Faith and Reason

One of the best ways to discredit an opposing view is to simply dismiss it as “illogical.” It’s a tried and true method for a quick conversation killer. If you haven’t tried it lately, give it a shot. You’ll be amazed at how little effort you will exert; not only will you not have to think through the oppositions argument, you won’t have to think through yours either. It’s akin to the ‘my dad is bigger than your dad’ taunt heard on every playground in the world. As kids we all used this taunt knowing full well we would never have to actually present our fathers to each other for a physical inspection. In the same way, we accuse others of being illogical without an honest inspection of their view or a demonstration of why ours is any more profound. It is an intellectual cat and mouse game we play to avoid confronting the deep and terrible possibility that we might be wrong; that the other may have something to teach us about reality.

When brought over to the discussion of faith and reason the “illogical” card is thrown at every turn. I have participated in hundreds of online discussions, public debates, and private conversations over the issue of religious faith in a reason focused world and I am rarely disappointed. Someone always finds it necessary to accuse the other of being illogical or irrational. Why? Because most people hold their views of existence as close to their heart as possible. After all, if we get existence wrong, we get nearly everything else wrong. Faith and reason provide us with our ideas of existence and/or our existential dealings (life, death, relationships, the afterlife, goodness, evil, God, human nature, etc) and for many today reason, and reason alone, is the only sure way to the truth.

While faith usually finds itself under the scrutiny of popular media and academia, reason too reveals its own weakness upon close inspection. The curious thing about our reasoning powers is that we can reason about the very thing we are using to reason – our reason. Whenever we attempt to climb outside of reason in order to analyze it from a safe distance we find that we have never actually left, quite the opposite, we have only dug down further into our seat of rationality. It’s the one great variable that can never be properly defended nor properly dismissed. If we try to defend reason we only do so by our own reason, which only begs the question. Reason cannot be called in as a material witness when it is also, and at the same time, the defendant in the dock. On the flip side, reason cannot be dismissed except with the use of reason, this of course is another logical absurdity. Therefore, we are subject to reason and must trust that it serves us as a reliable tool of interpreting reality (the book to read is Miracles, by C.S. Lewis, and, if time is no object and you know a good psychiatrist, the Critique of Pure Reason, by Immanuel Kant is a must).

Faith and reason are often presented as an either/or: either one chooses faith or one chooses reason, but one cannot have both faith and reason. If the reader has been paying attention, and if my logic has been sound thus far, it is easy to discern why this dichotomy of faith versus reason is a false dichotomy. At a base level the very tool we use for interpreting existence – our human reasoning – is assumed to present us with the truth, an assumption based on little more than what skeptics often accuse religious faith of: a blind leap, or, if one is honest with the language – a blind leap of faith (the epitome of intellectual treason in modern academia).

Of course, this is not an attack on reason, as I just said, reason can neither be attacked nor defended. Instead it is an attempt to show how it is that reason necessitates faith to perform its most basic movements (as troubling as such a thought might be for those who wish to purge their worldview of the necessity of faith). They are not antithetical, they are not in strict opposition, rather, they complement one another in very profound ways.

In closing let me throw out a simple analogy to help make the point (keeping in mind that all analogies are flawed in one way or another). Take a tire and a road. What could be more opposite than a circle and a straight line? Yet, the two make for a wonderful relationship. Rather than being in combat with each other, they are perfect companions with a shared purpose of moving someone from one place to another. If we think of reason as the tire and faith as the road the idea is clear. Faith and reason both work to move us from one state of mind and/or being to another. One need not prefer roads to tires or tires to roads for they are entirely separate categories serving a common goal.

Questions, comments, and threats welcomed.