A Preface to a Long Conversation—on the relationship between faith and reason—begun by addressing the presuppositions which have made the conversation unnecessarily difficult.
“There are not one hundred people in the United States”, once said Fulton Sheen, “who hate the Catholic Church; but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church to be.” We may take this claim, I believe, and expand it: not only the Catholic Church, but religious faith in general receives a hatred for being something it is not. For many have come to believe, as wrote Thomas Paine in 1794, that “All national institutions of churches—whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish—appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind and monopolize power and profit”[1] and that “Every national church or religion has established itself by pretending some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals… as if the way to God was not open to every man alike.”[2]
Though Paine’s sentiments may not have been accepted by the commoner of his own time, it is hard to dispute that these resonate with many, today—to the extent, even, that they are tacitly accepted or incorporated into some ostensibly religious teaching. That is, we see in not a few churches (perhaps in some synagogues, perhaps even in some mosques), a kind of religious egalitarianism: the claim that there are many paths to God, different but all potentially salvific—some perhaps less directly, but all with the possibility of arriving at the same end.
This flattening of religious difference into a mere matter of personal convenience (that is, a religion’s fittingness to one’s accidental constitutions of life—time and place of being born, of living, to which parents, in which society, culture, and all the circumstances having shaped one’s own habits of mind) not only presents religious faith as a series of essentially equal options: it makes faith itself appear as one among a number of options. “Belief” is reduced to something internal. “Faith” is its doctrinal form. But the doctrinal form of something purely internal carries no weight in the “objective” world of facts and truths. Thus today—so at least it seems to me—many reject the idea of faith as anything other than a personal preference: it may inform how you choose to live, but it does not, of itself, inform the world. There may not be sufficient reasons to reject faith, but there are also no sufficient reasons to accept this or that faith, or, therefore, to be obedient to the doctrines of any faith.
Or to put this otherwise: one might acknowledge that our world lacks something which religion seems to supply, but that which religion seems to supply does not preclude other possible answers. From this perspective, religious faiths, despite their claims, seem not to be sources of knowledge, but only of a certain moral code. This code may be either wholly arbitrary or partly determined by some observation of nature and nature’s laws, but it is not reducible to nature (else it would not be a religious but only a natural belief) and therefore stands outside reason and the things that reason may judge or evaluate. Does this divide of faith from the reach of reason, then, make religion itself something wholly arbitrary?
From within each religious faith (generally speaking—that is, within at least among the three great monotheistic religions of the world), the doctrines are not viewed as arbitrary, for they are grounded on some revelation: that is, some way in which God has communicated Himself to the world beyond the signs of nature. These revelations are collected by the Jews into the Torah, the Muslims into the Qur’an (and perhaps in some indirect manner, the Hadith, or reported sayings of Mohammed), and the Christians commonly into the Bible, and, specifically in Catholicism, the teaching of the Magisterium. That a religious faith’s doctrine be taken as authoritative resides on the legitimacy of these revelations.
But—so protest those taking a stand against religion—why must anyone take revelation itself as authoritative? Perhaps the person to whom the revelation was made initially; but as Thomas Paine objects, “It is a revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other; and, consequently, they are not obliged to believe it”:[3]
It is a contradiction in terms and ideas to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second-hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication—after this, it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner, for it was not a revelation to me and I have only his word for it that it was made to him.
Notably, Paine, though objecting to the many different particular creeds, was not himself an atheist, but a deist. The idea of a creator God was not one that he opposed—the universe appearing to sense to have an order and therefore it seeming reasonable that there be an orderer. But, it seems to me, the grounds of his objection to revelation, namely that it relies upon the testimony of others and consists in no sensible phenomenon which may be evaluated and put to the test by the individual mind hearing it second-hand, seems also the grounds upon which many a modern atheist rejects even the idea of a creator God.
The purpose of this seminar is not to explore the rationale proposed for atheism or its many objections to God—however God might be conceived—nor to argue against those positions. Nevertheless it is instructive for our purpose (navigating the tensions of faith and reason) to consider why the atheist rejects revelation. Put simply, it is this: there is no reason why these words should not be purely the fabrication of human beings. The author may believe his words divinely inspired or not; he may believe he is recording a message received directly from God, or he may believe he is simply recording historical fact, or telling a story. Thus, that there are conflicts (not to say contradictions) within the texts of the sacred scriptures seems even more so an indication of their inauthenticity as divine—for how could a divine being contradict itself? Why would God make His texts so difficult to understand, if providing guidance for adherents of a specific creed?
Behind these objections, no less than that of Thomas Paine, lies a certain presupposition quite common to the modern mind, though one which might be put in very diverse formulations: that human reason itself is sufficient; that our innate capacities for reason are the measure by which all things are evaluated; that the intelligible coherence of claims to oneself constitutes their rationality and the incoherence of claims to oneself puts them outside of reason; that the human mind is the judge of order, if not the agent responsible for it. Or to put this perhaps another way—anticipating a discussion raised by Strauss in his 1954 “Mutual Influence of Theology and Philosophy”—that what we know of the whole universe is sufficient to judge the reasonability of any claims about the universe; perhaps not infallibly, but where the faults in our judgment concern particulars within the whole and not the whole itself.
That such a presupposition undermines the very supposed rationality of the anti-religious rationalists should not need much exposition, for it seemingly would put the human mind outside the whole of the cosmos, from which position alone it would seem possible to make judgments concerning that whole. But undoubtedly it is true that pure human reason in its highest form—not the facile reductionistic or scientistic position common today, but rather the truly philosophical spirit of inquiry—does in some sense deal with the whole, with all things and man’s effort to understand them somehow. So, too, does revelation—or faith—or theology—claim in some way, and in fact in a more definitive way, something about the whole. Because of this, tension between the two is inevitable.
Tension, from the Latin tendere, signifies a certain stretch—and implies thereby a struggle or opposition of the two points between which that stretch occurs. We are doubtless all familiar with tension, both in its physical experience and in the metaphorical extension to matters of the psyche. Tension creates stress in all its parts: a tense muscle suffers prolonged contraction from one attachment point to the other; a tense moment between husband and wife may strain not only each spouse but so too the marriage; a tense conversation between political leaders may stretch economic and political relations between their constituents. We often aim, therefore, to avoid tensions; or, suffering them, to find means of bringing them quickly to an end.
Perhaps most commonly, people avoid the pain of tension by simply cutting the tie. This cutting might mean either the rejection of one or another cause of the tension, one “point” or the other; or it might be a kind of segregation or compartmentalization. If the stress is caused by tension between your spouse and a casual acquaintance, “cutting” the two apart may be an easy and good solution; between a spouse and a parent, it seems much more difficult and much less good either to cut one or the other out of your life or to try keeping them entirely separate—for even if this satisfies the two, it strains the self: the claims made on our lives by parents and spouses undoubtedly overlap, and to satisfy both separately seems to require a certain “doubling” of the self.
So too the claims on our lives of philosophy and faith, inasmuch as each concerns the whole—and especially as each makes claims about the good that is sought within that whole. Philosophy subjects all experience to the “tribunal of reason” in its efforts to discriminate good from bad; but faith accepts as true certain claims which, as accepted, stand above or outside of what we can know by reason—and thus, holds to claims which cannot be judged by that tribunal. Christ says to turn the other cheek, to love your enemy; Caesar says to cut off his hands, so as to see even in mercy, an expression of power. Can the non-Christian be convinced by reason that a life of suffering injustice is better than behaving cruelly? Can the Christian rule over the barbarian, constrain his raw violence, without committing violence himself?
Does the “suprarational” character of its source entail that faith and all its many practices which reason could never divulge to us are “unreasonable”? Does this elevation of faith render any reasoning conducted under the auspices of revelation to be a kind of impure reason—an exercise of reason only “in a certain respect”? Is there such a thing as a “Christian reasoning” or a “Christian philosophy”?
Many have denied that faith can inform reason—just as many have denied that reason can discover faith. Contrariwise, others have claimed that while faith provides data to reason from a supernatural source, these data are no less open to rational operation than any other we receive, including that which comes directly from the senses—only that the conclusions we can draw from inquiry into these data differ in some fashion. Yet despite the efforts at times that have been made to sever the tie, to segregate the two, or to subsume one into the other, still the tension remains; and it thus remains for us to ask: why?
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[1] Paine 1794: The Age of Reason, 6.
[2] Ibid, 7.
[3] Paine 1794: Age of Reason, 7-8.


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