it could be realized only in a limited sense. They were
all too aware of St. Paul's caveat that faith is a matter of "seeing
in a mirror dimly" (1 Cor 1:13).
1. ST. ANSELM.
Like Augustine, Anselm held that one must love God in order to have
knowledge of Him. In the Proslogion, he argues that "the smoke of our
wrongdoing" will prohibit us from this knowledge. Anselm is most
noted, however, for his ontological argument, presented in his
Proslogion. He claimed that it is possible for reason to affirm that
God exists from inferences made from what the understanding can
conceive within its own confines. As such he was a gifted natural
theologian. Like Augustine, Anselm held that the natural theologian
seeks not to understand in order to believe, but to believe in order
to understand. This is the basis for his principle intellectus fidei.
Under this conception, reason is not asked to pass judgment on the
content of faith, but to find its meaning and to discover explanations
that enable others to understand its content. But when reason
confronts what is incomprehensible, it remains unshaken since it is
guided by faith's affirmation of the truth of its own incomprehensible
claims.
2. PETER LOMBARD.
Lombard was an important precursor to Aquinas. Following Augustine, he
argued that pagans can know about much about truths of the one God
simply by their possession of reason (e.g. that spirit is better than
body, the mutable can exists only from a immutable principle, all
beauty points to a beauty beyond compare). But in addition, pagans can
affirm basic truths about the Trinity from these same affirmations,
inasmuch as all things mirror three attributes associated with the
Trinity: unity (the Father), form or beauty (the Son), and a position
or order (the Holy Spirit).
3. ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHERS.
Islamic philosophers in the tenth and eleventh centuries were also
heavily influenced by the reintroduction of Aristotle into their
intellectual culture.
Avicenna (Ibn Sina) held that as long as religion is properly
construed it comprises an area of truth no different than that of
philosophy. He built this theory of strong compatibilism on the basis
of his philosophical study of Aristotle and Plotinus and his
theological study of his native Islam. He held that philosophy reveals
that Islam is the highest form of life. He defended the Islamic belief
in the immortality of individual souls on the grounds that, although
as Aristotle taught the agent intellect was one in all persons, the
unique potential intellect of each person, illuminated by the agent
intellect, survives death.
Averroes (Ibn Rusd), though also a scholar of Aristotle's works, was
less sympathetic to compatibilism than his predecessor Avicenna. But
in his Incoherence of Incoherence, he attacked Algazel's criticisms of
rationalism in theology. For example, he developed a form of natural
theology in which the task of proving the existence of God is
possible. He held, however, that it could be proven only from the
physical fact of motion. Nonetheless Averroes did not think that
philosophy could prove all Islamic beliefs, such as that of individual
immortality. Following Aristotle in De Anima, Averroes argued for a
separation between the active and passive intellects, even though they
enter into a temporary connection with individual humans. This
position entails the conclusion that no individuated intellect
survives death. Yet Averroes held firmly to the contrary opinion by
faith alone.
4. JEWISH PHILOSOPHY.
Moses Maimonides, a Jewish philosopher, allowed for a significant role
of reason in critically interpreting the Scriptures. But he is
probably best known for his development of negative theology.
Following Avicenna's affirmation of a real distinction between essence
and existence, Maimonides concluded that no positive essential
attributes may be predicated of God. God does not possess anything
superadded to his essence, and his essence includes all his
perfections. The attributes we do have are derived from the Pentateuch
and the Prophets. Yet even these positive attributes, such as wisdom
and power, would imply defects in God if applied to Him in the same
sense they are applied to us. Since God is simple, it is impossible
that we should know one part, or predication, of Him and not another.
He argues that when one proves the negation of a thing believed to
exist in God, one becomes more perfect and closer to knowledge of God.
He quotes Psalm 4:4's approval of an attitude of silence towards God.
Those who do otherwise commit profanity and blasphemy. It is not
certain, however, whether Maimonides rejected the possibility of
positive knowledge of the accidental attributes of God's action.
5. ST. THOMAS AQUINAS.
Unlike Augustine, who made little distinction between explaining the
meaning of a theological proposition and giving an argument for it,
Aquinas worked out a highly articulated theory of theological
reasoning. St. Bonaventure, an immediate precursor to Aquinas, had
argued that no one could attain to truth unless he philosophizes in
the light of faith. Thomas held that our faith in eternal salvation
shows that we have theological truths that exceed human reason. But he
also claimed that one could attain truths about religious claims
without faith, though such truths are incomplete. In the Summa Contra
Gentiles he called this a "a two fold truth" about religious claims,
"one to which the inquiry of reason can reach, the other which
surpasses the whole ability of the human reason." No contradiction can
stand between these two truths. However, something can be true for
faith and false (or inconclusive) in philosophy, though not the other
way around. This entails that a non-believer can attain to truth,
though not to the higher truths of faith.
A puzzling question naturally arises: why are two truths needed? Isn't
one truth enough? Moreover, if God were indeed the object of rational
inquiry in this supernatural way, why would faith be required at all?
In De Veritate (14,9) Thomas responds to this question by claiming
that one cannot believe by faith and know by rational demonstration
the very same truth since this would make one or the other kind of
knowledge superfluous.
On the basis of this two-fold theory of truth, Aquinas thus
distinguished between revealed (dogmatic) theology and rational
(philosophical) theology. The former is a genuine science, even though
it is not based on natural experience and reason. Revealed theology is
a single speculative science concerned with knowledge of God. Because
of its greater certitude and higher dignity of subject matter, it is
nobler than any other science. Philosophical theology, though, can
make demonstrations using the articles of faith as its principles.
Moreover, it can apologetically refute objections raised against the
faith even if no articles of faith are presupposed. But unlike
revealed theology, it can err.
Aquinas claimed that the act of faith consists essentially in
knowledge. Faith is an intellectual act whose object is truth. Thus it
has both a subjective and objective aspect. From the side of the
subject, it is the mind's assent to what is not seen: "Faith is the
evidence of things that appear not" (Hebrews 11:1). Moreover, this
assent, as an act of will, can be meritorious for the believer, even
though it also always involves the assistance of God's grace.
Moreover, faith can be a virtue, since it is a good habit, productive
of good works. However, when we assent to truth in faith, we do so on
the accepted testimony of another. From the side of what is believed,
the objective aspect, Aquinas clearly distinguished between "preambles
of faith," which can be established by philosophical principles, and
"articles of faith" that rest on divine testimony alone. A proof of
God's existence is an example of a preamble of faith. Faith alone can
grasp, on the other hand, the article of faith that the world was
created in time (Summa Theologiae I, q. 46, a. 2). Aquinas argued that
the world considered in itself offers no grounds for demonstrating
that it was once all new. Demonstration is always about definitions,
and definitions, as universal, abstract from "the here and now." A
temporal beginning, thus demonstrated, is ruled out tout court. Of
course this would extend to any argument about origination of the
first of any species in a chain of efficient causes. Here Thomas
sounds a lot like Kant will in his antinomies. Yet by faith we believe
he world had a beginning. However, one rational consideration that
suggests, though not definitively, a beginning to the world is that
the passage from one term to another includes only a limited number of
intermediate points between them.
Aquinas thus characterizes the articles of faith as first truths that
stand in a "mean between science and opinion." They are like
scientific claims since their objects are true; they are like mere
opinions in that they have not been verified by natural experience.
Though he agrees with Augustine that no created intellect can
comprehend God as an object, the intellect can grasp his existence
indirectly. The more a cause is grasped, the more of its effects can
be seen in it; and since God is the ultimate cause of all other
reality, the more perfectly an intellect understands God, the greater
will be its knowledge of the things God does or can do. So although we
cannot know the divine essence as an object, we can know whether He
exists and on the basis of analogical knowledge what must necessarily
belong to Him. Aquinas maintains, however, that some objects of faith,
such as the Trinity or the Incarnation, lie entirely beyond our
capacity to understand them in this life.
Aquinas also elucidates the relationship between faith and reason on
the basis of a distinction between higher and lower orders of
creation. Aquinas criticizes the form of naturalism that holds that
the goodness of any reality "is whatever belongs to it in keeping with
its own nature" without need for faith (II-IIae, q.2, a.3). Yet, from
reason itself we know that every ordered pattern of nature has two
factors that concur in its full development: one on the basis of its
own operation; the other, on the basis of the operation of a higher
nature. The example is water: in a lower pattern, it naturally flows
toward the centre, but in virtue of a higher pattern, such as the pull
of the moon, it flows around the center. In the realm of our concrete
knowledge of things, a lower pattern grasps only particulars, while a
higher pattern grasps universals.
Given this distinction of orders, Thomas shows how the lower can
indeed point to the higher. His arguments for God's existence indicate
this possibility. From this conviction he develops a highly nuanced
natural theology regarding the proofs of God's existence. The first of
his famous five ways is the argument from motion. Borrowing from
Aristotle, Aquinas holds to the claim that, since every physical mover
is a moved mover, the experience of any physical motion indicates a
first unmoved mover. Otherwise one would have to affirm an infinite
chain of movers, which he shows is not rationally possible. Aquinas
then proceeds to arguments from the lower orders of efficient
causation, contingency, imperfection, and teleology to affirm the
existence of a unitary all-powerful being. He concludes that these
conclusions compel belief in the Judeo-Christian God.
Conversely, it is also possible to move from the higher to the lower
orders. Rational beings can know "the meaning of the good as such"
since goodness has an immediate order to the higher pattern of the
universal source of being (II-IIae q.2, a.3). The final good
considered by the theologian differs, however, from that considered by
the philosopher: the former is the bonum ultimum proportionate to
human powers; the latter is the beatific vision. Both forms of the
ultimate good have important ramifications, since they ground not only
the moral distinction between natural and supernatural virtues, but
also the political distinction between ecclesial and secular power.
Aquinas concludes that we come to know completely the truths of faith
only through the virtue of wisdom (sapientia). Thomas says that
"whatever its source, truth of is of the Holy Spirit" (Summa
Theologiae, I-IIae q. 109, a. 1). The Spirit "enables judgment
according to divine truth" (II-IIae 45, q. 1, ad 2). Moreover, faith
and charity are prerequisites for the achievement of this wisdom.
Thomas's two-fold theory of truth develops a strong compatibilism
between faith and reason. But it can be argued that after his time
what was intended as a mutual autonomy soon became an expanding
separation.
5. THE FRANCISCAN PHILOSOPHERS.
Duns Scotus, like his successor William of Ockham, reacted in a
characteristic Franciscan ways to Thomas's Dominican views. While the
Dominicans tended to affirm the possibility of rational
demonstrability of certain preambles of faith, the Franciscans tended
more toward a more restricted theological science, based solely on
empirical and logical analysis of beliefs.
Scotus first restricts the scope of Aquinas's rational theology by
refuting its ability to provide arguments that stop infinite
regresses. In fact he is wary of the attempts of natural theology to
prove anything about higher orders from lower orders. On this basis,
he rejects the argument from motion to prove God's existence. He
admits that lower beings move and as such they require a first mover;
but he maintains that one cannot prove something definitive about
higher beings from even the most noble of lower beings. Instead,
Scotus thinks that reason can be employed only to elucidate a concept.
In the realm of theology, the key concept to elucidate is that of
infinite being. So in his discussion of God's existence, he takes a
metaphysical view of efficiency, arguing that there must be not a
first mover, but an actually self-existent being which makes all
possibles possible. In moving towards this restricted form of
conceptualist analysis, he thus gives renewed emphasis to negative
theology.
Ockham then radicalized Scotus's restrictions of our knowledge of God.
He claimed that the Greek metaphysics of the 13th century, holding to
the necessity of causal connections, contaminated the purity of the
Christian faith. He argued instead that we cannot know God as a
deduction from necessary principles. In fact, he rejected the
possibility that any science can verify any necessity, since nothing
in the world is necessary: if A and B are distinct, God could cause
one to exist without the other. So science can demonstrate only the
implications of terms, premises, and definitions. It keeps within the
purely conceptual sphere. Like Scotus he argued held that any
necessity in an empirical proposition comes from the divine order. He
concluded that we know the existence of God, his attributes, the
immortality of the soul, and freedom only by faith. His desire to
preserve divine freedom and omnipotence thus led in the direction of a
voluntaristic form of fideism.
5. The Renaissance and Enlightenment Periods
Ockham's denial of the necessity in the scope of scientific findings
perhaps surprisingly heralded the beginnings of a significant movement
towards the autonomy of empirical science. But with this increased
autonomy came also a growing incompatibility between the claims of
science and those of religious authorities. Thus the tension between
faith and reason now became set squarely for the first time in the
conflict between science and religion. This influx of scientific
thinking undermined the hitherto reign of Scholasticism. By the
seventeenth century, what had begun as a criticism of the authority of
the Church evolved into a full-blown skepticism regarding the
possibility of any rational defense of fundamental Christian beliefs.
The Protestant Reformers shifted their emphasis from the medieval
conception of faith as a fides (belief that) to fiducia (faith in).
Thus attitude and commitment of the believer took on more importance.
The Reformation brought in its wake a remarkable new focus on the
importance of the study of Scripture as a warrant for one's personal
beliefs.
The Renaissance also witnessed the development of a renewed emphasis
on Greek humanism. In the early part of this period, Nicholas of Cusa
and others took a renewed interest in Platonism.
1.THE GALILEO CONTROVERSY.
In the seventeenth century, Galileo understood "reason" as scientific
inference based and experiment and demonstration. Moreover,
experimentation was not a matter simply of observation, it also
involved measurement, quantification, and formulization of the
properties of the objects observed. Though he was not the first to do
attempt this systematization — Archimedes had done the same centuries
before – Galileo developed it to such an extent that he overthrew the
foundations of Aristotelian physics. He rejected, for example,
Aristotle's claim that every moving had a mover whose force had to be
continually applied. In fact it was possible to have more than one
force operating on the same body at the same time. Without the
principle of a singular moved mover, it was also conceivable that God
could have "started" the world, then left it to move on its own.
The finding of his that sparked the great controversy with the
Catholic Church was, however, Galileo's defense of Copernicus's
rejection of the Ptolemaic geocentric universe. Galileo used a
telescope he had designed to confirm the hypothesis of the
heliocentric system. He also hypothesized that the universe might be
indefinitely large. Realizing that such conclusions were at variance
with Church teaching, he followed Augustine's rule than an
interpretation of Scripture should be revised when it confronts
properly scientific knowledge.
The officials of the Catholic Church – with some exceptions — strongly
resisted these conclusions and continued to champion a pre-Copernican
conception of the cosmos. The Church formally condemned Galileo's
findings for on several grounds. First, the Church tended to hold to a
rather literal interpretation of Scripture, particularly of the
account of creation in the book of Genesis. Such interpretations did
not square with the new scientific views of the cosmos such as the
claim that the universe is infinitely large. Second, the Church was
wary of those aspects of the "new science" Galileo represented that
still mixed with magic and astrology. Third, these scientific findings
upset much of the hitherto view of the cosmos that had undergirded the
socio-political order the Church endorsed. Moreover, the new
scientific views supported Calvinist views of determinism against the
Catholic notion of free will. It took centuries before the Church
officially rescinded its condemnation of Galileo.
2. ERASMUS.
Inspired by Greek humanism, Erasmus placed a strong emphasis on the
autonomy of human reason and the importance of moral precepts. As a
Christian, he distinguished among three forms of law: laws of nature,
thoroughly engraved in the minds of all men as St. Paul had argued,
laws of works, and laws of faith. He was convinced that philosophers,
who study laws of nature, could also produce moral precepts akin to
those in Christianity. But Christian justification still comes
ultimately only from the grace that can reveal and give a person the
ability to follow the law of faith. As such, "faith cures reason,
which has been wounded by sin." So, while the laws of works are for
the most part prohibitions against certain sins, the laws of faith
tend to be positive duties, such as the injunctions to love one's
enemies and to carry one's cross daily.
3. THE PROTESTANT REFORMERS.
Martin Luther restricted the power of reason to illuminate faith. Like
many reformers, he considered the human being alone unable to free
itself from sin. In The Bondage of the Will, he makes a strict
separation between what man has dominion over (his dealings with the
lower creatures) and what God has dominion over (the affairs of His
kingdom and thus of salvation). Reason is often very foolish: it
immediately jumps to conclusions when it sees a thing happen once or
twice. But by its reflections on the nature of words and our use of
language, it can help us to grasp our own spiritual impotence.
Luther thus rejected the doctrine of analogy, developed by Aquinas and
others, as an example of the false power of reason. In his Heidelberg
Disputation Luther claims that a theologian must look only "on the
visible rearward parts of God as seen in suffering and the cross."
Only from this perspective, do we keep our faith when we see, for
example, that in the world the unjust prosper and the good undergo
afflictions. Thus faith is primarily an act of trust in God's grace.
Luther thus stresses the gratuitousness of salvation. In a traditional
sense, Roman Catholics generally held that faith is meritorious, and
thus that salvation involves good works. Protestant reformers like
Luther, on the other hand, held that indeed faith is pure gift. He
thus tended to make the hitherto Catholic emphasis on works look
voluntaristic.
Like Luther, John Calvin appealed to the radical necessity of grace
for salvation. This was embodied in his doctrine of election. But
unlike Luther, Calvin gave a more measured response to the power of
human reason to illuminate faith. In his Institutes of the Christian
Religion, he argued that the human mind possesses, by natural
instinct, an "awareness of divinity." This sensus divinitatis is that
whereby we form specific beliefs about God in specific situations,
e.g. when experiencing danger, beauty, or even guilt. Even idolatry
can contain as aspect of this. So religion is not merely arbitrary
superstition. And yet, the law of creation makes necessary that we
direct every thought and action to this goal of knowing God.
Despite this fundamental divine orientation, Calvin denied that a
believer could build up a firm faith in Scripture through argument and
disputation. He appealed instead to the testimony of Spirit embodied
gained through a life of religious piety. Only through this testimony
is certainty about one's beliefs obtained. We attain a conviction
without reasons, but only through "nothing other than what each
believer experiences within himself–though my words fall far beneath a
just explanation of the matter." He realized, however, that "believers
have a perpetual struggle with their own lack of faith." But these
struggles never remove them from divine mercy.
Calvin is thus an incompatibilist of the transrational type: faith is
not against, but is beyond human reason.
4. CONTINENTAL RATIONALISM
René Descartes, even more profoundly than Calvin, moved reason into
the confines of the thinking subject. But he expanded the power of
reason to grasp firmly the preambles of faith. In his Meditations, he
claimed to have provided what amounted to be the most certain proofs
of God possible. God becomes explicated by means of the foundation of
subjective self-certainty. His proofs hinged upon his conviction that
God cannot be a deceiver. Little room is left for faith.
Descartes's thinking prepared Gottfried Leibniz to develop his
doctrine of sufficient reason. Leibniz first argued that all truths
are reducible to identities. From this it follows that a complete or
perfect concept of an individual substance involves all its
predicates, whether past, present, or future. From this he constructed
his principle of sufficient reason: there is no event without a reason
and no effect without a cause. He uses this not only to provide a
rigorous cosmological proof for God's existence from the fact of
motion, but also to defend the cogency of both the ontological
argument and the argument from design.
In his Theodicy Leibniz responded to Pierre Bayle, a French
philosophe, who gave a skeptical critique of rationalism and support
of fideism. First, Leibniz held that all truths are complementary, and
cannot be mutually inconsistent. He argued that there are two general
types of truth: those that are altogether necessary, since their
opposite implies contradiction, and those that are consequences of the
laws of nature. God can dispense only with the latter laws, such as
the law of our mortality. A doctrine of faith can never violate
something of the first type; but it can be in tension with truths of
the second sort. Thus though no article of faith can be
self-contradictory, reason may not be able to fully comprehend it.
Mysteries, such as that of the Trinity, are simply "above reason." But
how do we weigh the probabilities favoring a doctrine of faith against
those derived from general experience and the laws of nature? We must
weigh these decisions by taking into account the existence and nature
of God and the universal harmony by which the world is providentially
created and ordered.
Leibniz insisted that one must respect the differences among the three
distinct functions of reason: to comprehend, to prove, and to answer
objections. In the faith/reason controversy, Leibniz thought that the
third function takes on particular prominence. However, one sees
vestiges of the first two as well, since an inquiry into truths of
faith employs proofs of the infinite whose strength or weakness the
reasoner can comprehend.
Baruch Spinoza, a Dutch philosopher, brought a distinctly Jewish
perspective to his rigorously rationalistic analysis of faith.
Noticing that religious persons showed no particular penchant to
virtuous life, he decided to read the Scriptures afresh without any
presuppositions. He found that Old Testament prophecy, for example,
concerned not speculative but primarily practical matters. Obedience
to God was one. He took this to entail that whatever remains effective
in religion applies only to moral matters. He then claimed that the
Scriptures do not conflict with natural reason, leaving it free reign.
No revelation is needed for morality. Moreover, he was led to claim
that though the various religions have very different doctrines, they
are very similar to one another in their moral pronouncements.
5. BLAISE PASCAL
Rejected the hitherto claims of medieval natural theologians, by
claiming that reason can neither affirm or deny God's existence.
Instead he focused on the way that we should act given this ambiguity.
He argued that since the negative consequences of believing are few
(diminution of the passions, some pious actions) but the gain of
believing is infinite (eternal life), it is more rational to believe
than to disbelieve in God's existence. This assumes, of course, both
that God would not grant eternal life to a non-believer and that
sincerity in one's belief in God is not a requirement for salvation.
As such, Pascal introduced an original form of rational voluntarism
into the analysis of faith.
6. EMPIRICISM.
John Locke lived at a time when the traditional medieval view of a
unified body of articulate wisdom no longer seemed plausible. Yet he
still held to the basic medieval idea that faith is assent to specific
propositions on the basis of God's authority. Yet unlike Aquinas, he
argued that faith is not a state between knowledge and opinion, but a
form of opinion (doxa). But he developed a kind of apology for
Christianity: an appeal to revelation, without an appeal to enthusiasm
or inspiration. His aim was to demonstrate the "reasonableness of
Christianity." Though faith and reason have "strict" distinct
provinces, faith must be in accord with reason. Faith cannot convince
us of what contradicts, or is contrary, to our knowledge. We cannot
assent to a revealed proposition if it be contradictory to our clear
intuitive knowledge. But propositions of faith are, nonetheless,
understood to be "above reason."
Locke specifies two ways in which matters of faith can be revealed:
either though "original revelation" or "traditional revelation." Moses
receiving the Decalogue is an example of the former; his communication
of its laws to the Israelites is an example of the latter. The truth
of original revelation cannot be contrary to reason. But traditional
revelation is even more dependent on reason, since if an original
revelation is to be communicated, it cannot be understood unless those
who receive it have already received a correlate idea through
sensation or reflection and understood the empirical signs through
which it is communicated.
For Locke, reason justifies beliefs, and assigns them varying degrees
of probability based on the power of the evidence. But, like Aquinas,
Locke held to the evidence not only of logical/mathematical and
certain self-affirming existential claims, but also "that which is
evident to the senses." All of these veridical beliefs depend upon no
other beliefs for their justification. But faith requires the even
less certain evidence of the testimony of others. In the final
analysis, faith's assent is made not by a deduction from reason, but
by the "credit of the proposer, as coming from God, in some
extraordinary way of communication." Thus Locke's understands faith as
a probable consent.
Locke also developed a version of natural theology. In An Essay
Concerning Human Understanding he claims that the complex ideas we
have of God are made of up ideas of reflection. For example, we take
the ideas of existence, duration, pleasure, happiness, knowledge, and
power and "enlarge every one of these with our idea of Infinity; and
so putting them together, make our complex idea of God." We cannot
know God's own essence, however.
David Hume, like Locke, rejected rationalism, but developed a more
radical kind of empiricism than Locke had. He argued that concrete
experience is "our only guide in reasoning concerning matters of
fact." Thus he rejected the possibility of arguing for the truths of
faith on the basis either of natural theology or the evidence of
miracles. He supported this conclusion on two grounds. First, natural
theology requires certain inferences from everyday experience. The
argument from design infers that we can infer a single designer from
our experience of the world. Though Hume agrees that we have
experiences of the world as an artifact, he claims that we cannot make
any probable inference from this fact to quality, power, or number of
the artisans. Second, Hume argues that miracles are not only often
unreliable grounds as evidence for belief, but in fact are apriori
impossible. A miracle by definition is a transgression of a law of
nature, and yet by their very nature these laws admit of no
exceptions. Thus we cannot even call it a law of nature that has been
violated. He concludes that reason and experience fail to establish
divine infinity, God's moral attributes, or any specification of the
ongoing relationship between the Deity and man. But rather than
concluding that his stance towards religious beliefs was one of
atheism or even a mere Deism, Hume argued that he was a genuine
Theist. He believed that we have a genuine natural sentiment by which
we long for heaven. The one who is aware of the inability of reason to
affirm these truths in fact is the person who can grasp revealed truth
with the greatest avidity.
7. GERMAN IDEALISM.
Immanuel Kant was heavily influenced by Descartes's anthropomorphism
and Spinoza's and Jean Jacques Rousseau's restriction of the scope of
religion to ethical matters. Moreover, he wanted a view that was
consistent with Newton's discoveries about the strict natural laws
that govern the empirical world. To accomplish this, he steered the
scope of reason away from metaphysical, natural, and religious
speculation altogether.
Kant's claim that theoretical reason was unable to grasp truths about
God effectively continued the contraction of the authority of scienta
in matters of faith that had been occurring since the late medieval
period. He rejected, then, the timeless and spaceless God of
revelation characteristic of the Augustinian tradition as beyond human
ken. This is most evident in his critique of the cosmological proof
for the existence of God in The Critique of Pure Reason. This move
left Kant immune from the threat of unresolvable paradoxes.
Nonetheless he did allow the concept of God (as well as the ideas of
immortality and the soul) to become not a constitutive but a
regulative ideal of reason. God's existence remains a necessary
postulate specifically for the moral law. God functions as the sources
for the summum bonum. Only God can guarantee an ideal conformity of
virtue and happiness, which is required to fulfill the principle that
"ought implies can." This grounded what Kant called a faith distinct
from knowledge or comprehension, but nonetheless rational. Rational
faith involves reliance neither upon God's word nor the person of
Christ, but only upon the recognition of God as the source of how we
subjectively realize our duties. God is cause of our moral purposes as
rational beings in nature. Yet faith is "free belief": it is the
permanent principle of the mind to assume as true, on account of the
obligation in reference to it, that which is necessary to presuppose
as condition of the possibility of the highest moral purpose. Like
Spinoza, Kant makes all theology moral theology.
Since faith transcends the world of experience, it is neither doubtful
nor merely probable. Thus Kant's view of faith is complex: it has no
theoretical grounds, yet it has a rational basis that provides more or
less stable conviction for believers. He provided a religion grounded
without revelation or grace. It ushered in new immanentism in rational
views of belief.
G.W.F. Hegel, at the peak of German Idealism, took up Kant's
immanentism but moved it in a more radical direction. He claimed that
in Kant, "philosophy has made itself the handmaid of a faith once
more" though one not externally imposed but autonomously constituted.
Hegel approved of the way Kant helped to modify the Enlightenment's
dogmatic emphasis on the empirical world, particularly as evidenced in
the way Locke turned philosophy into empirical psychology. But though
Kant held to an "idealism of the finite," Hegel thought that Kant did
not extend his idealism far enough. Kant's regulative view of reason
was doomed to regard faith and knowledge as irrevocably opposed. Hegel
argued that a further development of idealism shows have faith and
knowledge are related and synthesized in the Absolute.
Hegel reinterpreted the traditional proofs for God's existence,
rejected by Kant, as authentic expressions of the need of finite
spirit to elevate itself to oneness with God. In religion this attempt
to identify with God is accomplished through feeling. Feelings are,
however, subject to conflict and opposition. But they are not merely
subjective. The content of God enters feeling such that the feeling
derives its determination from this content. Thus faith, implanted in
one's heart, can be defended by the testimony of the indwelling spirit
of truth.
Hegel's thoroughgoing rationalism ultimate yields a form of
panentheism in which all finite beings, though distinct from natural
necessity, have no existence independent from it. "There is only one
Being… and things by their very nature form part of it." God is the
being in whom spirit and nature are united. Thus faith is merely an
expression of a finitude comprehensible only from the rational
perspective of the infinite. Faith is merely a moment in our
transition to absolute knowledge.
6. The Nineteenth Century
Physics and astronomy were the primary scientific concerns for
theologians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries the sciences of geology, sociology,
psychology, and biology became more pronounced.
Kant's understanding of God as a postulate of practical reason – and
his dismissal of metaphysical and empirical support for religion —
soon led to the idea that God could be a mere projection of practical
feeling or psychological impulse. Such an idea echoed Hobbes's claim
that religion arises from fear and superstition. Sigmund Freud
claimed, for example, that religious beliefs were the result of the
projection of a protective father figure onto our life situations.
Although such claims about projection seem immune from falsification,
the Freudian could count such an attempt to falsify itself simply as
rationalization: a masking of a deeper unconscious drive.
The nineteenth century biological development most significant for
theology was Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. It
explained all human development on the basis simply of progressive
adaptation or organisms to their physical environment. No reference to
a mind or rational will was required to explain any human endeavor.
Darwin himself once had believed in God and the immortality of the
soul. But later he found that these could not count as evidence for
the existence of God. He ended up an agnostic. On the one hand he felt
compelled to affirm a First Cause of such an immense and wonderful
universe and to reject blind chance or necessity, but on the other
hand he remained skeptical of the capacities of humans "developed from
a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animals." Such
naturalistic views made it difficult to support any argument for God's
existence, particularly a design argument.
Not all nineteenth century scientific thinking, however, yielded
skeptical conclusions. Emilé Durkheim, in his sociological study The
Elementary Forms of Religious Life, took the scientific critiques of
religion seriously, but gave them a much different interpretation. He
concluded that the cultic practices of religion have the non-illusory
quality of producing measurable good consequences in their adherents.
Moreover, he theorized that the fundamental categories of thought, and
even of science, have religious origins. Almost all the great social
institutions were born of religion. He was lead to claim that "the
idea of society is the soul of religion": society derived from
religious forces.
In the context of these various scientific developments, philosophical
arguments about faith and reason developed in several remarkable
directions in the nineteenth century.
1. ROMANTICISM.
Friedrich Schleiermacher was a liberal theologian who was quite
interested in problems of biblical interpretation. He claimed that
religion constituted its own sphere of experience, unrelated to
scientific knowledge. Thus religious meaning is independent of
scientific fact. His Romantic fideism would have a profound influence
on Kierkegaard.
2. SOCIALISM.
Karl Marx is well known as an atheist who had strong criticisms of all
religious practice. Much of his critique of religion had been derived
from Ludwig Feuerbach, who claimed that God is merely a psychological
projection meant to compensate for the suffering people feel.
Rejecting wholesale the validity of such wishful thinking, Marx
claimed not only that all sufferings are the result of economic class
struggle but that they could be alleviated by means of a Communist
revolution that would eliminate economic classes altogether. Moreover,
Marx claimed that religion was a fundamental obstacle to such a
revolution, since it was an "opiate" that kept the masses quiescent.
Religious beliefs thus arise from a cognitive malfunction: they emerge
from a "perverted world consciousness." Only a classless communist
society, which Marx thought would emerge when capitalism met its
necessary demise, would eliminate religion and furnish true human
emancipation.
3. EXISTENTIALISM.
Søren Kierkegaard, arguably the father of existentialism, was a
profound religious thinker. He came up with an unequivocal view of
faith and reason much like Tertullian's strong incompatibilism. If
Kant argued for religion within the limits of reason alone,
Kierkegaard called for reason with the limits of religion alone. Faith
requires a leap. It demands risk. All arguments that reason derives
for a proof of God are in fact viciously circular: one can only reason
about the existence of an object that one already assumes to exist.
Hegel tried to claim that faith could be elevated to the status of
objective certainty. Seeking such certainly, moreover, Kierkegaard
considered a trap: what is needed is a radical trust. The radical
trust of faith is the highest virtue one can reach.
Kierkegaard claimed that all essential knowledge intrinsically relates
to an existing individual. In Either/Or, he outlined three general
forms of life individuals can adopt: the aesthetic, ethical, and
ethico-religious. The aesthetic is the life that seeks pleasure. The
ethical is that which stresses the fulfillment of duties. Neither of
these attains to the true individuality of human existence. But in the
ethico-religious sphere, truth emerges in the authenticity of the
relationship between a person and the object of his attention. With
authenticity, the importance is on the "how," not the "what," of
knowledge. It attains to a subjective truth, in which the sincerity
and intensity of the commitment is key. This authenticity is
equivalent to faith understood as "an objective uncertainty held fast
in an appropriation-process of the most passionate inwardness." The
coexistence of this "objective uncertainty" with "passionate
inwardness" is strikingly paradoxical. Kierkegaard makes a similarly
paradoxical claim in holding that "nothing historical can become
infinitely certain for me except the fact of my own existence (which
again cannot become infinitely certain for any other individual, who
has infinite certainty only of his own existence) and this is not
something historical." Thus faith can never be a matter of objective
certainty; it involves no reckoning of probabilities, it is not an
intellectual acceptance of a doctrine at all. Faith involves a
submission of the intellect. It is not only hostile to but also
completely beyond the grasp of reason.
Though he never read Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche came up with
remarkable parallels to his thought. Both stressed the centrality of
the individual, a certain disdain for public life, and a hatred of
personal weakness and anonymity. They also both attacked certain
hypocrisies in Christendom and the overstated praise for reason in
Kant and Hegel. But Nietzsche had no part of Kierkegaard's new
Christian individual, and instead defended the aesthetic life
disdained by Kierkegaard against both morality and Christianity. So he
critique religion not from Kierkegaard's epistemological perspective,
but from a highly original moral perspective.
Nietzsche claimed that religion breeds hostility to life, understood
broadly as will to power. Religion produces two types of character: a
weak servile character that is at the same time strongly resentful
towards those in power, and an Übermensch, or superman, who creates
his own values. In The Joyful Wisdom Nietzsche proclaims that God as a
protector of the weak, though once alive, is now dead, and that we
have rightly killed him. Now, instead, he claims that we instead need
to grasp the will to power that is part of all things and guides them
to their full development completely within the natural world. For
humans Nietzsche casts the will to power as a force of artistic and
creative energy.
4. CATHOLIC APOLOGISTS.
Roman Catholics traditionally claimed that the task of reason was to
make faith intelligible. In the later part of the nineteenth century,
John Cardinal Newman worked to defend the power of reason against
those intellectuals of his day who challenged its efficacy in matters
of faith. Though maintaining the importance of reason in matters of
faith, he reduces its ability to arrive at absolute certainties.
In his Grammar of Assent, Newman argued that one assents to God on the
basis of one's experience and principles. And one can do this by means
of a kind of rational demonstration. And yet this demonstration is not
actually reproducible by others; each of us has a unique domain of
experience and expertise. Some are just given the capacity and
opportunities to make this assent to what is demonstrated others are
not. Drawing for Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Newman argues that "a
special preparation of mind is required for each separate department
of inquiry and discussion." He stressed the continuity between
religious belief and other kinds of belief that involve complex sets
of phenomena. He claims that Locke, for example, overlooked how human
nature actually works, imposing instead his own idea of how the mind
is to act on the basis of deduction from evidence. If Locke would have
looked more closely at experience, he would have noticed that much of
our reasoning is tacit and informal. It cannot usually be
reconstructed for a set of premises. Rather it is the accumulation of
probabilities, independent of each other, arising out of the
circumstances of the particular case. No specific consideration
usually suffices to generate the required conclusion, but taken
together, they may converge upon it. This is usually what is called a
moral proof for belief in a proposition. In fact, we are justified in
holding the beliefs even after we have forgotten what the warrant was.
This probabilistic approach to religious assent continued in the later
thinking of Basil Mitchell.
5. PRAGMATISM.
William James followed in the pragmatist tradition inaugurated by
Charles Sanders Peirce. Pragmatists held that all beliefs must be
tested, and those that failed to garner sufficient practical value
ought to be discarded.
In his Will to Believe, James was a strong critic of W.K. Clifford's
uncompromising empiricism. Clifford, like Hume, had argued that acting
on beliefs or convictions alone, unsupported by evidence, was pure
folly. He likened such acting to that of an irresponsible shipowner
who allows an untrustworthy ship to be ready to set sail, merely
thinking it safe, and then gives "benevolent wishes" for those who
would set sail in it. Clifford concluded that we have a duty to act
only on well founded beliefs. If we have no grounds for belief, we
must suspend judgment. This provided the basis for an ethics of belief
quite different than Newman's. Clifford's evidentialism inspired
subsequent philosophers such as Bertrand Russell and Michael Scriven.
James argued, pace Clifford, that life would be severely impoverished
if we acted only on completely well founded beliefs. Like Newman,
James held that belief admits of a wide spectrum of commitment: from
tentative to firm. The feelings that attach to a belief are
significant. He defended the need we have, at times, to allow our
"passional tendencies" to influence our judgments. Thus, like Pascal,
he took up a voluntarist argument for religious belief, though one not
dependent solely upon a wager. There are times, admittedly few, when
we must act on our beliefs passionately held but without sufficient
supporting evidence. These rare situations must be both momentous,
once in a lifetime opportunities, and forced, such that the situation
offers the agent only two options: to act or not to act on the belief.
Religious beliefs often take on both of these characteristics. Pascal
had realized the forced aspect of Christian belief, regarding
salvation: God would not save the disbeliever. As a result, religion
James claimed that a religious belief could be a genuine hypothesis
for a person to adopt.
James does, however, also give some evidential support for this choice
to believe. We have faith in many things in life — in molecules,
conversation of energy, democracy, and so forth — that are based on
evidence of their usefulness for us. But even in these cases "Our
faith is faith in some one else's faith." Our mental life effectively
comprises a constant interplay between volitions and beliefs.
Nonetheless, James believed that while philosophers like Descartes and
Clifford, not wanting to ever be dupes, focused primarily on the need
to avoid error, even to the point of letting truth take its chance, he
as an empiricist must hold that the pursuit of truth is paramount and
the avoidance of error is secondary. His position entailed that that
dupery in the face of hope is better than dupery in the face of fear.
In "The Sentiment of Rationality" James concludes that faith is
"belief in something concerning which doubt is still theoretically
possible; and as the test of belief is willingness to act, one may say
that faith is the readiness to act in a cause the prosperous issue of
which is not certified to us in advance." So, faith is not only
compatible with doubt, but it requires its possibility. Faith is
oriented towards action: it is a kind of "working hypothesis" needed
for practical life.
7. The Twentieth Century
Darwins's scientific thesis of natural selection and Freud's
projective views of God continued to have a profound impact on many
aspects of the philosophy of religion in the twentieth century. In
fact the interplay between faith and reason began to be cast, in many
cases, simply as the conflict between science and religion.
Not all scientific discoveries were used to invoke greater skepticism
about the validity of religious claims, however. For example, in the
late twentieth century some physicists endorsed what came to be called
the anthropic principle. The principle derives from the claim of some
physicists that a number of factors in the early universe had to
coordinate in a highly statistically improbable way to produce a
universe capable of sustaining advanced life forms. Among the factors
are the mass of the universe and the strengths of the four basic
forces (electromagnetism, gravitation, and the strong and weak nuclear
forces). It is difficult to explain this fine tuning. Many who adhere
to the anthropic principle, such as Holmes Rolston, John Leslie, and
Stephen Hawking, argue that it demands some kind of extra-natural
explanation. Some think it suggests possibilities for a new design
argument for God's existence. However, one can hold the anthropic
principle and still deny that it has religious implications. It is
possible to argue that it indicates not a single creator creating a
single universe, but indeed many universes, either contemporaneous
with our own or in succession to it.
The twentieth century witnessed numerous attempts to reconcile
religious belief with new strands of philosophical thinking and with
new theories in science.
1. LOGICAL POSITIVISM AND ITS CRITICS.
Many philosophers of religion in the twentieth century took up a new
appreciation for the scope and power of religious language. This was
prompted to a large extent by the emphasis on conceptual clarity that
dominated much Western philosophy, particularly early in the century.
This emphasis on conceptual clarity was evidenced especially in
logical positivism. A.J. Ayer and Antony Flew, for example, argued
that all metaphysical language fails to meet a standard of logical
coherence and is thus meaningless. Metaphysical claims are not in
principle falsifiable. As such, their claims are neither true nor
false. They make no verifiable reference to the world. Religious
language shares these characteristics with metaphysical language. Flew
emphasized that religious believers generally cannot even state the
conditions under which they would give up their faith claims. Since
their claims then are unfalsifiable, they are not objects for rational
determination.
One response by compatibilists to these arguments of logical
positivists was to claim that religious beliefs, though meaningless in
the verificational sense, are nonetheless important in providing the
believer with moral motivations and self-understanding. This is an
anti-realist understanding of faith. An example of this approach is
found in R.M. Hare. Responding to Flew, he admitted that religious
faith consists of a set of unfalsifiable assumptions, which he termed
"bliks." But Hare argued that our practical dealings with the everyday
world involve numerous such "bliks." Though some of these principles
are faulty, we cannot but have some in order to live in the world.
Basil Mitchell responded to Flew's claim that religious beliefs cannot
be falsified. Mitchell argued that although rational and scientific
considerations can and ought at times to prompt revisions of one's
religious belief, no one can give a general determination of exactly
at what point a set of evidence ought to count decisively against a
faith claim. It is up to each believer to decide when this occurs. To
underscore this claim, Mitchell claimed that the rationality of
religious beliefs ought to be determined not foundationally, as
deductions from rational first principles, but collectively from the
gathering of various types of evidence into a pattern. Nonetheless, he
realized that this accumulation of evidence, as the basis for a new
kind of natural theology, might not be strong enough to counter the
skeptic. In the spirit of Newman, Mitchell concluded by defending a
highly refined cumulative probabilism in religious belief.
Another reaction against logical positivism stemmed from Ludwig
Wittgenstein. In his "Lectures on Religious Belief," he argued that
there is something unique about the linguistic framework of religious
believers. Their language makes little sense to outsiders. Thus one
has to share in their form of life in order to understand the way the
various concepts function in their language games. The various
language games form a kind of "family resemblance." Wittgenstein
concluded that those who demand a nonperspectival impartial way of
assessing the truth value of a religious claim are asking for
something impossible. From Wittgenstein's perspective, science and
religion are just two different types of language games. This demand
to take on an internal perspective in order to assess religious
beliefs commits Wittgenstein to a form of incompatibilism between
faith and reason. Interpreters of Wittgenstein, like Norman Malcolm,
claimed that although this entails that religious beliefs are
essentially groundless, so are countless other everyday beliefs, such
as in the permanence of our objects of perception, in the uniformity
of nature, and even in our knowledge of our own intentions.
Wittgenstein, like Kierkegaard, claimed that proofs for God's
existence have little to do with actual belief in God. He did think
that life itself could "educate" us about God's existence. In Culture
and Value he claims that sufferings can have a great impact on one's
beliefs. "These neither show us God in the way a sense impression
shows us an object, nor do they give rise to conjectures about him.
Experiences, thoughts–life can force this concept on us." D.Z.
Phillips also holds the view that religion has its own unique criteria
for acceptable belief.
John Hick, in Faith and Knowledge, modifies the Wittgensteinian idea
of forms of life to analyze faith claims in a novel manner. Hick
claimed that this could shed light upon the epistemological (fides)
analysis of faith. From such an analysis follows the
non-epistemological thinking (fiducia) that guides actual practice.
Taking up the epistemological analysis, Hick first criticizes the
voluntarisms of Pascal and James as "remote from the state of mind of
such men as the great prophets." He criticizes James in particular for
reducing truth to utility. Hick argues instead for the importance of
rational certainty in faith. He posits that there are as many types of
grounds for rational certainty as there are kinds of objects of
knowledge. He claims that religious beliefs share several crucial
features with any empirical claim: they are propositional; they are
objects of assent; an agent can have dispositions to act upon them;
and we feel convictions for them when they are challenged.
Nonetheless, Hick realizes that there are important ways in which
sense beliefs and religious beliefs are distinct: sense perception is
coercive, while religious perception is not; sense perception is
universal, while religious is not; and sense perception is highly
coherent within space and time, while religious awareness among
different individuals is not. In fact, it may in fact be rational for
a person who has not had experiences that compel belief to withhold
belief in God.
From these similarities and differences between faith claims and
claims of reason, Hick concludes that religious faith is the
noninferential and unprovable basic interpretation either of a moral
or religious "situational significance" in human experience. Faith is
not the result of logical reasoning, but rather a profession that God
"as a living being" has entered into the believer's experience. This
act of faith situates itself in the person's material and social
environment. Religious faith interprets reality in terms of the divine
presence within the believer's human experience. Although the person
of faith may be unable to prove or explain this divine presence, his
or her religious belief still acquire the status of knowledge similar
to that of scientific and moral claims. Thus even if one could prove
God's existence, this fact alone would be a form of knowledge neither
necessary nor sufficient for one's faith. It would at best only force
a notional assent. Believers live by not by confirmed hypotheses, but
by an intense, coercive, indubitable experience of the divine.
Sallie McFague, in Models of God, argues that religious thinking
requires a rethinking of the ways in which religious language employs
metaphor. Religious language is for the most part neither
propositional nor assertoric. Rather, it functions not to render
strict definitions, but to give accounts. To say, for example, "God is
mother," is neither to define God as a mother nor to assert an
identity between them, but rather to suggest that we consider what we
do not know how to talk about–relating to God – through the metaphor
of a mother. Moreover, no single metaphor can function as the sole way
of expressing any aspect of a religious belief.
2. PHILOSOPHICAL THEOLOGY.
Many Protestant and Roman Catholic theologians in the twentieth
century responded to the criticisms of religious belief, leveled by
atheistic existentialists, naturalists, and linguistic positivists, by
forging a new understanding of Christian revelation.
Karl Barth, a Reformed Protestant, provided a startlingly new model of
the relation between faith and reason. He rejected Schleiermacher's
view that the actualization of one's religious motivation leads to
some sort of established union between man and God. Barth argued
instead that revelation is aimed at a believer who must receive it
before it is a revelation. This means that one cannot understand a
revelation without already, in a sense, believing it. God's revelation
of Himself, His very communication of that self, is not distinct from
Himself. "In God's revelation God's Word is identical with God
Himself" (in Church Dogmatics ii, I). Moreover, Barth claimed that
God's revelation has its reality and truth wholly and in every
respect, both ontically and noetically, within itself. Revelation
cannot be made true by anything else. The fullness of the "original
self-existent being of God's Word" reposes and lives in revelation.
This renders the belief in an important way immune from both critical
rational scrutiny and the reach of arguments from analogy.
Barth held, however, that relative to the believer, God remains
"totally other" (totaliter aliter). Our selfhood stands in
contradiction to the divine nature. Religion is, in fact, "unbelief":
our attempts to know God from our own standpoint are wholly and
entirely futile. This was a consistent conclusion of his dialectical
method: the simultaneous affirmation and negation of a given
theological point. Barth was thus an incompatibilist who held that the
ground of faith lies beyond reason. Yet he urged that a believer is
nonetheless always to seek knowledge and that religious beliefs have
marked consequences for daily life.
Karl Rahner, arguably the most influential Catholic theologian of the
twentieth century, was profoundly influenced by Barth's dialectical
method. But Rahner argued that God's mystical self-revelation of
Himself to us through an act of grace is not predestined for a few but
extends to all persons: it constitutes the "supernatural existential"
that grounds all intelligibility and action. It lies beyond proof or
demonstration. Thus all persons, living in this prior and often
unthematized state of God's gift, are "anonymous Christians." All
humans can respond to God's self-communication in history. Rahner held
thus that previous religions embodied a various forms of knowledge of
God and thus were lawful religions. But now God has revealed his
fullness to humans through the Christian Incarnation and word. This
explicit self-realization is the culmination of the history of the
previously anonymous Christianity. Christianity now understands itself
as an absolute religion intended for all. This claim itself is basic
for its understanding of itself.
Rahner's claim about the gratuitous gifts of grace in all humans
reaches beyond a natural theology. Nonetheless one form of evidence to
which he appeals for its rational justification is the stipulation
that humans, social by nature, cannot achieve a relationship to God
"in an absolutely private interior reality." The individual must
encounter the natural divine law, not in his role as a "private
metaphysician" but according to God's will in a religious and social
context. Rahner thus emphasized the importance of culture as a medium
in which religious faith becomes understood. He thus forged a new kind
of compatibilism between faith and rationality.
3. NEO-EXISTENTIALISM.
Paul Tillich, a German Protestant theologian, developed a highly
original form of Christian apologetics. In his Systematic Theology, he
laid out a original method, called correlation, that explains the
contents of the Christian faith through existential questions and
theological answers in mutual interdependence. Existential questions
arise from our experiences of transitoriness, finitude, and the threat
of nonbeing. In this context, faith is what emerges as our thinking
about our "ultimate concern." Only those who have had these kinds of
experiences can raise the questions that open them to understand the
meaning of the Christian message. Secular culture provides numerous
media, such as poetry, drama, and novels, in which these questions are
engendered. In turn, the Christian message provides unique answers to
these questions that emerge from our human existence. Tillich realized
that such an existentialist method – with its high degree of
correlation between faith and everyday experience and thus between the
human and the divine — would evoke protest from thinkers like Barth.
Steven Cahn approaches a Christian existentialism from less
sociological and a more psychological angle than Tillich. Cahn agrees
with Kierkegaard's claim that most believers in fact care little about
proofs for the existence of God. Neither naturalist nor
supernaturalist religion depend upon philosophical proofs for God's
existence. It is impossible to prove definitely the testimony of
another's supposedly self-validating experience. One is always
justified in entertaining either philosophical doubts concerning the
logical possibility of such an experience or practical doubts as to
whether the person has undergone it. Moreover, these proofs, even if
true, would furnish the believer with no moral code. Cahn concludes
that one must undergo a self-validating experience personal experience
in which one senses the presence of God. All moral imperatives derive
from learning the will of God. One may, however, join others in a
communal effort to forge a moral code.
4. NEO-DARWINISM.
The Darwinistic thinking of the nineteenth century continued to have a
strong impact of philosophy of religion. Richard Dawkins in his Blind
Watchmaker, uses the same theory of natural selection to construct an
argument against the cogency of religious faith. He argues that the
theory of evolution by gradual but cumulative natural selection is the
only theory that is in principle capable of explaining the existence
of organized complexity in the world. He admits that this organized
complexity is highly improbable, yet the best explanation for it is
still a Darwinian worldview. Dawkins even claims that Darwin
effectively solved the mystery of our own existence. Since religions
remain firm in their conviction that God guides all biological and
human development, Dawkins concludes that religion and science are in
fact doomed rivals. They make incompatible claims. He resolves the
conflict in favor of science.
5. CONTEMPORARY REACTIONS AGAINST NATURALISM AND NEO- DARWINISM.
Contemporary philosophers of religion respond to the criticisms of
naturalists, like Dawkins, from several angles.
Alvin Plantinga thinks that natural selection demonstrates only the
function of species survival, not the production of true beliefs in
individuals. Yet he rejects traditional Lockean evidentialism, the
view that a belief needs adequate evidence as a criterion for its
justification. But he refuses to furnish a fideist or existentialist
condition for the truth of religious beliefs. Rather he claims that
religious beliefs are justified without reasons and are, as such,
"properly basic." These he sets in contrast to the claims of natural
theology to form the basis of his "Reformed epistemology." Other
Reformed epistemologists are W.P Alston and Nicholas Wolterstorff.
Plantinga builds his Reformed epistemology by means of several
criticisms of evidentialism. First, the standards of evidence in
evidentialism are usually set too high. Most of our reliable everyday
beliefs are not subject to such strict standards. Second, the set of
arguments that evidentialists attack is traditionally very narrow.
Plantinga suggest that they tend to overlook much of what is
internally available to the believer: important beliefs concerning
beauty and physical attributes of creatures, play and enjoyment,
morality, and the meaning of life. Third, those who employ these
epistemological criticisms often fail to realize that the criticisms
themselves rest upon auxiliary assumptions that are not themselves
epistemological, but rather theological, metaphysical, or ontological.
Finally, and more importantly, not all beliefs are subject to such
evidence. Beliefs in memories or other minds, for example, generally
appeal to something properly basic beyond the reach of evidence. What
is basic for a religious belief can be, for example, a profound
personal religious experience. In short, being self-evident,
incorrigible, or evident to the senses is not a necessary condition of
proper basicality. We argue to what is basic from below rather than
from above. These claims are tested by a relevant set of "internal
markers." Plantinga does admit that in fact no widespread acceptance
of the markers can be assumed. He concludes, though, that religious
believers cannot be accused of shirking some fundamental epistemic
duty by relying upon this basic form of evidence.
Epistemological views such as Plantinga develops entail that there is
an important distinction between determining whether or not a
religious belief is true (de facto) and whether or not one ought to
hold or accept it (de jure). On de jure grounds, for example, one can
suggest that beliefs are irrational because they are produced either
by a errant process or by an proper process aimed at the wrong aim or
end. Theism has been criticized on both of these grounds. But since
Christianity purports to be true, the de jure considerations must
reduce ultimately to de facto considerations.
J.J. Haldane criticizes the scientific critiques of religion on the
grounds that they themselves make two unacknowledged assumptions about
reality: the existence of regular patterns of interaction, and the
reality of stable intelligences in humans. These assumptions
themselves cannot be proven by scientific inquiry. Thus it seems odd
to oppose as rivals scientific and religious ways of thinking about
reality. Science itself is faith-like in resting upon these
assumptions; theology carries forward a scientific impulse in asking
how the order of the world is possible. But what do we make of the
fact that scientific models often explain the world better than
religious claims? What troubles Haldane is the explanatory
reductionism physical sciences employ is often thought to be entailed
by the ontological reduction it assumes. For example, the fact that
one can give a complete description of human action and development on
a biological level alone is often thought to mean that all action and
development can be explained according to biological laws. Haldane
rejects this thesis, arguing that certain mental events might be
ontologically reducible to physical events, but talk of physical
events cannot be equally substituted for mental events in the order of
explanation. Such argumentation reflects the general direction of the
anomological monism proposed by Donald Davidson. Haldane concludes
that language can be a unique source of explanatory potential for all
human activity.
Like Haldane, Nancey Murphy also holds for a new form of compatibilism
between religion and science. In Science and Theology she argues that
the differences between scientific and theological methodologies are
only of degree, not kind. She admits that scientific methodology has
fundamentally changed the way we think about the world. Consequently,
theology in the modern period has been preoccupied with the question
of theological method. But she thinks that theological method can
develop to meet the same standard of criteria as scientific method
has.
Scientific thinking in the twentieth century in particular has been
developing away from foundationalism: the derivation of theories from
indubitable first principles. Willard van Orman Quine and others urged
that scientific methodologists give up on foundationalism. He claimed
that knowledge is like a web or net of beliefs: some beliefs are
simply more apt to be adopted or rejected in certain situations than
others are. Murphy sees that theology, too, is developing away from
the foundationalism that literal interpretations of Scripture used to
provide. Now it tends to emphasize the importance of religious
experience and the individual interpretation of beliefs. But two
problems await the move from theology away from foundationalism:
subjectivism and circularity. The subjectivism emerges from the
believer's inability to make the leap from his or her private inner
experience to the real world. The circularity emerges from the lack of
any kind of external check on interpretation. Alasdair MacIntyre is
concerned with the latter problem. He claims that evidence for belief
requires a veridical experience for each subsequent belief that arises
from it. But Murphy finds this approach still close to
foundationalism. Instead she develops two non-foundational criteria
for the interpretation of a religious belief: that several related but
differing experiences give rise to the belief, and that the belief
have publicly observable consequences emanating from it.
To illustrate this approach to interpretation of beliefs, Murphy
considers Catherine of Siena's claim that a true "verification" of a
revelation from God requires that the believer subsequently engage in
publicly observable acts of humility and charity. The verification
also requires what Murphy calls discernment. Discernment reveals
analogous experiences and interpretations in other believers and a
certain reliability in the actions done. It functions the same way
that a theory of instrumentation does in science. Discernment often
takes place within a community of some sort.
But are these beliefs, supported by this indirect verification and
communal discernment, still in any sense falsifiable? Murphy notes
that religious experience has clashed with authoritative theological
doctrine numerous times. But it has also ended up correcting it, for
example in the way that Catherine of Siena's writings eventually
changed the Roman Catholic tradition in which she was writing.
Murphy claims, however, that until theology takes on the status as a
kind of knowledge of a reality independent of the human subject it is
unlikely that theology and science will have a fruitful dialogue. But
she thinks that turning from the subjectivization of the liberal turn
in theology to discourse about human religiosity will help this
dialogue.
A strong critic of the negative impact of scientific naturalism on
faith is the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. Taylor finds in all
naturalisms a kind of "exclusive humanism" that not only puts humans
at the center of the universe, but denies them any authentic
aspirations to goals or states beyond the world in which they live. In
modernity naturalism has led inexorably to secularization. In Sources
of the Self, Taylor argues that secularization, inspired by both
Luther and Calvin, first resulted in the prioritizing of "ordinary
life" of marriage and family over that of contemplative lives in the
vowed or clerical state. In later phases it led to the transformation
of cultural practices into forms that are neutral with regard to
religious affiliation. But secularization is not a prima facie problem
for any religious believer, since it does not preclude the possibility
of religious faith or practices per se. Moreover, secularization has
made possible the development of legal and governmental structures,
such as human rights, better fit for pluralistic societies containing
persons of a number of different religious faiths. Thus it has made it
easier for Christians to accept full rights for atheists or violators
of the Christian moral code. Nonetheless, Taylor sees problems that
secularism poses for the Christian faith. It can facilitate a marriage
between the Christian faith and a particular form of culture.
In contrast to naturalism, Taylor urges the adoption of a unique
transcendental point of view. Such a view does not equate a meaningful
life with a full or good life. Instead, a transcendental view finds in
suffering and death not only something that matters beyond life, but
something from which life itself originally draws. Thus natural life
is to be subordinated to the "abundant life" that Jesus advocates in
his Good Shepherd discourse (John 10:10). This call of the
transcendental requires, ultimately, a conversion or a change of
identity. This is a transition from self-centeredness, a kind of
natural state, to God-centeredness. Unable to find value in suffering
and death, those who focus on ordinary life try assiduously to avoid
them. The consequences of this resistance to the transcendent, found
in this uncritical embrace of ordinary life, are not so much epistemic
as moral and spiritual. Ordinary life virtues emphasize benevolence
and solidarity. But modern individuals, trying to meet these demands,
experience instead a growing sense of anger, futility, and even
contempt when confronted with the disappointments of actual human
performance. This is ordinary life's "dialectics of reception." A
transcendental vision, on the other hand, opens up a future for humans
that is not a matter of guarantee, but only faith. It is derived from
"standing among others in the stream" of God's unconditional love.
The theological principle by which Taylor buttresses this vision is
that "Redemption happens through Incarnation." The incarnational and
natural "ordinary" requires always the call of a redemptive "beyond"
that is the object of our endeavors inspired by faith and hope.
6. LIBERATION THEOLOGY.
Liberation theologians, such as Juan Segundo and Leonardo Boff, have
drawn their inspiration from the plight of the poverty and injustice
of peoples in the Third World, particularly Latin American. Drawing
from Marx's distinction between theory and practice, Gustavo
Gutiérrez, in A Theology of Liberation, argues that theology is
critical reflection on the socio-cultural situation in which belief
takes place. Ultimately theology is reactive: it does not produce
pastoral practice, but it finds the Spirit either present or absent in
current practices. The reflection begins by examining the faith of a
people is expressed through their acts of charity: their life,
preaching, and historical commitment of the Church. The reflection
also draws from the totality of human history. In a second moment, the
reflection provides resources for new practices. Thus it protects the
faith of the people from uncritical practices of fetishism and
idolatry. Theology thus plays a prophetic role, by interpreting
historical events with the intention of revealing and proclaiming
their profound meaning.
8. References and Further Reading
Alston, William. "History of Philosophy of Religion." The Routledge
Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Vol. 8. Ed. E. Craig. New York: Routledge,
1998. Pp. 238-248. [This article provides a good basic outline of the
problem of faith and reason].
Asimov, Isaac. Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and
Technology. Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1964. [Much of the above
section of Galileo comes from this text.]
Copleston, Frederick. Medieval Philosophy. New York: Harper, 1952.
Helm, Paul, ed. Faith and Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999.[This text has an excellent set of readings and good
introductions to each section. Some of the above treatment of the
introductions to each period are derived from it].
McInerny, Ralph. St. Thomas Aquinas. Boston: Twayne, 1977.
McGrath, Alister, ed. The Christian Theology Reader. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1995. [This text provided some of the above material on
early Christian philosophers.]
Meagher, Paul, Thomas O'Brien and Consuelo Aherne, eds. Encyclopedic
Dictionary of Religion. 3 Vols. Washington DC: Corpus Publications,
1979.
Murphy, Nancey. "Religion and Science." The Routledge Encyclopedia of
Philosophy. Vol. 8. Ed. E. Craig.. New York: Routledge, 1998. Pp.
230-236
Murphy, Nancey. Theology in the Age of Scientific Reasoning. Ithaca
NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.
Peterson, Michael, William Hasker, Bruce Reichenback, David Basinger.
Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2001. [This text was helpful for the above treatments of
Richard Dawkins and Nancey Murphy.]
Plantinga, Alvin. "Religion and Epistemology." The Routledge
Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Vol. 8. Ed. E. Craig. London/New York:
Routledge, 1998. Pp. 209-218.
Pojman, Louis, ed. Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology. 2nd ed.
Belmont CA.: Wadsworth, 1994. [This text provides a good introduction
to the philosophy of religion. Some of the above treatments of Kant,
Pascal, Plantinga, Cahn, Leibniz, Flew, Hare, Mitchell, Wittgenstein,
and Hick are derived from its summaries].
Pomerleau, Wayne. Western Philosophies of Religion. New York, Ardsley
House, 1998. [This text serves as the basis for much of the above
summaries of Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Hume,
Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, James, Wittgenstein, and Hick.]
Rolston, Holmes III. Science and Religion: A Critical Survey. New
York: Random House, 1987. [This has a good section on the anthropic
principle.]
Solomon, Robert, ed. Existentialism. New York: The Modern Library, 1974.
Taylor, Charles. A Catholic Modernity? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self. Cambridge MA.: Harvard
University Press, 1989.
Wolterstoff, Nicholas. "Faith." The Routledge Encyclopedia of
Philosophy. Vol. 3. Ed. E. Craig. London: Routledge, 1998. Pp.
538-544. [This text formed the basis for much of the above treatment
of "Reformed Epistemology."]
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