As I See Faith and Reason, Part I

It is an astounding thing to consider the weakness of reason. From Aristotle’s observations to modern neurophysiolgist we have come to understand that there are limits to what we can conceive and thus to where reason itself can take us. The question emerging in the West over the last three hundred years is not whether we should have faith, but if reason can give us a faith which is unbounded by culture and thus a faith for all and all time.

What has emerged in this long road out of the quiet faith of the West into the post-modern age is a general consensus that the tools of faith are not to be found in obedience and allegiance alone, but in freedom itself – and in particular the freedom of the individual purchase his or her faith from the marketplace of ideas. For it is a cardinal tenant of our post-modern society that whatever a person thinks it is his or her right to think it. At the core is not reason, but the individual. For it can be said that Decartes’ “I think, therefore I am” is the founding stone of our beliefs about what faith is and how it is we are to faith-full.

The metaphoric marketplace of ideas assumes an economic structure to faith. Those who are of the belief that all ideas are equal believe that from the smorgasbord or ideas one should be able to simply choose what he or she believes. Underlying this view are two assumptions: 1) that ideas can be examined and purchased; and 2) that reason is sufficient to at least allow us to distinguish a good idea from a bad.

On the other hand, others view faith as a measure of allegiance to not a concept of the divine, but to the divine itself. In this view the Divine can be known and thus a feast of concepts and/or ideas outside what the Divine has provided is sacrilegious, foolish, and dangerous. Reason alone, in this view, is insufficient to produce true faith.

So these two views of faith are each an answer to the question of reason. The question is this: “Can reason lead us to faith?” Or, to put it another way, “why is there revelation?” For if reason is sufficient to lead us to faith then why is there a need for revelation? And if reason falls short then we either live without faith or turn to revelation.

Plato, nearly 2500 years ago came to a similar impasse. In “The Phaedrus,” Socrates runs through two attempts to define love, before he is driven to found the enterprise, not on reason, but on mythology. And today Goedel has shown that no mathematical system can be complete enough to prove its own axioms, a general principle which has been used to suggest that logic itself must start with something outside itself. In other words, logic has its limits.

In the end then, every person must live their lives asking not whether they should have faith, but if reason itself should be used to determine faith – and in particular whether revelation ultimateloy must take a backseat to reason or reason, at some point and in some way, a backseat to faith. It is not a quetion of faith or reason, but which gets "top billing" in the heart of a man.