Relation to the world· Philosophy of religiondifficulty
Faith and reason
How do faith and reason relate to each other: agreement, conflict, or indifference?
Can one believe and reason without betraying either? Forcing them to agree risks distorting both, declaring them enemies forces one to pick a side, separating them protects each but leaves faith mute before knowledge. To take a position is to say what place a religious conviction can hold for someone who also wants to think freely.
Fideism
3Faith eludes reason: God is encountered through the heart, through commitment or a leap, not through demonstration. Trying to prove faith misunderstands its nature, which begins where calculation ends.
Explore this position →Michel de Montaigneexplicit
The mainspring of the is a paradoxical : by ruining reason's claim to prove anything of God, Montaigne does not destroy faith but strips it of its false supports. A reason incapable of reaching the slightest certainty cannot ground religion, which can therefore hold only by grace and authority, not by demonstration. Far from setting faith and reason in a conflict, he separates them while ranking them, the very weakness of reason serving as an argument for believing submission.
Essays, II, 12, "Apology for Raymond Sebond"
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Wittgensteininferable
Religious belief is not a hypothesis rivalling science: believer and unbeliever are "on an entirely different plane". It is a picture that regulates a whole life, an unconditional commitment, not a conclusion drawn from proofs. Hence a position at once fideist (faith as commitment, not demonstration) and of separate domains (a plane other than the factual). "Wittgensteinian fideism" is, moreover, a label coined by his critics, not by him.
Lectures on Religious Belief (1938); Culture and Value
Rousseauinferable
The vicar's faith rests neither on the authority of the Church nor on a demonstration, but on inner feeling: it is the heart that attests to God where reason wavers. This religion of conscience, midway between fideism and a harmony of faith with natural reason, heralds the religious feeling of the Romantics and of .
Rousseau, Emile, Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar
Harmony
8Faith and reason cannot contradict each other, for they proceed from the same source of truth. Reason can establish certain truths about God, and faith completes what reason begins.
Explore this position →Leibnizexplicit
The subtitle of the Theodicy announces the program: to show the conformity of faith with reason. For Leibniz faith and reason can never contradict each other, since they share the same author; reason can illuminate the mysteries without exhausting them, and defend religion against its detractors. This is in the proper sense, against all fideism as against all conflict.
Theodicy, Preliminary Discourse on the Conformity of Faith with Reason
Thomas Aquinasexplicit
Can reason and faith contradict each other? Thomas answers no, and his argument rests on a thesis about their shared source: one and the same God is the author of nature, which gives reason its light, and of Revelation; one truth therefore cannot belie another. Against the Averroist doctrine of double truth, which reserved an independent domain for philosophy, he distinguishes without opposing: reason establishes by itself the preambles of faith (the existence of God, the immortality of the soul), while the properly revealed mysteries, such as the Trinity, surpass reason without contradicting it. Where an argument seems to refute the faith, it is because it is badly conducted, and philosophy itself can expose the flaw.
Summa contra Gentiles, I, 3-9 · Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 1, a. 8
Hegelexplicit
Faith and reason do not oppose each other: religion and philosophy have the same object, the true, but under two forms. Religion grasps it in representations (Vorstellung), narratives and images; philosophy thinks it in the concept (Begriff). Philosophy therefore does not destroy religion: it raises its content to its highest form.
Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, §573 · Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (Lectures)
Descartesexplicit
Dedicating his Meditations to the Sorbonne, Descartes argues that the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, truths of faith, can be demonstrated by natural reason. Faith and reason thus agree: far from contradicting each other, philosophy comes to confirm and rationally ground the teachings of religion.
Meditations on First Philosophy, Dedicatory Letter to the Sorbonne · Discourse on Method, IV
Lockeexplicit
For Locke faith and reason do not conflict: Christianity is reasonable, and reason is the last judge of what may count as divine revelation. Faith never contradicts the clear truths of reason but adds truths beyond its reach, which reason authenticates: a harmony with a measure of separate domains (the magistrate does not judge salvation, revelation does not overturn evidence).
The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) · Essay Concerning Human Understanding, IV, ch. 18 (faith and reason, and their respective provinces)
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Platoinferable
The divine is not the object of a faith opposed to reason but is grasped by intellect: the Good and the Forms serve as the divine principle, and the set out to prove the existence of gods rationally. The myths (the cave, Er, the chariot) do not contradict the logos but extend it where demonstration stops, in a continuity of the religious and the rational.
Laws, X, 893b-899d · Republic, VII, 517b-c
George Berkeleyinferable
A bishop as much as a philosopher, Berkeley sees no opposition between well-conducted reason and faith: his immaterialism presents itself as a rational demonstration that issues in the existence of God and defends religion against the free-thinkers. Reason, far from threatening faith, would be its natural ally once freed from matter, the mother of scepticism and irreligion. This confidence in the agreement of reason and revelation ranges him on the side of harmony, in the line of an , rather than of a fideism of the leap.
Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, Preface · Principles of Human Knowledge, §§133-156
Kantexplicit
Theoretical reason can neither prove nor refute God, but practical reason postulates a rational faith attuned to morality. Faith and knowledge thus occupy distinct domains while harmonising under the primacy of the practical, with a fideist nuance since faith remains a need of reason rather than a matter of proof.
Critique of Pure Reason, Preface to the Second Edition (B XXX) · Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason
Conflict
4Faith and reason stand in opposition: believing without sufficient evidence means abandoning the demands of rationality. Critical examination of religious beliefs leads to rejecting them or, at the very least, suspending them.
Explore this position →Camusexplicit
The reason that has acknowledged incurs a debt of lucidity: it cannot, without contradicting itself, turn its own failure to find meaning into proof of a hidden meaning. This is Camus's objection to the religious thinkers of existence, and : they describe the absurd admirably, then deify it, erecting reason's scandal into a reason to believe. This leap out of the evidence is an abdication, not a solution. Faith and reason therefore stand here in open conflict: the former eases the anguish only by conjuring away what the latter has seen, and only a reason that consents to its own limits, without filling them by , stays honest.
The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), "Philosophical Suicide"
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Schopenhauerinferable
Religion is the 'metaphysics of the people': true under the veil of allegory, false taken literally, it says in images what philosophy thinks in concepts. Faith and knowledge cannot honestly lodge in one and the same head, but the metaphysical need that feeds them both is ineradicable.
Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. II, 'On Religion: A Dialogue'
Humeinferable
Hume sets religious belief against the : no religion grounded in reason holds up, faith always exceeding the available evidence (hence the ironic fideist twist when he concludes that only a continued miracle, faith itself, makes one believe Christianity). Religious belief thus belongs to another register than knowledge, and where it claims to demonstrate (natural theology) it conflicts with rigorous reason.
Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sect. X, conclusion (on faith) · Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, part XII
The Enlightenmentexplicit
On religion the current makes common front even where it diverges about God: reason, not revelation or the Church, is judge in the last instance. Many hold revealed religion to be incompatible with it, mixed with superstition and fanaticism: it is the « Infamous Thing » that would « crush ». Others substitute for it a natural religion, or , attuned to reason: a clockmaker God without miracles or clergy. From this primacy follow the cardinal demand of and the separation of the civil from the religious: shows that no one can be compelled to believe, and that salvation is no concern of the State.
Voltaire, Treatise on Tolerance · Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration
Separate domains
1Science and religion answer different questions: one describes facts, the other deals with meaning and values. As long as each stays on its own ground, there is neither conflict nor competition.
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Baconinferable
Bacon sharply separates the two books in which God may be read, that of Scripture and that of nature: science must keep to second causes and borrow nothing from theology, which for its part falls to faith and revelation, not to proof. To confuse the two spoils both, as the scholastics did. He thus keeps for religion its own domain, intact but distinct, which places him on the side of separate domains rather than Thomist harmony.
The Advancement of Learning, II · Novum Organum, I, §65 and §89
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Related problems to broaden toward other axes
- DescriptiveThe experience of the divine
Is believing in God a matter of inferring it from arguments, or of relying on an inner experience held to be a direct encounter, one that would need no proof?
GodExistence of God - DescriptiveBelieving a miracle
Can testimony make believable an event that contradicts the regular course of nature, or is it always more likely that the witness is mistaken?
a miracleExistence of God - PrescriptiveEpistemicDoes belief require proof?
May one believe only on the strength of proof, or is faith a legitimate venture that need not justify itself before the tribunal of evidence?
to believeExistence of God - DescriptiveGod's hidden reasons
What if the ends that justify evil exceed all human understanding? To Job, who demands an accounting, God answers not with reasons but with the sheer vastness of his creation.
the one who calls God to accountThe problem of evil - DescriptiveFaith and reason
Do religious faith and mystical experience give access to the real that science could not judge, or do they belong to a belief that is nothing like knowledge?
faith, mystical experiencePlace of science
It is faith alone that vividly and certainly embraces the high mysteries of our religion.Michel de Montaigne · Essays, II, 12, "Apology for Raymond Sebond"
I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.Kant · Critique of Pure Reason, Preface to the Second Edition (B XXX)