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Mythology Currently Haunting the Relationship between Fides et Ratio

The Discourse on Faith and Reason Revised

Athens in Dialogue with Jerusalem

We suggest that our current state of skepticism in Western late modernity stems from a significant confusion about the relationship between various types of faith and certain types of reason. There is more than one type of reasoning or knowledge, and more than one type of faith. Alasdair McIntyre notes three massively different paradigms of reason in Three Version of Moral Inquiry: pre-modern, modern and postmodern. This important insight helps us understand the breadth of discourse at our universities. Faith is also a multivalent concept and applies equally to the hard sciences as well as relationships or the study of Holy Scripture or one’s personal spiritual journey and quest for meaning. There are several assumptions that have to be made in all these cases which cannot be proven by science. These are meta-scientific, yet crucial for our work in various disciplines. They are part of our hermeneutical grid or framework.

We need a critical assessment of current metaphysical, epistemological and anthropological assumptions in order to find liberation from the Nihilistic world picture that has taken us captive. We propose that it is possible to think critically and wisely within a different framework or horizon. We can discover a richer understanding of reason, belief and life itself. The larger horizon of reason gives it its fecundity or fruitfulness.

God, in the classical sense, asks humans to the table of reason, he proposes intellectual hospitality and dialogue. He asks them to test his wisdom and revelation against the reality of their lives and their best thinking, against their deepest aspirations and worst fears and anxieties. He asks them to pay attention to reality by all possible means, at all levels, to come to grips with the mystery of their humanity and the mystery of being itself. Brilliant biochemist turned philosopher, Michael Polanyi (see a separate post on his work), revealed that faith is operative at all stages of scientific research and discovery, both theoretical and experimental science. For Polanyi, scientific inquiry is above all a practice best understood as a kind of craft. Philosophical theologian Jens Zimmermann has added significant and accessible insight on this subject of science and the humanities in his recent publication: Hermeneutics: a very short introduction (Oxford University Press, 2015). The big issue is how we frame our convictions and thoughts, plus the kind of stance we take on reality, towards ourselves and other people, the world at large.

We want to face the hard question: Are we entering a post-truth society where spin doctors, tweets and fake news producers are taken seriously, despite the ‘facts’, where rage gives us an audience? Some are buying into this stance. This is fideism combined with blind loyalty and cult-like tribalism. Oxford scholar Terry Eagleton would call it the ideology of the aesthetic.The current attempts towards a pure reason or pure faith are really impossible to actualize. In fact, there  are no pure domains of reason or faith. They are intertwined. One cannot get rationalism without the other extreme: fideism. Both rationalism and fideism are abstract categories and don’t exist in real life. Sadly, rationalism seems to need good faith to be reduced to fideism for its very survival. For example, Nietzsche claimed that all the way down there are only interpretations; on the opposite extreme, positivists claim that there are only facts (especially scientific ones).

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What should we believe about faith and reason whatever our starting point or prejudgments? It is perhaps a life-long quest to understand the nuances of this faith-reason, knowledge-religion relationship. Nothing is more important for balance in our lives and our thinking inside and outside the university. Accomplished philosophical theologian Duke University scholar D. Stephen Long helps our quest giving us much to ponder in his profound book Speaking of God: theology, language and truth. Stephen was a past guest speaker at UBC in the GFCF series. I have chosen some priceless quotes below from Stephen and other great scholars and scientists to help us re-imagine a truce between faith and reason. It may even lead to a re-enchantment of the world and a renewal of culture.                              

Here are ten of the most common myths (misconceptions) about the relationship between reason and Christian faith. Perhaps it can help awaken us from our studied naivety, our intellectual slumber, our received prejudgments. These assumptions need to be re-examined  as to their cogency and coherence, their soundness, their plausibility. It is critical that we transcend the hard, abstract (often confusing) categories of fideism and rationalism. Both are a form of harmful dogmatism that leads people in the wrong direction intellectually and personally. Let’s face it, there are good ways to reason and bad ways to reason (talk to a professor of logic), and this matters immensely today. The following misconstruals are commonly believed, even by PhDs who are well published, and some of the top public intellectuals.

Ten Myths about Faith & Reason

In response, we appeal to some of the sharpest minds to examine and confront these confusions. In the end, clear thinking does matter. The unexamined assumption can lead one astray, even into harm’s way, and into violence. It is no accident of history that many of the top modern universities, (e.g. Harvard, Queen’s, McGill, Oxford, Cambridge, Princeton, the Sorbonne) have deep roots in the Christian faith, have been inspired by such faith (John O’Malley, Four Cultures of the West; Kelly Monroe Kullberg, Finding God at Harvard). Their campus mottos reveal this fact. Religious belief is no friend of ignorance nor the enemy of knowledge. Christian faith involves the mind as well as the heart and the body (the whole person), reason as well as intuition, attention to facts and interpretation, all types of human perception. It employs the full human linguistic capacity (Charles Taylor, The Language Animal). See for example the pursuit of wisdom in both science and theology in Tom McLeish’s Faith and Wisdom in Science. (OUP 2014) Psalm 110:10 says: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”

Below, we take a stance/position of intellectual openness in the pursuit of a reasoned faith and faithful, responsible, noble reasoning. I believe that with effort we can we handle the pursuit of knowledge wisely, astutely and carefully. Philosopher Paul Gould notes: “We find truth when our thoughts, beliefs, or statements correspond to reality, when we are rightly related to the way the world is.” The reasoning process involves several components, including (1) the reception of facts from sensation, reports of others (i.e., testimony), memory, introspection, or the imagination; (2) the perception of self-evident truths (including laws of logical inference); and (3) the arrangement of facts to arrive at new truths that are not self-evident. 

Myth #1. Faith and reason are inherently incompatible, or in opposition.

“Philosophy should be the love of wisdom that prompts persons to use reason in the quest for truth, goodness and beauty…. Philosophy and theology have distinct tasks, but those tasks cannot be delineated solely in terms of nature and or reason and faith.” ~D. Stephen Long (statement about non-overlapping magisteria)

“The question of God… is one that can and must be pursued in terms of the absolute and the contingent, the necessary and the fortuitous, potency and act, possibility and impossibility, being and nonbeing, transcendence and immanence…. Evidence for or against God, if it is there, saturates every moment of the experience of existence, every employment of reason, every act of consciousness, every encounter with the world around us.” ~David Bentley Hart, philosopher, writer

 “As I try to discern the origin of that conviction [that the universe is orderly], I seem to find it in a basic notion discovered 2000 or 3000 years ago, and enunciated first in the Western world by the ancient Hebrews: namely that the universe is governed by a single God, and is not the product of the whims of many gods, each governing his own province according to his own laws.  This monotheistic view seems to be the historical foundation for modern science” Melvin Calvin, Nobel Prize for Biochemistry  (Chemical Evolution. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969, 258).

“Reason itself, and the deliberative processes that govern rationality, point to a reality ‘outside of the box,’ a world governed by truth and not mere survival instincts. The world is ontologically haunted by a self-existent, immaterial cosmic mind. As C. S. Lewis has said in Miracles, “To admit a cosmic mind is to admit a God outside Nature, a transcendent and supernatural God.” (Paul Gould, Cultural Apologetics, 137)

See Prayson Daniel’s Blog post on Max Planck:  Science and Religion http://withalliamgod.wordpress.com/2010/11/28/max-planck-on-god/

Clarification of the Concept of Faith

Faith is not wishful thinking, or the opposite of evidence, nor is it anti-science. Faith is a critical, reasonable trust (chairs, cars, doctors, bankers, husbands, mentors, professors). Clearly with all the scams today, good faith and bad faith must be discerned. But we cannot live without faith.

Good faith is a positive, hopeful openness to the fullness of reality and all the knowledge that is there to be apprehended (E.F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed; Jens Zimmermann, Hermeneutics: a very short history). It is the opposite of cynicism and reductionism, naïveté or paranoia about will to power. Of course, the object of our faith makes all the difference. We should never take a ride home from a drunk driver. In fact, current cultural superstitions, fantasies and self-deceptions are the enemy of good faith. They keep us from facing reality (Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head). We don’t want to build our lives on intellectual or personal sand. Popular Canadian author David Adams Richards (God Is, p.154) writes, “Faith is important because all of mankind’s other concerns are actually unsolvable without faith.” Cynicism will not solve problems; it folds its arms in a cold, self-righteous stance.

Charles Taylor has much to say about how science does not logically exclude religion or replace it in Chapter Fifteen of A Secular Age. I have a YouTube presentation of this point called Charles Taylor and the Myth of the Secular. People can discover faith within a secular or immanent frame. They can reach out of their immanent box towards the transcendent. He exposes the prejudices of a Closed World System that closes its doors to faith in anything beyond time-space-energy-matter concerns (the transcendent). David Bentley Hart (The Experience of God) and Thomas Nagel (Mind and Cosmos) do a brilliant job of deconstructing the presumptions of Naturalism with its false assumptions about science and religion.

Myth #2. Reason does not involve faith at any level of its operation.

“Modern rationalism makes us choose truth against beauty and goodness. Only a permanent, living unity of the theoretical, ethical and aesthetic attitudes can convey a true knowledge of being.” ~D. Stephen Long on the relationship of the culture spheres

“Philosophy has its limits, but it must be redeemed, and a place must be made for it within the gift we receive in sacred doctrine. Philosophy has its own integrity when it does not exceed its proper limits and seek to police the questions asked. The limits Wittgenstein placed on philosophy for the sake of a life worth living is similar to the limits Acquinas put on philosophy for the sake of the Christian life as a way of following Jesus into the truth of God.” ~D. Stephen Long

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pINptKQYviQ Francis Collins “Why is it hard for scientists to believe in God?”

“Understanding the nature of reason is central to our conception of human existence. We have to resist a narrow conception of human rationality that excludes religion as irrational because such a view cripples our ability to analyze correctly the current state of Western culture. As Rodney Stark has argued in his book The Victory of Reason, Christianity’s ability to combine faith and reason with a progressive view of human nature laid the foundation for Western science and technological progress…. Building on Judaism, Christianity also allowed for the concepts of human dignity, personhood and individuality that have decisively shaped Western views of society…. Neither the best nor the worst features of modernity are comprehensible without the transformative influence of Christianity on Greco-Roman culture. Without religion, the West would not be what it is, and without understanding the religious roots of Western culture and their continuing influence on Western thought, we lack the self-understanding necessary to address our current cultural crisis.” (J. Zimmermann, Incarnational Humanism, 2012, 25 & 26). Prize winning American historian Tom Holland (Dominion) agrees.

Albert Einstein once observed that “science can help human beings attain some of their goals; science cannot, however, supply the goals.” This comes by way of transcendence of physical matter: Mind transcends brain.

See Roy Clouser, The Myth of Religious Neutrality; An Essay on the Hidden Role of Religious Belief in Theories (rev. ed.; University of Notre Dame Press, 2005).

Faith underlies rationality: In this view, all human knowledge and reason is seen as dependent on faith: faith in our senses, faith in our reason, faith in our memories, and faith in the accounts of events we receive from others (history). Accordingly, faith is seen as essential to and inseparable from healthy rationality (Alvin Plantinga, American notable philosopher).

“A theology of science — situates our exploration of nature within a greater task. Science becomes, within a Christian theology, the grounded outworking of the ‘ministry of reconciliation’ between humankind and the world.” ~ Tom McLeish (2014). Faith and Wisdom in Science, 209.

Myth #3. Modern reason has made Christian faith redundant; faith is a primitive and weak disposition of our medieval ancestors.

“The certainties which the church has received as a gift require its participation in humanity’s “comom struggle” to attain truth. The human search for truth, which is philosophy’s vocation, is not set in opposition to theology’s reception of truth as gift. What we struggle to understand by reason we also receive by faith. No dichotomy exists between the certainties of faith and the common struggle by human reason to attain truth. … the truths humanity seeks by common reason (philosophy) and the certainties of faith can be placed over against each other such that each illuminates the other and renders it intelligible until the two ultimately become one, which is of course what the incarnation does in reverse. The concretion of the one Person illumines the natures of both divinity and humanity. Faith seeks reason and reason assists faith. They mutually enrich each other.” ~D. Stephen Long

 “The common belief that . . . the actual relations between religion and science over the last few centuries have been marked by deep and enduring hostility is not only historically inaccurate but actually a caricature so grotesque that what needs to be explained is how it could possibly have achieved any degree of respectability.”  ~Colin Russell, Reputable UK Historian of Science.

“Science is simply incapable of supplying answers in the realm of ethics, theology, and the purpose of life. In dealing solely with observable and measurable phenomena, modern science actually has nothing to say about love, compassion, beauty, self-centredness, altruism or cruelty. It concentrates on secondary causes and questions. Unfortunately, some scientists conclude that since the scientific method cannot handle non-material matters, they have little legitimacy in a university curriculum. They argue that because non-material issues cannot be scientifically proven, there is no point in investigating primary causes and questions. From within their closed system of reasoning this may make sense, but they gloss over or ignore the most important questions of human existence…. Even the most brilliant scientist, after all, has no inherent competence in ethics or other non-scientific matters.” ~John R. Redekop, Respected Political Scientist, Wilfrid Laurier University and Trinity Western University.

What if, as Oxford mathematician John Lennox says, faith in a transcendent God helps make better sense of human experience, human reason and science itself?

It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. ~G.K. Chesterton (1908). Orthodoxy.

For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.  – Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers. He is an astronomer who worked for NASA.

This subtraction view of secularity is contested by top Canadian McGill University philosopher Charles Taylor in his Templeton Prize winning book, A Secular Age (especially Chapter 15, “The Immanent Frame”).

“The change I want to define and trace is one which takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others. I may find it inconceivable that I would abandon my faith, but there are others, including possibly some very close to me, whose way of living I cannot in all honesty just dismiss as depraved, or blind, or unworthy, who have no faith (at least not in God, or the transcendent). Belief in God is no longer axiomatic. There are alternatives. And this will also likely mean that at least in certain milieux, it may be hard to sustain one’s faith.”
~Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, 2012. 

Oxford Mathematician & Philosopher John Lennox in a Debate with Richard Dawkins

Myth #4. Faith is a credulous assent to unfounded premises, a belief in something that is untrue or at least suspect.

“Faith not only seeks and presumes reason, it converts it. Every account of reason assumes something beyond it, some enabling condition that makes it possible but cannot be accounted for it within its own systematic aspirations… Likewise faith can never be pure; it will always assume and use reason even as it transfigures it.” ~D. Stephen Long on the interdependency of faith and reason

“There is a difference between seeking to know things for the sake of knowledge itself and being willing to undergo renunciation to be possessed by truth.” ~ James Houston, Joyful Exiles

“Newton argued that the regulation of the solar system presupposed the ‘counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being’ and indeed hoped that his Principia would convince the thinking person of the existence of a Deity.” ~John Lennox, Oxford Mathematician/Philosopher

Clearly there exists both good faith and bad faith. Believing a lie or promoting a falsity, as in a Ponzi scheme, for the sake of an advantage or con is bad faith. Sophism is the application of good rhetoric in bad faith (disingenuous). Evidence is vitally important to good faith; clarity, consistency, coherence and unity are important to good faith. Exposing fantasy, superstition or Gnosticism is an essential goal of good faith. One needs good faith/integrity in signing a major contract for a merger of two companies, or entering a marriage. Faith is a form of knowing that can go beyond the evidence but should not contradict it, or be hopelessly uncritical or unexamined. Does the Christian narrative have resonance, or make good sense of our experience? Is it both plausible and desirable? That’s a key question. ~Dr. Gordon Carkner, philosophical theology, meta-educator UBC postgraduate students.

Because God is the God of the universe there is, at the deepest level, no secular learning for Christians. There is no secular subject matter. Indeed, in this perspective the only secular learning is the effort of these scholars and students who deny the existence of God. Second, there is no area of human existence or history which lies outside the realm of Christian inquiry. Third, the church has much to offer the university because it challenges the university to acknowledge the historic and continuing contributions of Christianity and to establish inclusive curricula. Fourth, the university has much to offer the Christian because it helps them to develop critical thinking, to enlarge their understanding of options, to improve learning skills, and to approach intellectual pursuits systematically and efficiently. ~John R. Redekop, Emeritus Professor of Political Scientist Wilfrid Laurier University and Trinity Western University(In this light, see also John W. O’Malley, Four Cultures of the West.)

In Scripture, faith involves placing trust in what you have reason to believe is true. Faith is not a blind, irrational leap into the dark. So faith and reason cooperate on a biblical view of faith. They are not intrinsically hostile. ~J.P. Moreland, Christian philosopher

Wonder (awe) rather than doubt is the root of all knowledge. Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement … get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed. ~Abraham Joshua Heschel

Critical realism is the attempt to find a middle way between the heroic optimism of the failed modernist search for certain truth, and the intellectual pessimism that so often leads postmodernism into a slough of relativistic despond.” ~ John Polkinghorne and M. Welker (2001). Faith in the Living God: A Dialogue.

Myth #5. Reason is a pure, disinterested obedience to empirical fact; methodological naturalism implies and requires belief in philosophical naturalism.

Tom McLeish in his fine book, Faith & Wisdom in Science, reminds us that science over its long history has a more complex culture than is often understood today (52, 53). Here’s his meta-perspective:

1. Doing science is very old, even back to the ancient world of Greece and Rome.
2. Science is a deeply human activity.
3. Science is more about the imaginative and creative questions than it is about method.
4. Science can be painful, entailing an immense amount of work.
5. The relationship between ‘faith’ in all of its connotations and ”science’ is a long and rich one. The deeper we we have probed into its roots, the clearer becomes the theological background to every aspect of [science’s] nature. See Gregory of Nysa or Robert Grsseteste

“Naturalism, alone among all considered philosophical attempts to describe the shape of reality, is radically insufficient in its explanatory range. The one thing of which it can give no account, and which its most fundamental principles make it entirely impossible to explain at all, is nature’s very existence. For existence is most definitely not a natural phenomenon; it is logically prior to any physical cause whatsoever…. In fact, it is impossible to say how, in terms naturalism allows, nature could exist at all.” ~ David Bentley Hart, Philosopher (Key book: The Experience of God)

“Note that I am not postulating a ‘God of the gaps’, a god merely to explain the things that science has not yet explained.   I am postulating a God to explain why science explains; I do not deny that science explains, but I postulate God to explain why science explains.  The very success of science in showing us how deeply ordered the natural world is provides strong grounds for believing that there is an even deeper cause for that order”.   The issue here is that, because God is not an alternative to science as an explanation, he is not a God of the gaps.  On the contrary, he is the ground of all explanation, the very ground of being: it is his existence which gives rise to the very possibility of explanation, scientific or otherwise.” ~Richard Swinburne, top Oxford Philosopher. Swinburne examines the credibility of Christian faith using Bayes Theorem of Probability.

Oxford Physicist Ard Louis speaks on Science and Scientism

“An admirably severe discipline of interpretive and theoretical restraint [modern empirical science] has been transformed into its perfect and irrepressibly wanton opposite: what began as a principled refusal of metaphysical speculation, for the sake of specific empirical inquiries, has now been mistaken for a comprehensive knowledge of the metaphysical shape of reality; the art of humble questioning has been mistaken for the sure possession of ultimate conclusions. This makes a mockery of real science.” ~Philosopher David Bentley Hart reflecting on the ideology of scientism

Alvin Plantinga raises major questions about the compatibility of materialistic naturalism with science (Where the Conflict Really Lies, 2012, especially Chapter 10)

Comparing Creativity in Science and the Arts

Renaissance Thinker Tom McLeish, in his brilliant book The Poetry and Music of Science:

• Challenges the obvious assumption that science is less creative than art and illustrates the contrary (contra C.P Snow’s ‘Two Cultures’)
• digging down to a foundational core of science and humanities
• Treats art and science on an equal footing and shows their interplay
• Shows the points of contact between science and music, literature and visual art
• Draws on historical and contemporary examples to provide a broader understanding
• Brings medieval philosophy and theology to bear on current questions of creativity
• Discusses the conscious and non-conscious mind involved in a breakthrough
• Reports on individual conversations with artists and scientists and provides personal perspectives on their personal creative processes
• Illustrates with rich and detailed examples such as a close reading of mathematics and music
• Offers a rich conversation within academia and beyond–a wellspring of issues for dialogue and reconciliation

Four Stages of Creation: Ideation, Incubation, Illumination, Verification

“Art and science must both reassure and trouble, call on extension of both seeing and hearing, must both distance and immerse…. Art and science share the same three springs of imagination. The visual image offers perspective, insight, illumination. The written and spoken word bring the possibility of mimesis through the textual, the experimental, and the narrative form for the story of creativity itself. The wordless depths of number, the musical and mathematical draw on the ancient insights of the liberal arts at the limits of comprehension. These are the trinity of disciplines and of modes of creation that transport our present longings for a fruitful and a peaceful home in the world, toward a future in which we are less ignorant, wiser in our relationship, but no less caught up in the wonder of it.” (T. McLeish, The Poetry and Music of Science, 336, 339)

Myth #6.  Reason is morally and ideologically neutral, the same for all thinking human beings, therefore universal—unifying society.

“Science and theology do indeed take the entirety of nature as a fit subject of their narratives. There really only is one world, and our minds are the locus of both meaning and explanation within it…. In Judaism and Christianity the universe itself carries theological weight as our human environment–with both positive and painful consequences. Keeping science and theology at arms length artificially limits their domains of discussion–and this is inconsistent with the range of both of them. This is why for example, science cannot be value-free, nor a discussion of values science-free. ” (Tom McLeish, Faith and Wisdom in Science, 168)

“The good characterizes a public, successful performance of truth; it refuses fideism….Truth is an activity, a judgment inextricably linked to the good, and therefore to moral transformation. When I am pursuing truth I am pursuing goodness…. This truth both an undying fidelity and love, and at the same time a generosity towards others. By refusing to subordinate itself to ‘power’, understood as willful self-assertion, it best serves the tradition of democracy.” ~D. Stephen Long, Duke University theologian

Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor’s contention is that the power of materialism today comes not from scientific “facts”, but has rather to be explained in terms of the power of a certain package uniting materialism with a moral outlook, the package we call “atheistic humanism” or exclusive humanism. (C. Taylor, A Secular Age, 569) It works off an ontological thesis of materialism: everything which is, is based on “matter”, without explaining why this is taken as true.

“Intellectual virtues” are the deep personal qualities or character strengths required for good thinking and learning. To better pinpoint the concept, consider: What do we tend to associate with good thinking and learning? One familiar answer is knowledge. Good thinkers often know a lot; at a minimum, they aren’t ignorant. Another familiar answer is raw cognitive ability. Good thinkers also tend to be intelligent or to have a reasonably high IQ.

Good thinking and learning have a character-based dimension. They require the practice of qualities like intellectual carefulness, perseverance, honesty, humility, attentiveness, and thoroughness. These are intellectual virtues.

Read Alasdair McIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?; also see Roy Clouser, The Myth of Religious Neutrality; An Essay on the Hidden Role of Religious Belief in Theories (rev. ed.; University of Notre Dame Press, 2005).

All science is both theory and value-laden as Michael Polanyi notes in his book Personal Knowledge. It is personal knowledge held passionately by persons. Without a code of virtues and ethics, science could not be considered reliable knowledge.

James Sire in his very popular and helpful book, The Universe Next Door, demonstrates that ideology is at work in all viewpoints and discipline of academia including science. Our critiques and our reason are always implicated in a worldview. There is no such thing as a moral or ideologically neutral stance. The question is which ideology, and how does it stand up under scrutiny of the laws of logic: coherence, consistency, empirical justification, connection to reality, relevance. Whatever one’s worldview–Marxism, Atheism, Buddhism, Theism–one ultimately has faith in it and its plausibility, even if this is unconscious. Interpretation is always at work in our research and truth claims.

Also, in each area of research, there are very specific rules for good scholarship and if we do not obey them, we will never pass a PhD examination. Theories are also critical to the credibility of our research. The problems occur when a critical theory becomes an ideology: Marxism in late modern Critical Theory–social science.

Intellectual virtues, by contrast, are the character strengths of a good thinker or learner (e.g. curiosity, attentiveness, intellectual courage). While they intersect with moral and civic virtues in interesting ways, it is important to maintain a distinction between intellectual virtues and these other types of virtues.

Myth #7. Faith & reason exist as separate incompatible arenas; reason deals in physical causes only, while faith deals with supernatural/spiritual/magical causes.

“Polanyi probably criticised Popper, as most philosophers of science reject falsificationism.  Duhem and Quine showed, for example, that theories only make predictions when combined with a framework of background assumptions.  So when a prediction is false, the problem could be with the framework, not the theory itself.  Kuhn showed that all theories, even the best ones, are inconsistent with some of the data.  Hempel showed that many scientific statements aren’t falsifiable.  Bayesians (who are now the dominant group) reject Popper’s fundamental claim that theories are never probably true.  Popper is much more popular among scientists than among philosophers of science. Also, while there is disagreement among Bayesians and others, present views don’t allow such a sharp separation between science and religion.  Kuhn for example says that the present “paradigm” isn’t open to rational scrutiny, but shielded from criticism, and paradigm shifts are only partially rational.  Bayesians say that science depends on subjective judgements of plausibility in addition to logic and data, etc.”

-Dr. Richard Johns, Professor of Philosophy, Langara College, Vancouver, B.C.

“The church reminds the university that the two share a joint task–the preservation and accumulation of knowledge and the transmission of a common heritage. Both institutions need to rethink the past, question the present, and anticipate future revision of human understanding. Both need also to acknowledge that if they are faithful to their purpose, both will frequently find themselves in tension with society, in part for the same reasons: dissatisfaction with the status quo, challenging injustices, and raising controversial questions. Such commonality is to be expected given that both institutions emphasize the mind and both search for new insights. When the university acknowledges the limitations of the scientific method and the church concedes that it cannot provide final scientific answers, their two endeavours will increasingly overlap.” ~John R. Redekop, Political Scientist

Faith and Reason as Essential To Each Other: This is the Christian view that faith without reason leads to superstition, while reason without faith leads to nihilism and relativism.

Part of our task … is to awaken in others this innate longing for truth and  knowledge. We do this by arguing for the intrinsic worth of knowledge, that the pursuit of knowledge is valuable, pleasurable, and that every truth discovered, every piece of knowledge gained, illuminates the divine. Christians believe that all truth points to its source in Christ, the creator of all things.… We find truth when our thoughts, beliefs, or statements correspond to reality, when we are rightly related to the way the world is. Reason itself, and the deliberative processes that govern rationality, point to a reality “outside of the box,” a world governed by truth and not mere survival instincts. The world is ontologically haunted by a self-existent, immaterial cosmic mind. As C. S. Lewis has said in Miracles, “To admit a cosmic mind is to admit a God outside Nature, a transcendent and supernatural God.” ~Paul M. Gould, Christian Philosopher

It’s not just Christian scholars and pastors who need to be intellectually engaged with the issues. Christian laymen, too, need to be intellectually engaged. Our churches are filled with Christians who are idling in intellectual neutral. As Christians, their minds are going to waste. One result of this is an immature, superficial faith. People who simply ride the roller coaster of emotional experience are cheating themselves out of a deeper and richer Christian faith by neglecting the intellectual side of that faith. They know little of the riches of deep understanding of Christian truth, of the confidence inspired by the discovery that one’s faith is logical and fits the facts of experience, of the stability brought to one’s life by the conviction that one’s faith is objectively true.  –William Lane Craig, philosopher

Of course, so much important human reasoning is not focused on the physical but on ideas.

Myth #8. Faith is the irrational belief in the opposite direction of where scientific evidence leads us.

“Faith adds less a material content to geology, physics, mathematics, evolutionary science, economics, etc., than the form within which they can be properly understood so that they are never closed off from the mystery that makes all creaturely being possible.” ~ D. Stephen Long

“There is no such thing, at least among finite minds, as intelligence at large: no mind not constrained by its own special proficiencies and formation, no privilege vantage that allows any of us a comprehensive insight into the essence of all things, no expertise or wealth of experience that endows any of us with the wisdom or power to judge what we do not have the training or perhaps the temperament to understand. To imagine otherwise is a delusion…. This means that the sciences are, by their very nature, commendably fragmentary and, in regard to many real and important questions about existence, utterly inconsequential. Not only can they not provide knowledge of everything; they cannot provide complete knowledge of anything. They can yield only knowledge of certain aspects of things as seen from one very powerful but inflexibly constricted perspective. If they attempt to go beyond their methodological commissions, they cease to be sciences and immediately become fatuous occultisms.” ~David Bentley Hart

“Living in a postsecular world means that secularism is no longer the standard for reasonable thought. If indeed it is true that Western culture continues to experience a crisis of identity and purpose, the dogmatic exclusion of sources of transcendent purpose (i.e. religion) seems unwise…. Such dogmatism is not secular thinking, if secular is taken at its root meaning of “this worldly”. Rather, the arbitrary exclusion of religion from reasonable discourse is secularist ideology, a fundamentalist rejection of all interpretation of the world, except the materialist one that excludes religion.”  (J. Zimmermann, Incarnational Humanism, 41)

“The most pervasive error one encounters in contemporary arguments about belief in God–especially, but not exclusively, on the atheist side–is the habit of conceiving of God simply as some very large object or agency within the universe, or perhaps alongside the universe, a being among other beings, who differs from all other beings in magnitude, power, and duration, but not ontologically, and who is related to the world more or less as a craftsman is related to an artifact….. Beliefs regarding God  concern the source and ground and end of all reality, the unity and existence of every particular thing and the totality of all things, the ground of the possibility of anything at all.” ~David Bentley Hart

Faith as addressing issues beyond the scope of rationality Faith Seeking Understanding as per St. Augustine: In this view, faith is seen as covering issues that science and rationality are inherently incapable of addressing, but that are nevertheless entirely real. Accordingly, faith is seen as complementing rationality, by providing answers to questions that would otherwise be unanswerable. This is true of many purpose, identity and meaning (why) questions. It offers a richer landscape to human rationality and includes the poetic, the story, the human narrative. See Alister McGrath, A Fine-Tuned Universe: the search for God in science and theology (2009) for a strong statement on complementarity of scientific rationality and theological reason; and Tom McLeish, The Poetry and Music of Science.

“The reasoning process involves several components, including (1) the reception of facts from sensation, reports of others (i.e., testimony), memory, introspection, or the imagination; (2) the perception of self-evident truths (including laws of logical inference); and (3) the arrangement of facts to arrive at new truths that are not self-evident.” ~ Philosopher Paul M. Gould

Myth #9. Faith is seated in the emotions or sentimentality; reason is a non-emotional, cool operation of the disinterested mind.

Does Christian faith measure up to the standards of reason? Always be prepared to give an answer to anyone who asks you for the reason behind your hope. (I Peter 3:15) This is the field of apologetics and philosophical theology. Naturalism some say negates the existence and validity of reason itself. Naturalistic materialism tells us that minds evolve from non-rational, blind, mechanistic processes. The phenomenon of intentionality is at odds with naturalism. There also is the problem of a foundation for human worth and rights, which atheist Duke University philosopher Alex Rosenberg highlights. On the contrary, we would expect a perfectly rational and good personal being to spread his joy and delight by creating a world full of epistemic, moral and aesthetic value. For in such a world, it is possible to love, know, act, and create. If theism is true, mind is both prior to matter and the cause of matter. See Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies.

See our Blog Page on Apologetics Resources Creativity Centre: https://ubcgcu.org/apologetics-resources/

“We may define “faith” as the firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. Where there is evidence, no one speaks of “faith.” We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence. The substitution of emotion for evidence is apt to lead to strife, since different groups, substitute different emotions.” ~Bertrand Russell, atheist philosopher

“The existence of consciousness is both one of the most familiar and one of the most astounding things about the world. No conception of the natural order that does not reveal it as something to be expected can aspire even to the outline of completeness. And if physical science, whatever it may have to say about the origin of life, leaves us necessarily in the dark about consciousness, that shows that it cannot provide the basic form of intelligibility for this world.” ~Thomas Nagel, Atheist Philosopher

“God alone has necessity in and of himself. That is, if the word “God” has any meaning at all, it must refer to a reality that is not just metaphysically  indestructible but necessary in the fullest and most proper sense; it must refer to a reality that is logically necessary and that therefore provides the ultimate explanation of all other realities, without need of being explained in turn…. God is absolute being as such, apart from whom nothing else could exist, as either a possibility or an actuality…. It is God’s necessity, as the unconditional source of all things, that makes any world possible in the first place.” ~David Bentley Hart

“In another important respect, still related to the scope of inquiry and learning, Christianity and the university share an agenda. To a large degree both address societal problems, express moral outrage when warranted, believe that many problems can be solved, and insist that society can and should be improved. Both frequently express a sense of responsibility and undertake societal activism. Over the years the areas of intentional involvement have included literacy, health care, social housing, immigration reform, assistance to refugees, care for the blind and aged, the preservation of historical records and documents, promotion of the arts, and much more. In many of these activities, I suggest, it has been the church and at times even government, rather than the university, that has taken the lead. There is no ultimate incompatibility between the two; the basic assumptions of Christianity and the basic assumptions of the university, including its emphasis on scientific methodology, are fundamentally complementary, not contradictory.” ~ John R. Redekop, Political Scientist

Faith as based on Warrant (Alvin Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function): In this view, some degree of evidence provides warrant for faith. To explain great things by small. To find coherence within a worldview that holds to the supernatural or transcendent. Empirical and historical evidence can also be involved. Warrant is a very important concept of credibility. Evidence for the resurrection would also be a key example.

Faith and Reason are like two wings of the human spirit by which it soars to the truth. ~Pope John Paul II

Truth Calls; Reason Guides

Myth #10. Good reason requires a materialistic universe; materialism is a basic fact of deductive logic.

” There simply cannot be a natural explanation of existence as such; it is an absolute logical impossibility. The most a materialist account of existence can do is pretend that there is no real problem to be solved (though only a tragically inert mind could really dismiss the question of existence as uninteresting, unanswerable, or intelligible).” ~David Bentley Hart

“It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure” ~Albert Einstein

Christian spokespersons, thus, actually perform a praiseworthy role when they insist that there must be openness to supernatural sources of knowledge and that a particular methodology ought not to delineate the limits of reality. Christians argue with credibility, I suggest, that a healthy, heuristically productive skepticism, which lies at the heart of scientism, must also be applied to the scientific method itself. Consistency requires nothing less. ~ John Redekop, Political Scientist

Leading Philosopher Alvin Plantinga argues that naturalism (which includes materialism) is in conflict with evolution, a main pillar of contemporary science. The argument centers on the status of our cognitive faculties: those faculties, or powers, or processes that produce beliefs or knowledge in us (e.g. perception, memory, a priori intuition, introspection, testimony, induction). His argument concerns the question of the reliability of  cognitive faculties (reliability of cognitive content)if we espouse naturalism and unguided evolution together. The probability is very low. Can we get to true belief, reliable knowledge by this path? Again it is an argument from coherence (or rather, in this case, incoherence). See Plantinga’s Where the Conflict Really Lies, Chapter 10.

Charles Taylor on the Myth of the Secular: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl4NgIg_ht8IZCRIhho4nxA

Reductive materialism is a major philosophical problem in contemporary academia. One can study constitutive components (physics and chemistry) of a larger reality such as biological life, but this is never a fulsome explanation. The real danger is that methodological reduction  morphs into ontological reductionism in the mind. This is a dangerous logical non-sequitor.

NASA Astronomer Jennifer Wiseman doesn’t see the many unanswered questions of space or the enormous nature of our universe as a reason to doubt her faith. Instead, she sees it as a reason to strengthen it. … “Let us praise God for the Universe and let us praise God for the gift of science that lets us explore and understand our Universe.”

 Can Matter be Creative?  by Philosophy Professor Richard Johns, Langara College

It is commonplace to compare living organisms to human technology. William Paley, for example, compared organisms to watches, in virtue of containing parts with obvious purposes that meshed together to produce a functioning whole. Richard Dawkins compared bats to spy planes, bristling with advanced technology. Also note that biologists consider human technologies such as cell phones and airplanes to be products of evolution, since their creators are themselves such products.

While life and technology are similarly functional, their origins are thought to be very different. The development of new technologies requires that engineers understand the problem to be solved, and have knowledge of physical laws, the properties of materials, and so on. In short, creative engineering requires understanding. This is especially crucial when solving very difficult problems, which may take many generations of engineers. The Wright brothers, smart fellows though they were, could not have made a supersonic jet. Solving the problem of supersonic flight required a long cumulative process of somewhat gradual improvements, involving many people, who each had to understand the successes as well as the limitations of earlier designs.

Evolution on the other hand is not an intentional process, according to the standard evolutionary theory (SET). (SET refers rather loosely to contemporary versions of the ‘Modern Synthesis’, or ‘Neo-Darwinism’, developed in the 1940s by Fisher, Haldane, Wright, etc.) Evolution is a purely physical process on this view, and no thought or understanding is involved, until perhaps humans arrive on the scene. Nevertheless evolution is often described as a ‘creative’ process, on account of the fantastic technologies it has produced. I will argue, however, that no physical process can be creative in the required sense.

Engineers have, we might say, a ‘bias’ towards functional structures. If you produced a vast number of structures randomly, all with the same probability, very few of them would be functional. Very few would ‘do something useful’, such as walking, swimming, flying, detecting remote objects, producing light, generating electric currents, etc. Random processes are therefore unlikely to produce anything functional. Engineers however don’t produce objects randomly. They’re much more likely to produce a functional object than a random process would be.

Can physical processes have a similar bias toward functional structures? Evolutionary biologists say, “Yes indeed!” (Richard Dawkins is especially clear on this point.) Were this not the case, evolution – a physical process – could never have produced the complex life we see around us in so short a time.

Here’s the difficulty. The process of evolution must have a strong bias toward making new functional structures, or it cannot explain life as we find it. On the other hand, the laws of physics themselves have no bias toward functionality. The laws of physics are very simple and symmetric, and have been shown to produce only objects that are either simple and repetitive, or complex but random-looking and haphazard (or a mixture of the two). Such objects are never functional to any significant degree. A bias toward functionality arises only, SET claims, with the first appearance of a self-replicating entity, whose descendants differ from one another in minor ways. This leads to a struggle for existence, a competition for resources among these variants, and an automatic ‘selection’ of the more functional types.

So SET is committed to four claims:

1. (i)  The laws of physics have no bias toward producing ‘technology’, or functional structures.
2. (ii)  The process of evolution, which begins with the appearance of self-replicators, has a strong bias toward functionality.
3. (iii)  Evolution is a purely physical process.
4. (iv)  The spontaneous appearance of a self-replicator may be improbable, but it isn’t fantastically improbable (or evolution would require a miracle to get going).

The conjunction of these claims is however in conflict with probability theory. The first claim entails that complex life is fantastically improbable relative to the laws of physics, too improbable to be a realistic possibility, even in billions of years. (In the Markov chain formalism that can be used to represent a physical system, it has very low ‘stationary probability’.) If this probability becomes much larger, upon the appearance of a self-replicator, then probability theory tells us that the appearance of a self-replicator must also be fantastically improbable, contradicting claim (iv) above. In technical language, if Prob(A) is some low number , but Prob(A | B) is some much larger value q, then Prob(B) is no greater than /q. In effect, the probabilities of events in a physical system are fixed by the laws of physics, and the initial state, and cannot change much thereafter. For an improbable event to become probable, an equally improbable event must occur first.

There is no possible escape to this problem, as long as the probability of functional organisms is indeed very low at the beginning of time. But to drop this assumption (i) commits us to the view that the laws of physics themselves have a very strong bias toward functional objects, including computers and bicycles. Apart from there being no evidence for this at all (and much opposing evidence), it would seem to remove the need for SET in the first place.

In summary, if evolution is a physical process, then it can produce living organisms only if the laws of physics and initial state are ‘pre-programmed’ (so to speak) to do so. There is no question of a physical process creating such a disposition toward technology on its own. Physical systems, whether deterministic or not, are ruled by their laws and initial conditions.

Insights on Critical Realism by Alister McGrath, Roy Bhaskar and Ernan McMullin

See Alister McGrath on Critical Realism : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SPUklxrQmU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TO4FaaVy0Is Roy Bhaskar on Critical Realism

See our Scholarly UBC GFCF Lectures at https://ubcgfcf.com

Conclusion

We have shown that there are many misconceptions about faith and reason today. The myths are often quite divisive and reductive–promoting misinformation, confusion and bad paradigms. We suggest a new trajectory for the contemporary university would be to work on the compatibility and serendipity of faith and reason: with a view to promoting good scholarship, whole personhood and robust faith. After all, Christianity gave rise to the modern university and its committed pursuit of critical thinking, knowledge and wisdom. Where is the wisdom in ditching faith in our great academic institutions today? It is counter-productive and self-contradictory. It creates an abstract, poorer, and psychologically unhealthy environment. Why not commit to a future of integration, inclusion, and mutual enrichment–a rapprochement between faith & reason. Reason & Faith need each other to be their best self. We believe that this is the direction to human flourishing (M. Volf, Flourishing). The search for home that we find in culture today undergirds the pursuit of goodness, beauty, truth and unity and finds it fulfilment in God. Home is a place to stand and a story in which to live, to discover shalom or wholeness. Home is a metaphor for the heart’s and the mind’s deepest longings. Home is a place to stand and a story in which to live (shalom). Cornelius Plantinga writes:

Shalom means a universal flourishing, wholeness and delight–a state of affairs in which natural needs are satisfied and natural gifts fruitfully employed, a state of affairs that inspires joyful wonder as its Creator and Saviour opens doors and welcomes the creatures in whom he delights.

(C. Plantinga Jr., Not the Way its Supposed to Be, Eerdmans, 1995, 10)

~Dr. Gordon E. Carkner, Meta-Educator with UBC Postgraduate Students, Author, Blogger, YouTube Webinar Producer

A Relationship with Jesus: https://ubcgcu.org/relationship-with-jesus/

Apologetics Creativity Centre https://ubcgcu.org/apologetics-resources/

YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl4NgIg_ht8IZCRIhho4nxA

UBC Scholarly Lectures on Faith & Academic Issues: https://ubcgfcf.com

Incarnation, Identity, Spirituality https://ubcgcu.org/2022/10/04/incarnation-identity-spirituality/