Throughout this book, we have been studying various ways that faith and reason may or may not relate to each other. We have argued for a position that we have termed “integrationism”, suggesting that faith and reason can and do “go together”. But to say that they can “go together” turns out to be very imprecise, for in fact we have suggested that there are a number of different ways that faith and reason can go together.
The strongest way for faith and reason to be integrated is for reason to be able to give a deductive proof for one or more of the claims of faith; stated differently, the strongest instance of integration is when faith and reason coincide completely, so that faith clearly teaches something identical to what reason clearly proves. Such a strong instance of integration is rare, but we have looked at a deductive argument, the cosmological argument, which would rationally prove what faith claims about the existence of a God who is the continuous creator of all that is.
The weakest way for faith and reason to be integrated would be in situations where the claims of faith and of reason merely do not contradict each other. In other words, it would seem that in some rare situations the most one can say is that it would seem to be logically possible for a particular faith claim to be consistent with rational argumentation. Faith might say X and reason Y, but it is possible for both X and Y to be true. If faith claimed X and reason not-X, then we would be faced with an outright contradiction; but if faith claims X and reason Y, it is still possible that there is no contradiction. This weakest of integrative situations is, like the strongest situation, rare. In this book we especially examined the atheistic argument from evil and concluded that the most that can be advocated by the integrationist is that it is logically possible both for the God of theism to exist and for evil to exist.
As we have seen, the majority of cases fall somewhere in between the extremely strong and the extremely weak forms of integrationism. We suggested, for example, that some design arguments were relatively stronger or weaker than other design arguments, but none of them could be definitively proven or refuted by reason alone. In other words, in many cases we have been examining inductive arguments that would seek to make the claims of faith likely to be true according to the dictates of reason but would not render such claims deductively proven. The various arguments from design, for example, would fall into this category, as would the discussions of morality in the final chapters of the book.
With respect to our inductive arguments, though, what is really going on is that evidence is being gathered and accessed to see just how likely it is that the claims of faith can be reinforced by reason. At the end of a complete examination of these arguments, one would be in a position to ask a comprehensive question about whether the collected evidence is strong enough to make faith claims likely. Perhaps one more analogy would serve to explain this point: let us say that we are jurors listening to evidence in a murder trial. The prosecution has no “smoking gun” that definitively proves that the defendant is guilty, but the defense has no “airtight alibi” that would prove the defendant not guilty. What the prosecution and the defense do is to present evidence for thinking that the defendant did commit the crime or that the defendant did not do so. At the end, the jurors have to sift the evidence, weigh it, and reach a conclusion. Philosophers sometimes call such arguments wherein evidence from a number of narrower arguments is collected and sifted “cumulative case arguments”.
One way in which our analogy perhaps does not work is that in a murder trial in the United States, the evidence must show “beyond a reasonable doubt” that the defendant committed the crime before a conclusion can be reached. It is not obvious that, in thinking about rational evidence for theistic faith claims, one has such a high bar to meet. Maybe all one has to show is that “the preponderance of the evidence” is on the side of theism.
Throughout this book, we have avoided apodictic assertions that would insist that a particular argument, deductive or inductive, “works” or is successful. One reason for this is that we prefer to let readers reach their own conclusions. It will be clear to all by now that we are Christian theists who are integrationists, but we want to be honest about the strengths and weaknesses of the various arguments and let the readers think through things themselves.
A second reason for avoiding definitive conclusions is that this book is meant to introduce readers to these arguments. The first task is to enable the reader to understand the “lay of the land”, to grasp what the basic arguments and principles are in this area of debate, and to know the various approaches and strategies. All the chapters of this book are incomplete to a greater or lesser degree; it is our hope that readers, having had the basics explained to them, can now progress to more thorough and sophisticated treatments.
There is one definite goal that we hope to have attained, however, beyond merely promoting further inquiry. In our many years of teaching and listening to students and adults, we have come across a great many people for whom the question of the relationship between faith and reason is no longer a question. Sometimes they are fideists who think that reason can have nothing to say about such matters; more often they are rationalists who have unreflectively accepted the notion that faith is simply irrational. We find it disheartening and downright sad that so many otherwise decent and intelligent people find themselves in such a close-minded position.
It is our hope that this little book will have shown that faith may well be something compatible with reason and that reason need not necessarily be an enemy of theistic belief. We have not “proven” that integrationism is true, but we hope at least to have opened the minds of our readers to the idea that “integrationism” might be possible after all. To return to the image offered by Pope Saint John Paul II, perhaps the human spirit really does have two wings that raise it to the contemplation of truth. If our book prompts its readers to think that John Paul’s words might be true, and if it inspires them to pursue the question farther, it will have achieved its purpose.