‘It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason.’ Thus in his Pensées (1670), Blaise Pascal – both a pioneering scientist and a devout Christian – captures the perplexing relationship between faith and reason. For Pascal, the power of faith is not opposed to that of reason; they are different in kind and have distinct objects: ‘Faith certainly tells us what the senses do not, but not the contrary of what they see; it is above, not against them.’
For believers, religious conviction does not depend on rational argument, nor is it undermined by it. It is presumptuous, they would claim, to suppose that our intellectual efforts could make God’s purposes transparent or comprehensible to us. Those who elevate faith above reason – so-called ‘fideists’ – hold that faith is an alternative path to truth and that, in the case of religious belief, it is the right route. A state of conviction, achieved ultimately through God’s action on the soul, demands a voluntary and deliberate act of will on the part of the faithful; faith requires a leap, but it is not a leap in the dark. ‘Faith is to believe what we do not see,’ St Augustine explains, ‘and the reward of this faith is to see what we believe.’
Once convinced of the antagonism between faith and reason, both opponents of faith and its supporters can take up extreme positions. Martin Luther, the father of Protestantism, insisted that faith must ‘trample underfoot all reason, sense and understanding’; reason, for him, was the ‘greatest enemy’ of faith, the ‘damned whore’ that must be obliterated in all Christians. In contrast, rationalists and sceptics are unwilling to exempt religious belief from the reasoned, empirically based assessment they would apply to any other area of claimed knowledge; they insist on considering the evidence and reaching a conclusion on that basis. And the enemies of religion are no more temperate in expressing their views: ‘Faith is one of the world’s great evils,’ fulminates Richard Dawkins, leading spokesman of the anti-God squad, ‘comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.’
‘Reason is our soul’s left hand, Faith her right, By these we reach divinity.
John Donne, 1633
‘We do not speak of faith that two and two are four … 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, 1958
The balance sheet of faith In fideistic hands, the fact that religious belief cannot be adequately defended on rational grounds is turned into a positive recommendation. If a (fully) rational route were open, faith would not be needed, but as reason fails to provide a justification, faith steps in to fill the gap. The act of will necessary on the part of the believer adds moral merit to the acquisition of faith; and a devotion that does not question its object is revered, at least by those who share it, as simple and honest piety. Some of the attractions of faith are obvious enough: life has a clear-cut meaning, there is some solace for life’s tribulations and the consolation of knowing that something better awaits after death, and so on. Religious belief clearly answers many basic, primordial needs and concerns in humans, and many people are undeniably improved, even transformed by adopting a religious way of life. At the same time the symbols and embellishments of religion have provided almost limitless artistic inspiration and cultural enrichment.
Many of the points that the fideist would put on the credit side for faith are set down as debits by its opponents. Amongst the most precious principles of secular liberalism, championed by J.S. Mill and others, is freedom of thought and expression, which sits very uneasily with the habit of uncritical assent extolled in the pious believer. The unquestioning devotion valued by the fideist can easily look to the non-believer like credulity and superstition. Ready acceptance of authority can lead people to fall under the influence of unscrupulous sects and cults, and this can sometimes tip over into fanaticism and zealotry. Placing one’s faith in others is clearly not admirable unless the others concerned are themselves admirable. When reason is shut out, all manner of excesses may rush in to take its place; and it is hard to deny that at certain times in certain religions, sense and sympathy have flown out of the window to be replaced by intolerance, bigotry, sexism and worse.
So the balance sheet is drawn up, with debits and credits on each side – and often the assets on one side appear as liabilities on the other. To the extent that different accounting methods are used, the accounts themselves are meaningless, and this is often the abiding impression left when believers and non-believers start talking. They generally speak at cross-purposes, fail to establish any common ground, and succeed in moving each other not one inch. Opponents prove to their own satisfaction that faith is irrational; the faithful regard such supposed proof as irrelevant and beside the point. In the end faith is irrational or non-rational; it defiantly sets itself in opposition to reason, and in a sense that is precisely its point.
the condensed idea
Belief that is blind to reason