Hello,
My question is essentially: How is faith related to reason?
I myself am not Catholic, and in all honesty doubt that I will convert anytime soon. That being said, I am interested in a deeper understanding of the religion’s philosophy.
I’ve heard from Catholics and other Christians an answer to the question, ‘How do you know God exists if you can’t see Him’?: The answer is that there are many things we believe without scientific proof. I agree with this. But even for those things, there is some ‘reason’ that, although not scientific, is reason enough to believe in them. Another answer i’ve heard is, ‘I take it on faith’. But what does this mean? Obviously Catholics and Christians would agree that we can’t have ‘faith’ in just anything. What ‘reason’ informs faith before someone chooses it?
Thank you for your time,
CV
There are almost always
some reasons for accepting a meaningful claim of unknown truth-value, especially if one’s mentally innovative enough. Even false and ridiculous propositions can have some rational support; however, most times they eventually get buried under heaps of further reasons
against them, so the mind inevitably declines acceptance after the overall assessment. Other times, a belief may still be a “live option” after all available evidence is weighed – it’s subjectively somehwere between certainty and incredibility – and then one might often in a sense
freely choose to affirm it or not, usually based on something that’s itself beyond the strict logical merits of the proposition. This will typically be based on some cost/benefit analysis and, with a
pragmatic concern, subjected ultimately to the individual’s own threshold for belief re: uncertain live options, which is arguably combined with a sort of
ethical standard once a purely logical standard comes up inconclusive.
Anyway, I hope you don’t mind, but now I’m just going to copy & paste from a couple posts I’ve made before on this topic.
Here’s one:
We are aware of a lacking, a privation – not just a mere absence – of a due, intended good. Thus we’re aversely acquainted with what is essentially evil. As we pursue our natural goods out of love and thereby conversely shun evil, it’s not surprising that we may often leap at the sight of a potentially-reached good – to our minds, that’s a leap out of an evil into a good, which is a pretty solid net gain. Quite simply, our wills (which are inclined to the truth qua goodness, a.k.a. knowledge) refuse to settle with anything less than an intellectual state of perfect certainty with conformity to unlimited truth.
. . . Belief is one’s personal construction of an artificial bridge over a void that he recognizes as evil, an attempt to overcome that evil. I suppose the will finds the intellect in a predicament and suddenly springs to action to provide some means of an escape into safety.
. . . One only doubts after he’s already, consciously or not, realized that what he’s currently got isn’t completely satisfying (that is, isn’t totally certain). The doubt is his effort to assess just how much he’s missing, so to speak, to sample alternatives, to play the field with top contestants. Doubt is often like an intellectual affair, mental cheating/adultery, which only happens amid dissatisfaction of some degree; excessively prolonged doubt is like intellectual spinsterhood, you might say. Hypothesis is akin to dating; belief is a “committed relationship” with temporarily agreed-upon fidelity; religious faith is (or, maybe, ought to be) monogamous marriage. Certainty is like what happens at the end of chick flicks, I guess, when the girl meets Mr. Perfect, Prince Charming, and lives, no doubt, happily ever after.
. . . The fact we seem to be practically, even existentially, compelled to believe amid uncertainty might give us a good idea of our human nature, its end, etc. Every human being with functional rationality has an innate disposition toward perfect, indubitable knowledge, no? Upon recognition of its absence, one begins immediately to maximize his closeness to it, before even trying to determine whether such a goal is feasibly attainable or not.
And here’s another:
[All knowledge by way of] the Scientific Method is faith-based. It relies primarily on dubitable abductive logic, inference to the best sufficient explanation. And of course that’s only the “best” in a somewhat subjective manner – that is, the best at time t, and given a particular amount of (limited) experience.
. . . The Scientific Method is fundamentally a method for gradually reducing, not eliminating, the uncertainty of whatever promising hypotheses we’ve come to believe in after having deemed them sufficiently explicative of new raw data that initially wasn’t covered by one’s prior set of theoretical convictions. It is probability-based, and thus there’s room, however slight, for error.
Therefore any time one chooses to accept a conclusion from the Scientific Method, he’s making the choice to proceed in the face of a specific risk for error. He’s effectively gambling with what he finds to be his best odds in a game that’s undetermined (as far as he knows), with faith in a probability that he personally considers high enough to justify that leap from suspension of belief to adoption of belief. Or in other words, belief results once one thinks the probable good of the belief (the “juice”) is worth the possible evil of the risk (the “squeeze”).
