Reason And Religious Faith

Terence Penelhum, Emeritus

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367300586
• eBook ISBN: 9781000309089
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The concerns of philosophy and of religion overlap to a considerable extent—each seeks, among other things, to develop an account of mankind's place in the universe. But their relationship has never been an easy one. Faith gives rise to philosophical puzzlement just as secular beliefs do, but it also generates special philosophical questions that secular beliefs do not. This engaging text encourages students and other readers to grapple with these special questions of faith, to look at how they relate to other issues in philosophy and in the empirical study of religion. Equally accurate and insightful in its treatment of historical authors such as Aquinas and Pascal as it is in treatment of such contemporaries as Plantinga and Alston, Reason and Religious Faith is the most up-to-date and balanced introduction to these issues available. It marks an advance over earlier surveys in its recognition of religious pluralism and the relevance of non-Christian religious views. It is an ideal introduction to the issues of religious epistemology for students of both religious studies and philosophy.

CHAPTER ONE
Introduction

Faith and the Philosophy of Religion

Students of philosophy are familiar enough with the philosophy of religion and usually encounter it in one or more of three ways:

1. They may consider religious ideas as presenting special problems in conceptual analysis: Is it coherent, for example, to suppose we are created by a being who is all powerful, incorporeal, present everywhere, yet personal or to blame our sins on ourselves while ascribing any merits we may have to the grace of God?
2. Even if students judge religious doctrines to be coherent, they may still see them as very ambitious cosmic or metaphysical claims and ask whether they can possibly be proved or disproved: Can it be proved, most obviously, that God exists or that he does not?
3. Such questions force students to ask how far religious beliefs strain the limits of our capacities to attain truth or live according to reason: Is it rational to center one's life on beliefs about God and our supposed relationship to him, or are such beliefs arbitrary or even pathological?

The philosophical problems that are generated by faith are, for the most part, in the last of these three categories. Consequently, the philosophical study of faith has largely consisted of explorations in the epistemology of religion. In modern times these have been undertaken in contexts that have involved comparing the convictions of those who have faith with the convictions we all have outside religious contexts when we form commonsense beliefs, such as those that depend on the senses, or when we acquire scientific beliefs like those of astronomy or biology.

Faith and the “Study of Religion”

Students of religion, at least in nonsectarian institutions, are likely to examine religious traditions in a manner that is said to be phenomenological.¹ The purpose of the academic study of religion is thought to be that of understanding the beliefs and practices that can be discerned in these traditions rather than that of deciding on the truth of the claims they make. It is easy to suppose that such an enterprise does not require us to consider the sorts of questions that interest philosophers since these have to be put to one side in the interests of objectivity and fairness. But this supposition is unrealistic, not because the interest in religion that prompts the study of it may well come from personal involvement, even though that is sometimes true, but because the suspension of judgment that an objective study of religion requires does not exempt the student from confronting many other questions that are certainly philosophical. Three examples are enough to show this.

First, the major religious traditions of the world all have divisions and internal controversies. To understand these, it is essential to identify the bases on which those on one side of such internal divisions distinguish themselves from those on the other. To do so requires an understanding of how each side settles questions of religious authority, doctrine, or scriptural canon. We can understand such controversies without taking sides, but not without identifying the competing claims and standards involved. Such identification is a philosophical task, indeed an epistemological one. (It can be excluded from epistemology only if the latter is restricted to the activity of passing judgment on claims that someone else has identified. This restriction, as we see later, is a very dated one.) Second, all the major religions of the world make practical demands on their adherents that are, or appear to be, based on claims about our place in the cosmos and our need to work out our destiny in it. The relationship between those knowledge claims and the practical demands the traditions make on their members' conduct is fundamental to each tradition. But this relationship is not the same in each case; nor is an understanding of it something that can be arrived at without religious or scholarly controversy. Here again we confront a question that is often philosophical in nature: What is the relation between knowledge and moral practice? Third, and perhaps most important, as scholarly awareness of the details of the world's religious traditions is broadened and deepened, questions arise about their relationship to one another.

These questions do get attention within the religions themselves as each looks at the others, and the answers are very different: Hinduism is more obviously accommodating to what is said in other religious traditions than is Islam or Christianity, for example. But these questions have also been addressed by scholars of religion from a more general perspective; some of them want to know whether the divergencies between the religions are really as deep as they seem or whether they are culturally determined differences that can be judged to represent alternative responses to one reality. If this is not a philosophical question, it is hard to know what is. Obviously, anyone seeking to answer it has to confront all the major epistemological questions about the powers and limits of the human mind that interest, equally, the philosopher of perception and the metaphysician.²

These examples show that the academic study of the world's religions is not free of philosophy merely because those who engage in it may refrain from making judgments of each religion's truth. But that does not show that the philosophical questions to which the contemporary student of religion should attend are confined to the traditional Western philosophical concerns with the relation of faith to reason. That is because faith and religiousness cannot be identified.

“Faith” and “Religion”

The concept of faith seems to be much more restricted than that of religion. Faith is one of the states or attitudes demanded of the religious person and then, it seems, only in some of the major religions: namely, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It may indeed be that faith is also essential to Hinduism or Buddhism, which may be what causes some to refer to all the religions as "faiths." But whether they all require faith is an issue that needs discussion— here is one more philosophical question that religion poses for us. I attempt to say a few sketchy things about this matter much later. For the moment I rest on the obvious appearances and say that faith is one attitude or state of mind that is characteristic of religious persons in some traditions, though it is not the whole of what those traditions demand of adherents or the whole of what they aspire to. Faith has attracted more philosophical attention than many other aspects of the religious life because it raises questions that exercise the philosophical mind independently: questions about the limits of human knowledge and the demands of reason. But the very fact that at least some great religious traditions require faith, and that it does raise these questions, shows that it is necessary for the student of religion as well as the philosopher to know about them. The serious study of the nature of any of these traditions requires us to contend with these questions, at least indirectly.

Theology

A similar involvement with philosophy falls to the lot of the student of theology. This book is not a theological work. But the questions it deals with are questions that the theologian confronts continually. Much theology is a philosophical activity that is carried on within faith: It is the activity of articulating what faith entails. Christian theologians, for example, do not (for the most part) debate between themselves whether God exists or whether Jesus is the son of God; but they do assume that only those who accept that these are truths can engage in Christian theology. But those who do engage in it may well find themselves debating whether God's reality can be known through natural reason or only through revelation, and they may well find themselves debating what, in detail, it means to say that Jesus was the son of God. The motives and premises of theology and the philosophy of religion are undoubtedly different, but the questions they ask are frequently the same. This book does not assume the faith commitment that the theologian assumes, but it does deal with questions that the theological student must explore.

Faith as a Phenomenon

Let us then begin, as philosophers and students of religion, to ask what problems faith presents. To do so, we have to be able to recognize examples of faith; that is, to be able, at least in a rough-and-ready way, to know who has faith and who does not. Deciding that faith is present, either in ourselves or in others, is not necessarily a straight-forward matter, but it does look as though we can be uncertain whether some people have faith only if we are clear in our minds that we could recognize others who do. But even here, at the very outset of inquiries into the nature and status of religious faith, we run into a difficulty: There are some very important accounts of faith that seem to say no one can identify it without having it or, at least, without accepting as true what the faithful person believes.

Two such views are those we find in Aquinas and in Pascal, whose opinions have been extremely influential.³ Aquinas holds that faith is one of the theological virtues, which he defines as virtues that God implants within us. One is not able to accept this account of faith without having previously accepted that God exists and intervenes in human affairs. Pascal says that faith is God known by the heart and not by the reason. One cannot, similarly, accept this view of faith without believing in God. This might not seem to matter at first sight. After all, it is quite easy to say, for example, what the philosophical problems about miracles are regardless of whether one believes there are any. Why is the case of faith different? But the question only has to be put to answer itself: If Aquinas or Pascal is right, then someone who does not believe in God is forced to deny that there are any examples of faith to be found, just as such a person has to deny that any miracles ever happen. This position may seem plausible enough with regard to miracles, but it seems an absurd consequence to accept about faith.

Perhaps it is not really absurd. Many Jews, Christians, or Muslims might be quite willing to say that in the end only God knows which of his creatures truly have the faith they profess. But it certainly collides with the natural assumption that both sides make in the common debates about faith and reason: that many people indeed have faith and that the problem is to decide whether they should. I proceed here in the following way: I take for granted that the word faith is the name of a state of mind and of personality that exists and is characteristic of followers of at least some of the major religions of the world. The task of the philosophical student is to understand what is meant when we say someone has faith and to consider questions about its rationality and relationship to our human capacities to discover truth. Theological questions about whether human beings can bring about faith in themselves, how far it is necessary or sufficient for salvation, and the like I take to be questions that believers raise about the origin and implications of a state of the personality that believers and unbelievers alike can recognize to exist. If this assumption needs to be defended, I do so by pointing out that within some of the key scriptures of these religions individuals are identified as having faith and that the key formative personalities of these religions, such as Moses or Saint Paul, are surely paradigmatic examples of it.⁴ For the remainder of this introduction, I try to indicate why faith is an object of puzzlement and even suspicion for philosophers and why a state of mind that has these puzzling features is still so central to the religious traditions in which it is demanded.

Why Faith Is Puzzling

Let us look at the puzzlement of philosophers first. For the most part they take for granted that faith is something found only within religion. As it is found there, faith seems to combine features that the practice of philosophy demands that a rational being keep apart. These are a wholehearted belief, on the one hand, and a recognized absence of conclusive evidence for it, on the other. To many philosophers it is not obvious that one can wholeheartedly believe anything that one does not think one has conclusive reasons to believe; and it is obvious to them that even if one can do this, one ought not to. We all know that many people believe things that they lack sufficient grounds for; but it is the task of philosophical thought to put them on their guard against doing so as far as possible. Yet not only does faith appear to combine these things; it also seems to make a virtue of the combination. The faithful (believers, as they are called) are commended for their apparent certainty in the face of what looks like counterevidence and are censured for having doubts in circumstances that, would seem to make such doubts very reasonable. In nonreligious contexts we praise people for adjusting the strength of their beliefs to the quality of the evidence they have, but in religious contexts we find them being praised for ignoring defects in the evidence and persisting in spite of them. If we look at the reasons given for this praise, we find that they relate to religious teachings about salvation: that those who have faith are said to have achieved something that helps ensure their salvation and that those who do not are imperiling it. But this reasoning suggests that not only does faith make those who have it cling to beliefs that they do not have good reasons to hold, but also that they consciously do this because they hope to gain by it and are afraid of the consequences of changing their minds. Faith, then, seems to involve either wishful thinking or self-deception.

This problem about faith is familiar to anyone who has ever thought about it. Some philosophers have noticed that articulation of this problem leads immediately to another puzzle that faces both those who defend faith and those who attack it: To say that one ought to hold on to this or that belief in the face of difficult circumstances, or that one ought to give it up in the face of contradictory evidence, implies that one has control over what beliefs one holds. At least on the surface believers praise one another for freely doing something that their critics fault them for doing. How can either attitude be the right one unless beliefs (or at least these beliefs) can be freely taken on, sustained, or abandoned? But are beliefs matters of free choice? For all the centrality of the discussions of belief and knowledge in Western philosophical history, there has not been a great deal of attention to this issue. There are, however, a number of classic theories about it, and we must consider these. The relation between belief and the will is very critical for the assessment of faith and cannot reasonably be disregarded by anyone considering the theory of knowledge.

Faith in Its Religious Context

No phenomenon with such striking peculiarities could fail to be controversial. But to understand why faith has these peculiar features, we have to look at the religious traditions that have laid such stress upon it. What follows is not an attempt to argue that the teachings of any one of these traditions are true, only an attempt to see why those who think they are true believe faith to have such importance and value.

These traditions teach that the world is the creation of a God on whom it completely depends but who depends in no way upon it. Although he in no way depends upon it, he is concerned with what happens in it and has acted on that concern by intervening in the world on at least some occasions in human history. These are theistic religions. (Theism is distinct from deism, which also holds that the world is the creation of God but denies that he intervenes in it once he has created it, even though he may be well disposed toward it and particularly toward us.⁵)

Theistic religions need not say that God intervenes in the world frequently, however. Certainly in modern scientific times theists are usually anxious to deny any suggestion that their beliefs run counter to the scientific understanding of our world. That understanding requires us to think of the world as one that follows regular and predictable patterns, which scientists discover. The theistic view of the world has to be conformable to the knowledge of it that we have been able to acquire by thinking in this way. This conformity is achieved by viewing those regular sequences as being themselves the outcome of God's will. This vision of the world is found in the first chapter of Genesis: "God said, 'Let there be light'; and there was light." The fact that in this story there was light before there was a sun may indicate that the story is a myth. But the very fact that in the myth God is able to have light without first creating a sun emphasizes the supposed fact about the creation that is the core of the myth's teaching: God does not have to bring about the light by creating the sun first, and if we live in a world where light does come from the sun, that is merely and wholly because he has chosen this sequence.

It is as well for us that natural events have...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 INTRODUCTION
• 2 FAITH AND WESTERN PHILOSOPHY
• 3 BELIEF AND THE WILL
• 4 FAITH, CERTAINTY, AND ANXIETY
• 5 FAITH AND RATIONALITY
• 6 FAITH AND AMBIGUITY
• Appendix: Reading Suggestions
• Bibliography
• About the Book and Author
• Index