How Far Apart Are Athens and Jerusalem? Toward an Understanding of Faith and Reason
By Steven B. Cowan
The second-century church father, Tertullian, once asked, “What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”[1] Athens, of course, was the center of Western intellectual life and philosophy, while Jerusalem, for Christians, was the center of religious faith. So, what Tertullian was really asking was, “What concord or agreement is there between human reason and religious faith?” For his part, Tertullian seemed to give a negative answer as indicated by his statement that he believes Christian truth “because it is absurd.”[2]
Throughout history, there have been various opinions on the relationship between faith and reason. Some, like Tertullian, have held that faith and reason are enemies—or at least not friends. For example, the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard defined faith as an “objective uncertainty,” and claimed that “the absurd is the object of faith.”[3] On the other side of the religious divide, atheists like Richard Dawkins champion science and reason against religious belief claiming that “faith is an evil.”[4] Of course, many others have held that faith is consistent with reason and utilize reason to understand and defend the faith. Giants of the faith like Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, and many contemporary Christian apologists have sought ways to reconcile any perceived tension between faith and reason.
In this brief essay I will not be able to settle completely the proper way to understand the relationship between faith and reason. What I will do is explain my own preferred way of laying out what the options are. I hope to show, as well, that the answer has a lot to do with how we define the terms “faith” and “reason.”
A Faith-Reason Taxonomy
As I see it, there are two main options for understanding the relationship between faith and reason (see figure below). These are Compatibilism and Incompatibilism.[5] The former, obviously, is the view that faith and reason are compatible. They are not enemies, but friends. Faith does not deny or circumvent reason, nor does reason undermine faith. The latter view holds that faith and reason are incompatible. One must, on this view, choose either faith or reason, but not both, within some domain of inquiry.
As you can see, both compatibilism and incompatibilism have what I call “optimistic” and “pessimistic” varieties. This means that there are four stances one can take on the relationship between faith and reason:
1. Optimistic Compatibilism holds that reason can be used to justify faith. Reason is not only consistent with faith but can and does support faith. Those who hold this view believe that there is good, perhaps even compelling, evidence by which to prove or strongly justify Christian truth-claims. Christian philosophers and apologists in the classical or evidentialist schools[6] who engage in natural theology and advocate the importance of Christian evidences (e.g., arguments for the existence of God and for Jesus’ resurrection) would fit this category.
2. Pessimistic Compatibilism has less confidence in the ability of human reason to demonstrate Christian beliefs. Those in this camp would argue, however, that faith does not contradict reason or vice-versa. Christian truth-claims can be shown to be consistent with what reason discovers. Reformed epistemologists such as Alvin Plantinga will fit this category nicely. While not denigrating the usefulness of theistic arguments, Plantinga claims that they make belief in God rational at best. They do not, in his view, rise to the level of proofs.[7]
3. Optimistic Incompatibilism holds that faith and reason are not compatible, but this poses no problem for the person of faith. Faith is “above” reason and cannot be critiqued or questioned by reason. If human reason suggests that the truths of Christianity are unsupported by evidence or even false, the optimistic compatibilist is undaunted. This view is otherwise known as fideism. Kierkegaard is often said to have held this view. Some interpretations of Cornelius Van Til, the presuppositional apologist, would place him in this category, too.[8]
4. Pessimistic Incompatibilism is a view held only by religious skeptics. Religious beliefs, on this view, are without evidence and may even be contrary to sound reason, and, unlike optimistic incompatibilism, this is a bad thing. For this pessimist, faith is irrational and therefore should be rejected. Prominent atheists such as Bertrand Russell and Richard Dawkins hold this view.
So, which of these views is correct? In the next section, I will give the reader some help in finding an answer.
What Do We Mean by “Faith” and “Reason”?
The question of whether or not faith and reason are compatible turns, at least in part, on what one means by these two terms. Notice, first, that “faith” is used in English in many different ways. Most relevant to our purposes, we may distinguish four different definitions of “faith”:
a. Believing something for no reason. The idea here is that faith means believing something even though there is no reason for believing it. Let’s label this definition of faith as: Faith-0.
b. Believing contrary to reason. Here faith has to do with believing something even though reason is against it. Call this Faith-C.
c. Believing something on authority. On this definition, faith means believing some statement because someone you take to be an authority (e.g., a scientist, the government, God) says the statement is true. This we will call Faith-A.
d. Trusting someone or something. Unlike the previous three definitions, this use of the term “faith” does not directly relate to believing something. It has more to do with relying on something or having confidence in a person. Of course, such trust can be based on things one believes, and it can also be the ground for believing things a person you trust says. Let’s call this Faith-T. I should also note that what I have called Faith-A (believing on authority) is a species of Faith-T. We take something on authority when we trust the one taken as an authority. So, in what follows, I will subsume Faith-A under Faith-T.
Second, the term “reason” is used in multiple ways as well. In particular, we must distinguish the normative and the descriptive senses of reason, which I will label Reason-N and Reason-D, respectively:[9]
a. Reason-N = A set of principles and processes aimed at gaining truth.
b. Reason-D = What cultural leaders (here and now) consider to be reasonable.
Reason-N represents an ideal standard for gaining knowledge that includes the principles of deductive and inductive logic, and the truth-conducive ways they may be utilized. It may also include the requirement that one’s belief be based on some evidence. This requirement will be controversial among some philosophers but perhaps the controversy can be mitigated by specifying a broad sense of “evidence” that includes prudential reasons and “seemings.”[10]
Reason-D has to do with what a particular society at a particular time thinks the application of Reason-N shows. This descriptive notion of reason is relative, fallible, and mutable due to human limitations.
Armed with these definitions, we can show when, how, and why faith and reason may be compatible or incompatible. Consider the following table (and let’s assume that “faith” here has to do specifically with religious faith and religious beliefs):
The table indicates that Faith-0 (believing religious beliefs for no reason) is incompatible with reason in the normative sense. That is, if one’s faith is a blind faith, then it’s inconsistent with what the canons of reason require. Such blind faith will also likely be incompatible with reason in the descriptive sense. If one agrees that the normative sense of reason really is normative—universally normative for all cultures, that is—then one will believe that our culture’s rejection of Faith-0 is not just a cultural idiosyncrasy.
What about Faith-C? Obviously, it is incompatible with Reason-N. For example, the principles of logic require that one’s beliefs be logically consistent. If one holds, contrary to reason, a set of religious beliefs that are contradictory, then one holds beliefs incompatible with Reason-N. However, it is possible to have religious beliefs that are consistent with Reason-N, but at odds with Reason-D. That is, it can be reasonable (in the normative sense) to hold religious beliefs that are contrary to what one’s culture thinks is reasonable. For example, perhaps our cultural elite has come to be skeptical of the biblical teaching on the special creation of human life because scientists have overestimated the evidence for macroevolution and underestimated the evidence for biblical authority.
Faith-T seems to be compatible with both senses of reason. Reasons and evidence offered in support of the trustworthiness of my bank (Reason-N), for example, are perfectly consistent with my having trust in my bank. Likewise, evidence for the divine inspiration of the Bible is compatible with my trusting the Bible’s authority. As for Reason-D, our culture generally agrees that it is reasonable to trust people and institutions that one takes to be trustworthy and/or authoritative. So, there is a prima facie compatibility between Faith-T and Reason-D. There is a caveat, however. There is potential for disagreement between the religious believer and the cultural leaders over which people and institutions are trustworthy. The Christian trusts the authority of Scripture, for example, but many in our culture are skeptical of biblical authority.
Conclusion
No doubt, many questions about the relationship between faith and reason remain. What we have seen above, however, suggests that some variety of compatibilism is correct when it comes to the question of whether or not the Christian faith is worthy of belief. This should not be surprising, given the fact that the Bible itself seems to indicate that key Christian beliefs are supported by objective evidence and appeals to reason. As Paul wrote in Romans, for instance, God’s existence and nature are “clearly seen” by all human beings “through what has been made” (Rom 1:19-20). And elsewhere he supported belief in Jesus’ resurrection by appeal to eyewitness testimony (1 Cor. 15:3-8).
Notes
[1] Tertullian, Prescription Against Heretics, Chap. 7.
[2] Tertullian, On the Flesh of Christ, Chap. 5.
[3] Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. D.F. Swenson, L.M. Swenson, and W. Lowrie, in A Kierkegaard Anthology, ed. R. Bretall (Princeton University, 1946), 190-258.
[4] Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 308.
[5] It is important not to confuse what is being discussed here with the difficult debate over the relationship between free will and determinism which uses similar terms.
[6] See my Five Views on Apologetics (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000) for a discussion of these and other schools of apologetics.
[7] See Alvin Plantinga, “Reason and Belief in God,” in Faith and Rationality, ed. A. Plantinga and N. Wolterstorff (Notre Dame University, 1983).
[8] See Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 1955).
[9] I am indebted to C. Stephen Evans for this distinction (See his Faith Beyond Reason: A Kierkegaardian Account [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998], 18-24).
[10] A “seeming” is an experiential state in which a proposition seems true to a person. For a defense of this modest version of evidentialism, see Trent Dougherty, “Religious Beliefs Require Evidence,” in Problems in Epistemology and Metaphysics, ed. Steven B. Cowan (New York: Bloomsbury, 2020), 126-39.
— Steven B. Cowan is Chair of the Department of Humanities and Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Lincoln Memorial University. He is the author or editor of numerous books and articles including Five Views on Apologetics (Zondervan, 2000), (with James Spiegel) The Love of Wisdom: A Christian Introduction to Philosophy (B&H, 2009), (with Terry Wilder) In Defense of the Bible: A Comprehensive Apologetic for the Authority of Scripture (B&H, 2016), and most recently Problems in Epistemology and Metaphysics (Bloomsbury, 2020).
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