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Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

Date: Tue Apr 22, 2003 7:06 am
Subject: Faith and Reason

http://www.sulekha.com/chpost.asp...ilosophy&show=0&cid=56437

http://www3.baylor.edu/~Scott_Moore/handouts/faith_reason.html

'What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?'-Tertullian

'The heart has reasons which Reason does not know.'Blaise Pascal

'It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything
upon insufficient evidence.'-W. K. Clifford

'God, when he makes the prophet, does not unmake the man. . . . He
[God] leaves all his [Man's] faculties in their natural state, to
enable him to judge of his aspirations, whether they be of divine
original or not. When he illuminates the mind with supernatural
light, he does not extinguish that which is natural. . . . Reason
must be our last judge and guide in everything.'-John Locke

'Truth is subjectivity. . . . Without risk there is no faith. Faith
is precisely the contradiction between the infinite passion of the
individual's inwardness and the objective uncertainty. If I am
capable of grasping God's objectivity, I do not believe. If I wish to
preserve myself in faith I must constantly be intent upon holding
fast the objective uncertainty, so as to remain out upon the deep,
over seventy fathoms of water, still preserving my faith.'-Søren
Kierkegaard

http://www.probe.org/docs/faithrea.html

One of the more intriguing aspects of the Indiana Jones film trilogy
is its focus on religious themes. In the third installment, Indiana
Jones and the Last Crusade, Indy is involved in a search for the Holy
Grail, the cup from which Christ drank at the Last Supper. As the
film reaches its climax, Indy must go through three tests in order to
reach the Grail. After overcoming the first two obstacles, the final
test required Indy to "step out" in faith, even though he was on one
side of a cavern that appeared to be thirty feet across, without any
visible way to reach the other side. Following the instructions from
his father's diary, Indy stepped into the void, and to his amazement,
his foot came down on solid ground. It turned out that there was a
bridge across the cavern but because the rocky texture of the bridge
perfectly matched the facing wall of the cavern, the bridge was
invisible from Indy's perspective.

According to this scene, and enforced by general opinion, religious
faith and human reason are opposites. Indiana Jones simply could not
understand how it was possible to reach the Grail without any visible
means to do so; the implication is that his decision to step out was
a forfeiture of his intellect. This idea that Christian faith is a
surrender of our reasoning abilities is a common one in contemporary
culture.

Tertullian was a lawyer who converted
to Christ sometime around the year A.D. 197. It was he who asked the
famous questions, "What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? What
have heretics to do with Christians?" Tertullian's major distinction
was to create a metaphorical contrast between Athens, the home of
pagan Greek philosophy, and Jerusalem, the central locale of divine
revelation. Tertullian was convinced that the Christian faith and
human wisdom were polar opposites. It was his conviction that God had
revealed His plan of salvation in Scripture alone; to mix Scripture
with the philosophy of pagans could only distort God's message. But
does this mean that Tertullian believed that human wisdom is
irrational?

Whereas Tertullian considered faith in Christ's revelation of himself
to be the only thing worth knowing, Augustine emphasized both the
priority of faith and its incompleteness without the help of reason.
One of his great insights is that faith is the foundation for all
knowledge. Christians are often ridiculed for their faith, as
if "faith" and "gullibility" were synonyms. But Augustine reminds us
that each of us must trust some authority when making any truth
claim, and that "faith" and "trust" are synonyms.
Consider a few examples: Christians and non-Christians alike agree
that water freezes at zero degrees centigrade. However, I myself have
never performed that experiment; I simply trust what reliable
scientific studies have confirmed. Likewise, no one living today was
present at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, but all
Americans celebrate that day as having been July 4, 1976. We trust
the witness of those who were actually there. In other words, our
knowledge begins with faith in some authority, just as Augustine
emphasized.

A Synthesis was attempted by Thomas Aquinas, the twelfth-century
scholar Thomas Aquinas, whose own slogan has been called, "I
understand in order to believe."

A good way to get a handle on Thomas's position is to recognize that
his own motto is a reversal of Augustine's faith seeking
understanding. It was Augustine who first explained the concept of
original sin, which states that we are alienated from God at birth
because we have inherited a sin nature from Adam. Thomas agreed that
our moral conformity to God had been lost, but he believed that sin
had not completely corrupted our intellect. Thomas believed,
therefore, that we could come to a basic knowledge of God without any
special revelation. This is not to say that Thomas did not hold a
high view of Scripture. Scripture was authoritative for Thomas. But
he seemed to believe that divine revelation is a fuller explanation
of what we are able to know about God on our own. For example, his
attempts to prove the existence of God were based on the aftereffects
of God's action in the world, such as the creation, rather than in
the sure Word of Scripture. In contrast to Tertullian and Augustine,
who placed faith in God's revelation of Christ as the foundation for
knowledge, Thomas started with human reason and philosophy. His hope
was to show that even people who reject the Scripture could come to
believe in God through the use of their intellects. But the
Scriptures were necessary since the human mind cannot even conceive
of concepts such as the Trinity.

Thomas lived at a time when most of Aristotle's philosophy was first
being introduced into the Latin language. This created quite a stir
in the universities of the day. Up until that time, Augustine's
emphasis on an education centered on Scripture was the dominant view.
Thomas himself was educated in the tradition of Augustine, but he
appreciated the philosophy of Aristotle as a witness to the truth. He
found Aristotle to be more balanced in his approach to philosophy
than Augustine had been. Whereas Augustine emphasized the eternal
realm in his own philosophy, Aristotle's philosophy confirmed the
importance of the natural world as well and assisted Thomas in his
effort to create a comprehensive Christian philosophy which
recognized that the material world was important because it had been
created by God and was the arena in which His redemptive plan was to
be fulfilled. Prior to Thomas, the tendency had been to downplay the
physical world as greatly inferior to the spiritual world.

Let's put Tertullian in the shoes of Indiana Jones. What would
Tertullian do if faced with the prospect of crossing over the
invisible bridge? My guess is that he would see such a step as
consistent with God's way of directing His people. The key to
understanding Tertullian's view of faith and reason is to consider
what the unbeliever would think. Since most unbelievers would
consider what Indiana Jones did as unreasonable, he would probably
consider such an attitude as compelling proof that the person of
faith must take such a step.

What would Augustine have done if he had faced the choice of Indiana
Jones? First, he would have needed scriptural support for such a
choice. Secondly, he would have considered the logic of such a
decision. Whereas Tertullian considered God's mind to be contrary to
the philosophies of man, Augustine believed God created us to think
His thoughts after Him. His was a reasonable faith. This is why his
motto has been described as "faith seeking understanding."

If we were to place Thomas in the shoes of Indiana Jones, it is
likely that he would have stepped out as well. But he would have
arrived at the decision for different reasons than Tertullian or
Augustine. Because of his emphasis on the thinking ability of the
human race and his emphasis on physical reality, he might have knelt
down on the ground and felt for the hidden pathway before actually
stepping out. Since he leaned toward utilizing reason and his own
understanding to discover the bridge, he would not have depended
solely on revelation to cross over like the others.

http://www.tertullian.org/quotes.htm

Tertullian is often quoted as saying:

Certum est, quia impossibile - It is certain because it is
impossible.

A fuller quotation:

Crucifixus est dei filius; non pudet, quia pudendum est.
Et mortuus est dei filius; credibile prorsus est, quia ineptum est.
Et sepultus resurrexit; certum est, quia impossibile.
The Son of God was crucified: I am not ashamed--because it is
shameful.
The Son of God died: it is immediately credible--because it is silly.
He was buried, and rose again: it is certain--because it is
impossible.

This is usually misquoted, "Credo quia impossibile" (I believe it
because it is impossible), and used together with the
Athens/Jerusalem quote as evidence of Tertullian's irrationalism, and
advocacy of blind faith as a reason to believe. But neither idea is
under discussion. The context is actually an argument with the
heretic Marcion, who believed in the resurrection, but didn't believe
Christ had a real body, and that the flesh was shameful.

Tertullian points out that Christ himself said that worldly wisdom
was not to be trusted on such things, so if Marcion was following it,
he must be in the wrong. The idea of irrationalism as such, as
opposed to 'the wisdom of the world is foolishness' does not arise.

Quid ergo Athenis et Hierosolymis -

What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?

NB: Context is that importing secular ideas into Christ's teaching is
mixing chalk and cheese together

http://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/

"Whatever we meant by God being creator, it wasn't something that God
did once in the past, and then walked off ... It's something that's
going on all the time." - Arthur Peacock

Dr. Arthur Peacocke

Dr. Arthur Peacock was born in 1924. He is currently a Warden
Emeritus at the Society of Ordained Scientists and Hon. Chaplain and
Honorary Canon at Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford. In 1973, he was
awarded the Le Conte Du Nouy Prize, and in 1986 he became an Academic
Fellow at the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science. He is the
Vice President of the Science and Religion Forum and of Modern Church
People's Union. He is also a Council Member of ESSSAT - The European
Society for the Study of Science And Theology. In 1971, he was
ordained as a priest in the Church of England.

The point here is not that one must see God in the process of
evolution, but rather that there is nothing inherently incompatible
between an evolutionary view of life and a commitment to the
Christian scriptures.

The controversy over biological evolution began in 1859 when Charles
Darwin published his monumental book "On the Origin of Species by
Means of Natural Selection ". Darwin's book suggested that instead of
being specially created by God, humans were the product of biological
evolution. As he later wrote: "Man is descended from a hairy
quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal
in its habits." Many religious believers in the nineteenth century
felt that Darwinian evolution had robbed humanity of its dignity, for
how could humans be created in the image of God if we were the
descendants of apes? Faced with this dilemma, they rebelled against
Darwin's theory. Yet even in the nineteenth century there were many
theologians and ministers - both Catholic and Protestant - who did
not see a conflict between their faith and Darwin's science. These
more liberal thinkers often went to great lengths to convince the
public that evolution could be harmonized with traditional religious
views and values.

"Creationism" is the name given to the belief that the creation story
of Genesis is the literal truth about how the world came into being.
According to Christian creationists, the universe and everything in
it was created by God in six days, at a time which biblical scholars
have calculated to be just over 6000 years ago. Up until the late
nineteenth century it was quite possible to believe in the scientific
world picture and also in the biblical story of creation, because
science itself did not have any particular account of creation. But
in the past 150 years scientists have gradually pieced together their
own accounts of how life and the universe began. These accounts
differ significantly from the literal account in Genesis, and so they
present a significant challenge to Christian believers.

In July 1996 the Vatican Observatory, in association with the
Berkeley-based Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, held an
international conference on the theme of evolution. The conference,
which took place in the pope's summer residence, Castel Gandolfo
(outside Rome), was the fourth in a series based around the overall
theme of "Divine Action". Over the past decade the Divine Action
conferences (which are held every two years), have been bringing
together scientists, philosophers, and theologians from around the
world.

Each conference has a specific scientific theme, and participants
present papers on how these scientific themes are relevant to
theological and religious questions. The theme of the first
conference was physics, philosophy, and theology; the next was chaos
and complexity; the third was quantum cosmology ; the fourth was
evolution; the fifth conference (held in July 1998) was focused
around the brain/mind problem; and the next conference (to be held in
2000) will be on the theme of quantum mechanics. At the evolution
conference, participants considered both the biological evolution of
life on earth, and the evolution of the cosmos as a whole. All agreed
that, in essence, an evolutionary perspective was commensurate with a
Christian world view. The papers from this conference have been
published as a book "Evolutionary and Molecular Biology: Scientific
Perspectives on Divine Action", which is an excellent resource for
anyone interested in exploring this subject more seriously.

Science and religion have always been at war with one another, right?
Isn't that what we've all been taught? Isn't that what the trial of
Galileo was all about? In fact this widely held view is a distortion
of the historical truth. On the contrary, historians over the past
fifty years have revealed that for most of history science and
religion have been deeply entwined.

Throughout the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, most scientific
leaders were men of the church, They included the great medieval
champion of mathematical science Robert Grosseteste (Bishop of
Oxford, and the man who reinvigorated the science of geometric
optics); the medieval champion of experimental science Roger Bacon (a
Franciscan monk, sometimes known as the medieval Galileo); the
fifteenth century proto-physicist Nicholas of Cusa (a cardinal in the
Roman Catholic Church and the man who first championed the idea of an
infinite universe); and Nicholas Copernicus (a canon at Frauenburg
Cathedral, and the man who more than any other introduced the idea of
a sun-centered cosmos .

In popular mythology, the "scientific revolution " of the seventeenth
century is commonly said to mark a fundamental break between science
and religion. But nothing could be further from the truth. Almost all
the great pioneers and founders of the new science were religious men
who wanted a science that would harmonize with their faith. All three
founders of the new heliocentric cosmology - Nicholas Copernicus,
Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton - saw their new vision of the
universe as an offshoot of their theology. Newton. in particular, was
a religious fanatic whose whole life work can be seen as a search for
God. Even the infamous Galileo was a committed Catholic who wanted
nothing more than for the Pope to endorse his vision of the heavens.

Not until the eighteenth century do we see a fundamental break
between science and religion. In the new rationalistic climate of the
Enlightenment philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and Jean-Jacques
Rousseau argued that science and religion were two separate domains
that must be kept apart. But even in the eighteenth century there was
no idea of a warfare between the two spheres. That idea only arose in
the late nineteenth century, particularly after the publication of
Charles Darwin's revolutionary book, "On the Evolution of Species by
Means of Natural Selection ." In the wake of this book, some
Christian believers and theologians began to see science as a threat
to their faith. On the other hand, some scientists also began to see
religion as a threat to scientific freedom. Although there have
always been people on both sides who did not see a conflict between
science and Christian faith, nonetheless this "warfare" model has had
a powerful influence on Western thinking throughout the twentieth
century.

The most infamous clash between science and religion is undoubtedly
the Galileo affair. According to popular mythology the great Italian
physicist Galileo Galilei almost lost his life at the hands of the
Roman Catholic Church for championing the idea that the earth
revolves around the sun, rather than the sun circling the earth. Yet
historians have now shown that the whole story has been greatly
exaggerated, and that the reality was a lot more complex.

In fact Galileo never spent a single day in jail. During his trial he
was housed in luxury in a cardinal's palace, and throughout his life
some of his greatest supporters were cardinals and other churchmen.
At the time of his trial, in 1633, no one had definite proof that the
earth orbits the sun. The truth is that astronomy then was not
accurate enough to decide between an earth-centered and sun-centered
system. Nonetheless, the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church
(along with many other scholars at the time) was slowly moving
towards accepting this new vision of the heavens, and it is likely
that the whole conflict could have been avoided if Galileo himself
had been a bit less arrogant. The church was far from admirable in
its behavior, in that Galileo was committed to house arrest for the
last eight years of life, for espousing his views. Yet the church did
not try to stop him from pursuing his science, and it was in fact
during this time that he wrote his great book, "Dialogs Concerning
Two New Sciences", which established his role as a founder of modern
physics.

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