05/29/2021 – 2nd in our Saturday Apologetics series: “Faith and Reason”
Again, I am quoting from my “Pocket Handbook of Christian Apologetics” by Peter Kreeft and Ronald K. Tacelli, ISBN-13: 978-0-8308-2702.2. I will be pulling from Chapter 2 and interjecting with my own comments in parenthesis.
“In a sense the marriage of faith and reason is the most important question in apologetics because it is the overall question. If faith and reason are incompatible, then apologetics is impossible. For apologetics is the attempt to defend faith with reasons weapons.”
Defining Faith
“Religious faith is something to die for and something to live for every moment. The act of faith is more than merely an act of belief. (Jimmy note: One may believe that Biden is not a crook, but there is not a willingness to die for that belief, nor can it be lived for it every moment.)
We can distinguish at least four aspects or dimensions of religious faith.
- Emotional faith is feeling assurance or trust or confidence in a person. This includes hope (which is much stronger than just a wish) and peace (which is much stronger than mere calm).
- Intellectual faith is belief. It is the aspect of faith that is formulated in propositions and summarized in creeds.
- Volitional faith is an act of the will, a commitment to obey God’s will. This faith is faithfulness or fideility. It manifests itself in behavior, that is, in good works.
- Faith begins in that obscure mysterious center of our being that Scripture calls the “heart.” Heart in scripture does not mean feeling, or sentiment, or emotion, but the absolute center of the soul, as the physical heart is the center of the body.
‘Keep your heart with all vigilance,’ advised Solomon, ‘for from it flow the springs of life’ (Proverbs 4:23). With the heart we choose our “fundamental option” of yes or no to God, and thereby determine our eternal identity and destiny.”
Defining Reason
“Here again, we must distinguish the subjective, personal act of reason with the object of reason. The object of reason means all that reason can know. This means all the truths that can be (a) understood by human reason, (b) discovered by human reason, and (c) proved by reason without any premises assumed by faith in divine revelation.
Reason is relative to truth, it is a way of knowing truth: understanding it, discovering it or proving it. Faith is also relative to truth; it too is a way of discovering truth. No human being ever existed without some faith. We all know most of what we know by faith; that is, by belief in what others – parents, teachers, friends, writers, society –tell us. Outside religion as well as inside it, faith and reason are roads to truth.”
The Relation Between the Objects of Faith and Reason
“Having defined our two terms, we are ready to ask the question about the relation between them. When we ask this question, we do not mean “What is the psychological relation between the act of faith and the act of reason? but “What is the logical relation between the object of faith and object of reason?” How are these two sets of truths – those knowable by unaided human reason and those knowable by faith in divine revelation – related?
There are three different kinds of truths:
- Truths of faith and not of reason.
- Truths of both faith and reason.
- Truths of reason and not of faith.
Truths of faith alone are things revealed by God but not understandable, discoverable or provable by reason (e.g. , the Trinity or the fact that Christ’s death atoned for our sins) Truths of both faith and reason are things revealed by God but also understandable, discoverable or provable by reason (e.g., the existence of one God, or objective moral law, or life after death). Truths of reason and not faith are things not revealed by God but known by human reason. (e.g. , the natural sciences.) If this is the correct position, it follows that the Christian apologist had two tasks: to prove all the propositions in class 2 and to answer all objections to the propositions in class I (see figure 1).
We cannot prove the propositions in Class 1 (e.g., the Trinity), but we can answer all the objections to them. For example, suppose a Unitarian or a Muslem objects to the Trinity because “it is polytheistic.” We can show that this is a misunderstanding; it does not mean three Gods, but one God in three Persons. Or suppose a logician says it is a contradiction to call anything both one and three. We can reply that God is one nature, not three, and three persons, not one. This is not a contradiction, any more than we are : two natures (spirit and animal, mind and matter, soul and body) but one person.
Christian thinkers do not all agree about how many of the propositions of faith can be proved by reason, but most have held that some could (thus apologetics is possible) but not all thus apologetics is limited).
Why Faith and Reason Can Never Contradict Each Other
Aquinas answer to this question in Summa Contra Gentiles 1.7 seems to us irrefutably true:
The truth that the human reason is naturally endowed to know cannot be opposed to the truth of the Christian faith. For that which the human is naturally endowed is clearly most true; so much so, that it is impossible for us to think of such truths as false. (If we only understand the meaning of the terms in such self – evident propositions as “The whole is greater than the part” or “Effects must have causes,” we cannot think them false.) Nor is it permissible to believe as false that which we hold by faith, since this is confirmed in a way that is clearly divine. [ It is not our faith , but its object, God, that justifies our certainty.] Since, therefore, only the false is opposed to the true, as is clearly evident from an examination of their definitions, it is impossible that truth of faith should be opposed to those principles that the human reason knows naturally.
Thus, either Christianity is false, or reason is false, or –if both are true — there can never be any real contradiction at all between them, since truth cannot contradict truth.
Aquinas gives a second, equally compelling reason for the same conclusion:
Furthermore, that which is introduced into the soul of the student by the teacher is contained in the knowledge of the teacher — unless his teaching is fictitious, which is improper to say of God. Now the knowledge of the principles that are know to us naturally [rationally self – evident propositions] has been implanted in us by God; for God is the author of our nature. These principles, therefore, are also contained by the divine Wisdom. Hence, whatever is opposed to them is opposed to the divine Wisdom and therefore cannot come from God. That which we hold by faith as faith as divinely revealed, therefore, cannot be contrary to our natural knowledge.
Many will follow Aquinas so far but balk at this next point. Yet, this next point follows necessarily from the previous one:
From this we evidently gather the following conclusion: whatever arguments are brought forward against the doctrines of faith are conclusions incorrectly derived from the first and self – evident principles embedded in [rational human] nature. Such conclusions do not have the force of demonstration; they are arguments that are either probable or sophistical [fallacious]. And so there exists the possibility to answer them.
In other words, every possible argument against every Christian doctrine has a rational mistake in it somewhere and therefore can be answered by reason alone.
If this were not so, if Aquinas is wrong here, then one of those arguments from unbelievers against one of the doctirnes of Christianity, at least, would really and truly prove the doctrine to be false, that is prove Christianity untrue. Aquinas’s optimistic view of the marriage between faith and reason necessarily follows from the simple premise that Christianity is true. Thus ‘Christian irrationalism’ is self-contradictory.
Remember, however that we (and Aquinas) are not claiming that all Christian doctrines can be proved by reason, only that every argument against them can be disproved. Nor are we claiming that any given person can disprove them. Reason is flawless, de jure, but reasoners, are not, de facto.”
Jimmy note , from here:
“Definition of a priori
1a: DEDUCTIVEb: relating to or derived by reasoning from self-evident propositions— compare A POSTERIORIc: presupposed by experience 2a: being without examination or analysis : PRESUMPTIVE b: formed or conceived beforehand”
I remember getting up to the board in 10th grade geometry to step-wise lay out our lengthy proofs. They invariably would have an axiom or a postulate [self evident propositions] at the beginning.
So, let’s start here: Either God exists or he doesn’t, it can’t be both. Einstein’s theory of relativity was a proof of the “big bang”. So, let’s imagine we have a super fast stop action replay that runs in reverse. Let’s go back: Something, something, something, hey I have an ameba here, then: “nothing”!. I stop and play it forward, I locate the very instant where “nothing” goes to “something”. “Something is definitely wrong here!!!” ; no pun intended.
The ancient Greeks called this axiom: “ex nihilo nihil fit”, or translated: “out of nothing nothing comes”. Duh! So, we conclude our proof: If you have a big bang, you have to have a “big-banger”, that would be God Almighty, Jehovah Jireh, the first cause that did not have a beginning. He transcends His creation. So, we just disproved atheism and we only had to scroll our one line axiom on the board. Done! And we didn’t even have to look within creation, where Paul rightly noted gave man no excuse for declaring “there is no God.” (Romans)
Soli Deo Gloria!