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Faith and rationality

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Faith and rationality are two modes of belief which are seen to exist in varying degrees of conflict or compatibility. Faith is generally defined as belief not grounded in evidence and reason, while rationality is belief based on logic and/or material evidence.

Broadly speaking, there are three categories of views regarding the relationship between faith and rationality. Rationalism holds that truth should be determined by reason and factual analysis, rather than faith, dogma or religious teaching. Fideism holds that faith is necessary, and that beliefs must be held without evidence or reason, or even in conflict with evidence and reason. Thomism holds that faith and rationality are compatible, so that the evidence and reason ultimately lead to belief in the objects of faith.

Relationship between faith and rationality

Beliefs held "by faith" may be seen as existing in a number of relationships to rationality:

  • Faith as underlying 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. Accordingly, faith is seen as essential to and inseparable from rationality.
  • Faith as unparsimonious with respect to rationality: In this view, faith is seen as those beliefs that are unparsimonious, because Occam's Razor would remove them as being more than what is both true and sufficient to explain the physical evidence. Accordingly, faith is seen as unnecessary and unreasonable with respect to rationality;
  • Faith as contradicting rationality: In this view, faith is seen as those views that one holds despite evidence and reason to the contrary. Accordingly, faith is seen as pernicious with respect to rationality, as it requires counterfactual belief;
  • Faith as addressing issues beyond the scope of rationality: In this view, faith is seen as covering issues which science and rationality are inherently incapable of addressing. Accordingly, faith is seen as complementing rationality, by providing answers to questions that would otherwise be unanswerable;

Faith as underlying rationality

The view that faith underlies all rationality holds that rationality is dependant on faith for its coherence. Under this view, there is no way to comprehensively prove that we are actually seeing what we appear to be seeing, that what we remember actually happened, or that the laws of logic and mathematics are actually real. Instead, all beliefs depend for their coherence on faith in our senses, memory, and reason.

Philosophers such as Alvin Plantinga have described this view as Classical foundationalism, and argued that beliefs of this type are "properly basic" -- that is, that they are reasonably and even necessarily held without evidentiary support. Plantinga goes on to argue that belief in God is properly basic in the same way -- that belief in God comes not through evidence and argument but from intuitive experience.René Descartes argued along these lines in Meditations on First Philosophy, in which he argues that all our perceptions could be an illusion manufactured by an evil demon, so that what we see cannot be held as irrefutably true. Illustrations of this view are also common in popular culture, with movies such as The Matrix illustrating and challenging faith in the senses, and movies such as Total Recall illustrating and challenging faith in memories.

The view that faith necessarily underlies all rationality is challenged by some, who argue that human knowledge can be grounded finally and ultimately in evidence and logic, and requires no basic faith at all. René Descartes, for instance, after exploring the possibility that all perception could be an illusion managed by an evil demon, arrived at a foundational point which he argued was beyond doubt: his famous axiom, Cogito ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am."). However, even this asserted axiom is disputed as unprovable, as is discussed in more detail on that page.

Various justifications and criticisms

The justifications for faith found in the responses of religious scholars and apologists generally are based on semantic strategies:

  1. Less semantically precise definitions of rationalism that allow faith to be accommodated.
  2. A more expansive definition of faith to include faith as a belief that rests on logical proof or material evidence.
  3. A broadening of the definitions of proof, evidence, logic, rational, etc., to allow for a lower standard of proof.

Critics have responded by pointing out that this tactic is nothing more than a special pleading and hence makes a fallacious argument.

Another notable strategy to justify faith as rational has been to attack the epistemological underpinnings of rationality by claiming that much unrelated knowledge enjoying wide acceptance is accepted as a matter of faith as well. One example is that belief in distant, obscure countries rests solely on faith since there is no direct evidence available so we must rely on the statements people who claim first hand knowledge of the distant country. By associating faith with widely accepted knowledge, those who make this argument hope to achieve an undermining of what constitutes justified true belief, a blurring of the distinction between knowledge and belief, and to raise the stock of faith as a method for ascertaining knowledge by associating it with successful instances. Critics point out that when we accept the evidence from others, we must have reason to believe that they know the truth, and that there's an important distinction between testimony of individuals that has the possibility of being corroborated and that which has no such possibility. In the case of distant lands, corroboration comes from others with first hand knowledge. But when someone claims to have supernatural knowledge, or the ability to gain knowledge in a way that you are unable to, their claims cannot be considered valid. If someone claims to be able to speak to their god, and tells us what god demands, we have no reason to accept it as true.

Other people of faith have adopted the position that faith is implicitly irrational and have embraced the putative irrationality of faith as a demonstration of devotion to one's beliefs and deity. For example, Fideism specifically recommends that one not be rational.

See also

Apologetics and philosophical justifications of faith as rational

Criticisms of faith as rational

Historical overview of the relationship between faith and reason

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