Wow, thank you all for the warm welcome.
I'm going to respond to all of you in this one post, so it may be a touch long -- we'll see.
First of all, I think definitions are in order. As I first stated, I deliberately made my query open-ended and perhaps vague, in order to invite non-knee-jerk responses. Seeing now how civilized you all are (^_^), I needn't have worried.
Faith is, as I learned it as a child, belief plus action. It is holding a belief strongly enough to act on it.
Reason is thinking logically about a thing.
These are my own working definitions, and are not in any way meant to be precisely honed, the way philosophers would expect them to be in formal dialog. Please realize that, when challenged, I may very well find myself revising them a bit here and there. This is exactly why I'm here: to explore what it is that I believe, to learn about it from others, to interact, grow, and expand what I know about the way faith and spirituality work in my life.
All that said, I'll plunge into responses.
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Thomas, you say:
...one should never accede in faith to something that seems fundamentally unreasonable.
Consider the virgin birth of Jesus of Nazareth. That, it seems, is fundamentally unreasonable to me. And it surprises me to discover that the Catholic church no longer believes in the virgin birth. Quoting from Catholic Encyclopedia,
via http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15448a.htm:
Modern theology adhering to the principle of historical development, and denying the possibility of any miraculous intervention in the course of history, cannot consistently admit the historical actuality of the virgin birth.
So, no beef with the Catholics, it seems. Yet my evangelical brothers and sisters insist (there's a significant word, worth considering in context with religious belief in another thread) that the virgin birth must be accepted and not questioned.
Here is the main point to me: when faith is defined as holding a belief that must be
accepted and not questioned, then faith is held as against reason, in my opinion.
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Snoopy, you say:
Is reason, rather than faith the accepted "criterion" in all other areas of life? (i.e. an either/or and no other criteria involved). What about the arts, f'rinstance?
You're completely correct. We go through life taking many things on faith: the internal combustion engine, for many, is a mystery, and many are content to "just trust" that whoever built the one they own knew what she was doing, etc., etc.
But I, for one, can do that precisely because, to take the engine example, I know that the way my car's engine works is explainable in terms that I could understand if I put my mind to it. If, upon probing the reasons why my car propels me down the road, I was told, "It's really just a matter of faith; you just need to trust that it works and leave it at that," then I might be, well, skeptical (another great word worth its own discussion), and not quite so willing to trust without thinking.
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seattlegal, your quote from Thomas Merton is a good one. But my problem begins with Meron's first line:
Faith, without depending on reason for the slightest shred of justification, never contradicts reason and remains ever reasonable.
But it does contradict reason. I point you to the virgin birth example again.
I can hear you and others saying, "But you cannot listen to those
unreasonable voices who expect you to believe -- have faith -- in an
unreasonable way. Yet this is exactly my point. There
are those who insist that "having faith" means accepting without questioning. My own question, rephrased, is: On what basis is it all right to ask me to do that?
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Paladin, you say:
Faith does not destroy reason as Merton says . . . it merely circumvents it.
Perhaps, perhaps. But how? What do you mean by this?
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Chris, I'm a touch confused by what you say. Although the insight you offer is a good one, I'm not sure that it helps to talk about how faith is used here. Of course, to be fair, I did leave things rather vague in my initial post.
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flow, your thoughts are most interesting to me. I want to attempt a restatement of what you've said as my way of better grasping it. Please let me know if you think I've gotten the essence of what you're saying.
First of all, you use the terms local and non-local to mean, respectively, observable reality and spiritual. Next (and finally), you assert that (using my own terminology here) any attempt to understand spiritual things will always be colored by how we feel about the way we choose to see the world.
I fear I'm mashing up your thoughts terribly. But isn't something like this what you mean by saying:
When dealing with matters which originate from or are affected by non-local influences, then emotionally filtered reason must necessarily determine our grounding of beliefs.
Your thoughts in response to Bobby Winters are excellent. You're explaining that it is in the nature of the universe (or its the spacetime fabric) for us to not be able to comprehend the spiritual in physical terms.
Is this a fair restatement of your idea?
The Paul Davies article (
Taking Science on Faith) is excellent as well.
~ ~ ~
Well, new friends, I thank you again for your thoughts.
And now, I wonder aloud, what have I learned?
Well, faith still seems to me to be acting on a belief, and not just intellectually holding an idea to be true.
And reason is all about thinking logically. That still seems good to me.
I guess I think that it's not appropriate -- ever -- to ask or expect a person to "have faith" in something without being willing to give reasons why believing something (or in something) is, well, reasonable.
flow's cosmic context argument is one I'll have to ponder for some time, probably over coffee. Doing that with the likes of you all at a local (pun intended) coffeehouse would be quite a treat for me.
chron
