# is faith reasonable?



## rmwilliamsjr (Jan 15, 2007)

i've been asked to give a short talk on this question this coming Saturday.
i'll spend the week reading more (i've been reading on the topic for a month or so) but mostly writing to get ready. i'm not a teacher so this is a big deal for me.

this is my current in process outline.
any help will be most appreciated, i can't start new books this week, but i will certainly continue think and reading on the topic past Saturday *grin*


this is an unstable document, pretty much for the same reasons it's author is.
under construction. writing for delivery Sat Jan 20th.

notes for LaVitaHouse talk= "Is Faith Reasonable?"

http://www.answers.com/topic/fideism-1
i'd like to discuss Augustine's motto on your sign:
Credo ut intelligum — "I believe in order that I may understand."

comparing it to:
"Credo quia absurdum" ("I believe because it is absurd") by Tertullian

and the skepticism and human centerness of:
René Descartes. Cogito ergo sum — "I think, therefore I am."
and his modern day intellectual descendents, most of us.

and look at the various ways that reason and faith can relate, and how different people have answered the question:
is faith reasonable? or is Christianity rational?

for example:
1. faith is absurd and irrational
2. faith is reasonable but exceeds the rational, but extra-rational is not the same thing as irrational (Gordon Clark?)
3. the reasonable requires faith, to trust in reason is to exercise a form of faith, presuppositionalism, C.VanTil
4. faith is reasonable, we can be asked to believe things that are not rational to us, but they are to God and one day they will be disclosed and understandable to us as well. Calvin although he says mystery will always remain because we are finite. but God is fully rational and reasonable, but we can not understand the highest reaches of it.

i believe it ought to be an hour long with time afterwards for questions.
and a prepared 1 page outline.

what is faith
what is reason
are reason and rationality the same thing
the division of emotions, reason, will
what is the relationship of faith and reason.
the spectrum reason as deficient or broken to reason as sufficient
the spectrum of faith as irrational to faith as extra-rational with faith and reason talking about the same domain in the middle

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i don't want this to be the 1st class in epistemology 101, i'd bore half of the group and be over the heads of the other half.
what i aim to do is more a directed question and answer motif, with me trying to get you'all to think through these outlines as we built they together and then post them on the wall for a continuing reference.

i'm going to start of with as much modern common sense, man in the pew thinking that i can and slowly introduce the historical ideas from several important thinkers. the end point being that the history of epistemological thinking will stimulate everyone to go out and buy a few books on the way home for reading this next week. remember if you buy amazon through the church website link we get 5% instead of profit to amazon.

start with faith VERSUS reason motif

nature of man as ontological dualism: spirit/soul and body
using "we walk by faith not by sight" some people align spirit with faith and the body with evidence from the eyes and it's understanding ie reason
this is the separate domains idea that with a little bit of manicheanism will lead to opposing the two.








then look at augustine's faith over reason
starts with the definition of faith as knowledge, assent, trust
see that faith is built on top of knowledge, requires content
Credo ut intelligum in my mind: credibility by intelligence.
the problem of the relation of evidence and faith.




then look at what might be called faith is irrelevant to reason motif.
start with mind body dichotomy.
add man as: intellect, emotions and will, often confuse emotions and will with "the heart", 
and you end up with intellect uses reason, heart uses faith
one of the modern problems is to connect the inside-out and outside-in pathways.
what we experience as people inside our heads into terms (reductionism) of cells,electrical charges, emergent properties and levels.

the last motif that i will look at, but certainly not the last one people have talked about is the Venn diagram of reason and faith.
parts interpenetrate, parts are separate and then there are places that aren't either.

the first problem:
is faith and reason tools/facilites or domains?
that is, do we use faith and reason as sources or are we looking at domains, places, content with these words?
realm of faith, reason as a tool, faith as a way of seeing. what exactly are we talking about?
(other way of looking at them is as a standard, a goal, an optimization)
one of the big problems in the discussion is talking past each other and equivocation or using words in very different ways.

then back up, how can religion and science or faith and reason logically interact?
Science and Religion: From Conflict to Conversation 
by John F. Haught
yields handy list: 1) conflict, 2) contrast, 3) contact, and 4) confirmation

my major interest, here as well as online, is to look at the errors in the church, i'm not really all that concerned, personally, with the errors in the metaphysics of scientism or naturalism or materialism. i'm more interested in the brethren in the church.
nor am i particularly interested in developing my own ideas. i really don't think i have enough pieces of this puzzle in one place to effectively do that. i plan to show a little bit about what i think personally on the issues, but mostly i will be talking about errors and other people's ideas, not my own.

i kind of know where i want to end up, with the 3 major themes on the topic that i see online:
*conflict*
a type of fundamentalist: faith is irrational, doesn't depend on reason, the White Queen defense.
the best faith will be the most irrational for then you are obviously demonstrating that you do not trust your eyes but trust God.
we walk by faith and not by sight is interpreted as deny the evidence of your eyes, believe. the doubting thomas defense.
this is faith is absurd, irrational but what God requires of us.

the other is the modern atheist, faith is absurd, it is irrational, therefore we don't need it.
they are actually mirror images in many ways. both depend on faith and reason being different domains, and contradictory facilities.
they are really the same conflict motif. the idea here is that faith belongs to an earlier, proto scientific mythological age and we have grown up and no longer need such crutches. so faith is not only irrational but dispensible and good riddance.

*contrast*, this is SJG NOMA and one way many Christians solve the problem, separate the combatants, let each rule in their own sphere.
the big problem, as many people are beginning to realize is that this doesn't do justice to God's claim to be sovereign over all.
this is Haught's contrast. It can be done in two ways. compartmentalization or denial that one is even valuable, or is reducible to the other.
i think this is Descartes alienation of the two realms ideal:
and the skepticism and human centerness of:
René Descartes. Cogito ergo sum — "I think, therefore I am."

*engagement*
to me, this is Polanyi, Jaki, Haught, Pokinghorne, a group of people that want to see science and faith not just talk to each but strenghten and help each other. I refer to this as Bacon's reading of the two books of God metaphor. we must read them together. hermeneutics and epistemology need to talk to each other.


faith and opinion as a movement of the will not a persuasion of the intellect via reason.


resources:
http://www.nd.edu/~afreddos/courses/301/faith.htm


btw.
i thought i started a thread here asking for help when i was first asked to do this talk.
but i can't find it. if the search failure was my error can someone point out that other thread?
and we can move this and delete the thread. 
tia.


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