If we reflect on the philosopher Socrates, the first thing we notice is that he was always asking questions; the second thing we notice is that he was rarely satisfied with the answers he initially received in response to those questions. Indeed, the answers usually just led to further questions. In the conversations of Socrates depicted by Plato, sometimes the chain of questioning and answering only results in the person being questioned coming to look like a fool—that is, someone who really does not know anything. But sometimes, if the soul of the person being questioned is properly prepared and open, Socrates joins forces with such a person in a chain of questioning and answering that seeks, as its goal, the truth. Socrates describes this seeking of the truth through ascending questions honing in on ever more adequate answers as a kind of desire or “love”; just as a drunkard is in love with wine or an erotic lover in love with a beautiful body, even so is a philosopher a lover of truth, and when truth is approached or perhaps in some sense attained, the philosopher becomes a true “lover of wisdom”.
In thinking of Abraham, who is said to be the “father of the faithful”, the first story that usually comes to mind is the story of his willingness to sacrifice his beloved son, Isaac—if such sacrifice is what is in accord with God’s will. According to the account in Genesis, Abraham’s faith in God’s word and promise is so great that, even when God asks for something that seems contrary to his word and promise, Abraham trusts in the Lord. At least in this story, Abraham does not ask many questions. His activity is not a chain of questioning and answering; rather, he hears the word of God and responds to it. His activity in the story about the binding of Isaac is not explained in terms of human understanding but in terms of trust in God’s ultimate goodness and power, even when that powerful goodness is not apparent to human understanding. Although he does not completely understand God, Abraham trusts in God because he still somehow “grasps” what is true about God—that is, that God is ultimately good and powerful, for example. In responding to God’s command, even though it is especially difficult and almost impossible to do so, the father of the faithful shows that he is a lover, too—a lover of God.
A. Questioning and Trusting
So far, the difference between Socrates and Abraham seems to turn on the difference between questioning and trusting, so we need to be more precise about what these activities are. When we question, what we are doing is asking for reasons, and the most important questions seem to be those that ask for the reason “why”. Perhaps someone has made a claim, and we want to know more about why that person thinks such a claim is true. We want to know if there are reasons that support such a claim. Socrates seemed often to be questioning others to find out whether they had reasons to support their claims; he discovered that usually they did not!
But sometimes Socrates questioned people who could give plausible answers to his questions; they could give a reason or reasons why they made the claims they did. If we were to consider these claims and the reasons supporting them in a more formal way, we would say that the claims people make are like conclusions to an argument, and the reasons that purport to support the truth of the conclusions are premises for the argument. Sometimes the premises support their conclusions so strongly that we might even say that they “prove” their conclusions; in other words, the conclusion must be true because the premises are so strong. Questioning, then, is asking for the premises of an argument whose conclusion has been stated, and if strong premises are discovered in this way, the result is the discovery of the truth about the proposition that is the conclusion of the argument. The process of thinking or reasoning moves back and forth from premise to conclusion. Reflection on reasoning or thinking thus consists of analyzing arguments to see if they are the sort that are strong enough to yield truth. If one perfects this process of reasoning or thinking so that truth is obtained, one can say that one practices philosophy. But the term “philosophy” means “love of wisdom” in Greek, so one who practices philosophy not only is capable of reasoning well, but also loves the reasoning process and therefore is willing to commit himself to living an entire life in pursuit of perfecting this process of asking and answering questions.
When one trusts or believes another person, what one does is accept his claim without knowing or perhaps without even asking for the reasons why he accepts his claim. Perhaps, for example, our older sister is a stockbroker or an economist, and perhaps our older sister recommends that we invest money in a certain stock. In other words, perhaps our older sister makes a claim that a certain stock will go up in value. The philosopher might start asking the older sister for the reasons why she thinks this. Ultimately, the philosopher might want to know what sort of knowledge she thinks she has from her study of stocks or economics that enables her to know about such things. But perhaps we do not care to practice philosophy with our sister. We might think that, well, our sister has worked in this area for some time and is likely to know about it. Besides, she is our sister and would not willingly want to harm us. Given such considerations, we might not bother asking her about reasons why. In other words, we might trust our sister or have faith in her or believe in her. In this case, we forgo the pursuit of reasons and accept her authority in this matter. We accept her conclusion without examining her premises.
This, then, is a good way to begin to understand the difference between reason and faith. The reasoner, the philosopher, seeks to establish the truth of claims by means of analyzing the premises for such claims. The believer, the faithful one, accepts the truth of a claim without knowing all or even any of its premises.
In the next chapter, we will consider whether Socrates and Abraham are really so different from each other as our portrayal has so far depicted them to be, and we will show that indeed their approaches to these questions are more nuanced than what has been stated so far. Nevertheless, there are plenty of people who follow what we might call “the Socratic impulse” to an unqualified extreme and conclude to a viewpoint that is known as rationalism; there are also plenty of people who follow what we might call “the Abrahamic impulse” to an unqualified extreme and conclude to the viewpoint known as fideism.
B. Rationalism and Its Advantages
By rationalism, what we mean is the view that in order to accept any proposition, we must be able to give a proof of the truth for the proposition. Stated differently, we can say that rationalism is the view that we should believe nothing (or disbelieve nothing) until we know the reasons why that something is true or false. This position was stated in perhaps its purest form by William Clifford in 1877 in an essay titled “The Ethics of Belief”. In his essay, Clifford attempts to get his point across by means of an analogy. He imagines a shipowner who is considering sending out a group of passengers in a vessel that may not be seaworthy. The ship is old and has needed repairs in the past, so the shipowner harbors doubts about the ship’s condition. Nevertheless, he overcomes these doubts and convinces himself that the passengers will fare well. When the ship sinks and the lives are lost, he collects the insurance money and “tells no tales”. Clifford’s readers are of course meant to understand that in the analogy the shipowner is the purveyor of religion (perhaps a minister or preacher) who collects money from believers and, even though he harbors doubts about the truth of the faith he preaches, is happy enough to send people forth in a leaky vessel.
In Clifford’s view, the shipowner is responsible for the deaths of his passengers because he harbored doubts about his ship but sent the passengers off anyway; similarly, the advocate of religious belief is unethical because he believes something without rational proof. Ever the rationalist, Clifford draws the conclusion that one should never accept any belief or make any claim unless sure reasons can be given for such beliefs or claims. He articulates his position succinctly in what has come to be known as “Clifford’s principle”: “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence.”
There are, to be sure, several things to be said in support of the rationalist’s position. The first and most obvious is that, if one lived as the rationalist says we should, all the claims we make would be true. If we asserted that X is the case, it would only be because we had intellectually grasped the reasons for X being the case with our powers of understanding and judgment. Unfortunately, one does not have to be in the world very long to realize that many of the claims that people make turn out not to be true. The problem is not so much that we intentionally lie to other people (although people do indeed tend to tell lies), but that we often make claims for which we do not have all the reasons. As a result, sometimes our claims turn out not to be true, even if, when making the claims, we thought that they were true. If we all lived as the rationalist would have us, this very serious problem of making false claims would be eliminated.
Perhaps even more importantly, though, rationalism has the advantage of ensuring not only that people always make true claims, but that they know why such claims are true. Consider a common grammar school experience: as we were learning mathematics, we were told that, for all right triangles (that is, for all right triangles existing in a Euclidean plane), the sum of the squares of the sides of the triangle was equal to the square of the hypotenuse; we all learned this as the simple formula a2 + b2 = c2. Perhaps we remember that when the formula was first given to us, it struck us as a most implausible claim, but that when we applied it to some actually existing triangles (lo and behold!), it “worked out”. We discovered that not only did the formula seem to “work out” every time, but that we could solve some interesting practical problems with it, such as the distance from home plate to second base on a baseball diamond. Later, when we were a little older, the mathematics books taught us why it was the case that the Pythagorean theorem was true. Knowing why did not really help us solve any more practical problems, but we recognized that it was still better to know the reason. In other words, while it is good to claim that X is the case, and for it to be true that X is the case, it is even better to claim that X is the case and to know why X is the case. Beliefs or claims that happen to be true are surely better than beliefs or claims that happen to be false, but it is better still to know why the true claim we are making is true, for in the latter case we have not just true opinion, but what we would define as knowledge. Rationalism has the advantage, then, not only of ensuring that people have true opinions, but also of ensuring that they have knowledge.
C. Fideism and Its Advantages
Let us consider the alternative position, the position of fideism. Perhaps the most powerful exposition of this view is the one offered by Søren Kierkegaard in a work called Fear and Trembling from 1843. The book celebrates the story in Genesis 22 of the sacrifice of Isaac, or the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. Kierkegaard seems to claim that, precisely because what God asked was contrary to Abraham’s reason, Abraham’s response of total trust or “infinite resignation” to God was proper. In accepting God’s will, Abraham became the “knight of faith”. Lack of rationality seems to be a fundamental condition of faith in Kierkegaard’s view, for if Abraham had understood the reasons for God’s command, he would not have had faith. Faith is at least a-rational and apparently at times even anti-rational; and for that reason it must be accompanied by a certain “fear and trembling”. The fideist therefore claims that reason cannot and should not be used to judge religious belief. Fideism is a word derived from the Latin word fides, and fides is about faith, not ratio, or reason. Giving reasons and seeking knowledge about the boats on the sea just misses the whole point of religious belief, according to the fideist. Unlike Socrates, Abraham did not sit patiently while weighing whether or not God exists and had spoken correctly to him, evaluating the arguments according to the light of his own limited understanding. Rather, God spoke, and Abraham trusted and believed that God had a purpose.
Just as there are advantages to the rationalist position, so there are advantages to the fideist position. Perhaps the greatest advantage to fideism is that it is based on the human experience of trust. This can best be explained by using an analogy to marriage. In deciding to marry another real, live human being, one does not decide as a result of a rational calculation or syllogism. One does not say, “Well, given reasons X, Y, and Z, I conclude that I should ask you to marry me.” And, indeed, if one is the recipient of such a proposal, one is not likely to accept! Rather, the decision for marriage is based on trust of another person. The marriage partners never really know, and cannot really ever know, whether the other person will keep his side of the trust. Instead, the partners believe or have faith in the other person to do so, and they do not base this faith upon a purely rational calculation. To extend Clifford’s ship analogy, one could say that, according to the fideists’ view of religious experience, God asks us to get into a boat, and we either get into it because we trust God, or we do not get into it because we do not trust God. But in neither case do we put God on hold while we inspect the boat! It is not so much that the fideist thinks that all knowledge about God impossible (although some fideists do think that) but, rather, that such knowledge is just not decisive in deciding whether to trust God.
If the first advantage of fideism that comes to sight is that it places faith in the realm of trust, perhaps an even greater advantage is that it seems to describe better how most people say they actually experience God. Most people say they encounter God in the Eucharist or in the Scriptures of the Church or in the Sabbath celebrations or in the recitations of the Torah in the synagogue or during Ramadan or within the Umma or within the silence of their hearts and consciences. They do not say that they came across a syllogism in which they encountered God. A human experience that is common is not for that reason always true or genuine or trustworthy; anger and the desire for revenge, for example, are common enough human experiences. Nevertheless, we are much more inclined to trust an experience that is both personal to us as well as common to many. Trust and faith are possible for and experienced by people both young and old, busy or at leisure, gifted with intellectual prowess or not.
It seems, then, that we are left with something of a conundrum. Socrates and Abraham each seem to have a point; both rationalism and fideism seem plausible and attractive. Our first response upon encountering two options, both of which seem good and desirable, is to attempt to rank them. That is, we naturally ask, “Which is better?” In order to evaluate the two so that we can rank them, however, we have to have common criteria—criteria that are agreed upon by both sides in the debate. But this is impossible in this conundrum, because each position establishes its own criterion and the criteria are mutually exclusive, so that if one criterion is true, the other cannot be. The rationalist says that giving reasons for beliefs is the highest human activity; this is the rationalist’s criterion for evaluation. The fideist says that trusting another is the highest human activity; and this is the fideist’s criterion for evaluation. The result of this “standoff” is that neither can prove the other wrong. The rationalist says to the fideist that reasons must be given, but in asking the fideist for reasons, the rationalist is only restating the rationalist’s position. The fideist says to the rationalist that trust or faith must be offered, but in asking the rationalist for faith, the fideist is only restating the fideist’s position. There is no higher authority to which the argument between the rationalist and the fideist may be referred, so the conflict appears irresolvable.
Of course, there is nothing at which the human mind so recoils as the thought that in choosing one good thing it must forgo another. We may initially try to rank good things and choose the highest, but if ranking is not possible, we ask ourselves whether it might be possible to have both! To be sure, if the conflict between reason and faith truly is irresolvable, it will be impossible to have both, but, before admitting that we are in such a despairing position, we will want to see whether we cannot somehow combine the lives of Socrates and Abraham. We will want to consider whether it might be possible to integrate the two.