Theses on Faith and Reason

 

      Averroes (Ibn Rushd 1126-1198) is known (among other things) for the following claim: as “truth cannot contradict truth” – affirmed by Aquinas – justified beliefs in philosophy and science cannot contradict claims of sacred scripture: for him, the Quran. As an Aristotelian, science and philosophy were not strictly separated for him as they are for us. Both reached conclusions using reason and careful method. Averroes believed reason in this sense was the most reliable road to truth. Crucially, when scripture seemed to be at odds with reason, scripture had to be subjected to interpretation or allegorical understanding to remove the logical tension. And who shall perform this interpretation? Those “rooted in knowledge” – philosophers. The Quran was rhetorically powerful, appropriate for communicating truth to the illiterate in the only form they can receive it: through poetry, allegory, symbolism, etc. For the educated, those truths can be more fully understood through the disciplined application of reason. You can imagine how that went down with the established Islamic authorities. I have yet the read the full treatise in which Averroes argues this thesis – I plan to do so as soon as I can afford to buy the book. But I have my own take on this to me crucial thought on the boundaries between faith and reason. Here presented only as theses.

 

I.          By reason Averroes marks out boundaries, limits to what can be claimed as true, to what can be justified as knowledge. I share that much. Reason is by definition that capacity that allows our intellect to grasp something real, to thus conform our ideas and propositions to reality. But limiting reason to the purely philosophical and scientific – the logical and the empirical – is too narrow. My argument:  Averroes Aristotelian conception of reason is too narrow because it presupposes what cannot be presupposed: namely, that our purely cognitive capacities are adequate to first conceptualize and then investigate all of reality. That reality is just that which we can ideally know – that with the right use of reason, we can know everything there is to know. For Aristotle that meant even the nature of God.  Logically, it is possible and indeed probable that reality transcends the capacity of our intellect, of human reason, to know or understand it. It follows that there is conceptual space for a lucid sense of faith.

 

II.         Faith has many meanings. One meaning that makes sense in thesis I is this: to believe some x is false on the basis of “reasons of the heart” – that is, not because I can give a knock-down argument or proof that x is false, but because x must be false if some certainty y that goes all the way down in me is to remain certain. For example, although I cannot prove that Richard Dawkins reductionist view of the universe is false, I believe it is false because if it were true, then many parents’ love for their children (and much else) would be illusory. This I cannot believe. This is the reductio ad absurdum, which is not a proof that x is false, but only that my certainty y – itself not provable, though I cannot doubt it – is incompatible with belief in x. I suppose the faith here is really the certainty that the unprovable, indeed axiomatic y is true. Practices like giving children names rather than numbers only make sense if the birth and life of an individual human being has the kind of dignity or significance most of us who are not steeped in evolutionary biology or some form of biologically grounded racism axiomatically ascribe to it. Such beliefs transcend reason; they cannot be reached as the conclusion of an argument (or experiment). Indeed, they are the necessary premises for the kind of things we can reason about.

 

III.       Another form of faith that the limited nature of human reason creates conceptual space for is more connected to what religious people mean by the term. If there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophy or science, then conceptual space exists that could be inhabited by the sacred, the divine. The sacred, if real (though in a sense that transcends what we can understand as real), may communicate with special individuals – the author of Job, Socrates, Jesus, Mohammed – who then translate their knowledge into terms others can understand. Or some people may just have a spiritual antenna to the sacred realm. In any case, we may believe x is true because we trust and believe in the messenger and their prophetic communication. We don’t know x, cannot know x through human reason. But I believe that what Jesus revealed when, defending to woman who had committed adultery from being stoned as Deuteronomy (22:22) demanded, he proclaimed ‘let he who is without sin cast the first stone (John 8:7).’ That to me had the force of prophecy, or to put it more logically, seemed axiomatically true. It was a revelation to me. It changed how I saw myself and others. It was and is sublime. Like a leak from another realm. My faith in Jesus derives from partly from this. But again, I cannot prove it, and thus if the passage doesn’t strike you as it did me, it does not mean you are irrational. It means something, many things perhaps, but not that.

 

IV.        The limits of reason as understood by Averroes also excludes Pascal’s “reasons of the heart” – the seat of emotion – as a source of understanding. Love or joy can go very deep in people, so deep that they reveal aspects of ultimate reality or even the sacred. Despair or fear, the same. Actually most thoughts are interwoven with emotions, and emotions are interwoven with thought. I behold the beauty of an unspoiled part of earth and am filled with joy, which implies a judgment, a thought that the world is truly wonderful. I witnessed a child dying because the parents abused him, and recoil in horror at the evil of the deed. That also contains the thought that the child was wonderful, also innocent and needy, dependent on his parents’ love and care – all this violated in terrible ways. Such emotion-thoughts or thought-emotions are responses of the whole person, undivided between heart and head. Of course, people are different, some people are damaged; indeed, we are all damaged to some extent, and some of us are damaged to the point that they may even react with indifference or sentimentality to the things I mentioned.

 

V.         Metaphysical or religious truth is not reducible to whatever a person happens to believe – otherwise, truth would not enter into it – but the capacity to grasp truth does depend on the person and is a function of their concrete life. The point of philosophical and scientific reasoning is to separate truth from the person (and their heart), such that anyone competent in the method can achieve the same results. But unless all of reality is accessible to impersonal reason; if some reality can only be known through a thinking-feeling response of the whole person; then claiming that impersonal reason is the only reliable guide to truth is itself irrational. The rationality of elevating impersonal reason to the only way to truth depends on accepting the metaphysical proposition that reality equals what a human being competent in philosophy and science can know as axiomatic. But that proposition is more than debatable.

 

VI.       If, however, I expand the conception of reason to include the response of the whole person, indeed make reason a function of the quality of response and thus the quality of the person, then Averroes claim that scripture must be subject to reason makes sense. Jesus attitude toward to woman who had committed adultery, to take the previous example, revealed to me something essential about being human. Thus based on the truth I was able to grasp, I accepted the story as scripture, as revealing ultimate truth, as coming from a source far greater than myself. But when I read Deuteronomy 22:22 – the command to stone anyone caught in adultery – I am horrified. I know this still happens. The command is indifferent to the reason why a person may have committed adultery: whether from pure lust or out of desperation with a hellish marriage, it doesn’t matter. And even in the worst scenario, if the adultery was done in lust and was a betrayal, then stoning the person to death…terrible. At most such punishments may symbolize the terribleness of some sins – some cases of adultery are disgusting; for others we may have compassion – show us the meaning of such transgressions. But to actually kill the woman by stoning – that is not something any being I can imagine as divine or good or godly would do. It is so merciless. And it was Jesus that showed me this, activating my moral imagination.

 

VII.      Believing in Jesus – trusting Jesus – as a guide here is for me an act of reason, too. Thus when scripture conflicts with reason in the expanded sense, it is reason that I trust; not scripture. (In my Deuteronomy example, scripture conflicts. But I also do not believe God would kill the first-born or Egypt or order all the inhabitants – including children and animals – of a certain city to be put to the sword. Nor do I believe God would consign my good father to hellfire for not believing the right things about him.)

 

VIII.    This means that I – like Averroes – reject a common understanding and practice of religious faith. Some believers need to be impressed by God’s radical otherness and unlimited magical power. They accept especially wherever in scripture that strains human understanding precisely because it strains human understanding – as proof of God’s sublimity. Our reason – also in my expanded use of the term – is nothing compared to God. Who are we to question scripture? Who are we to put God in the dock? God puts us in the dock, not we him! This is the God of the Torah, of the book of Job. It is the God of Luther and Calvin. Nothing we think, feel, or do can reveal anything about God. Nature – the Creation – does not reveal God. Our only possible attitude is obedience and submission. Ours is not to question why, but to do or die. As though the scriptures and their authoritative interpreters were clear mouthpieces for God himself. I cannot live with that, and neither could Averroes.

 

IX.       I also find it contrary to reason in the expanded sense this attitude: scripture is a magical text, with magical power, written directly by the hand of God himself. Thus to be itself worshipped or adored, as though it provided a direct, unmediated, uninterpreted, magical-mystical encounter with the divine itself. Most practicing Jews,  Christians, and Muslims do see scripture in this light. At times, I have wished I could. But when I read passages like Deuteronomy 22:22, the spell is broken. So much finds its way into scripture that strongly appears to be human-all-too-human. Again, I am thrown back on my intellect-heart. To mindlessly accept such passages as from God - especially those repudiated or qualified by Christ - would seem a betrayal of something I think is God-given: love of truth, love of the Good.

 

X.        Another view I reject amounts to enclosing religious views in pure subjectivity or sentimentality – transforming the encounter with the ultimate other into self-consoling fantasy. An extension of this is a ‘liberalism’ in theology that would simply make religious truths out of contemporary fads or wishes. This is perhaps as great a danger than the ‘fundamentalist’ view, given that the ‘fat, relentless ego’ strives non-stop to translate everything in life into self-consoling or self-gratifying fantasy. The account of Jesus’ saving of the woman accused of adultery in John, for example, is far from self-consoling fantasy. The adulterer and the vengeful mob – that is who I am. That is not flattering to my ego. For a man truly to recognize himself as a sinner is a terrible, ego-breaking event.  The story reveals a truth that my ego could never grasp, a truth about my ego that can only be grasped from a perspective outside my ego – reason informed by the heart. The only comfort of the story is that one knows the truth.

 

XI.       Of course, it would be presumption for our finite reason to put God in the dock or believe it was up to us to determine what was real, good, true, or beautiful. God’s mind/heart is infinite – whatever that means; ours are radically finite and fallible. But as a matter of faith we have space to believe that our deepest responses to the world – love, joy – are at least analogous to or related to those of our Creator. The Good as Socrates and then Plato grasped, we experience as absolute, puzzling, and sometimes as sublime. We can experience that which is good, true, and beautiful in however limited and fallible a way. Yet it is the most powerful guide to truth we have. It is where scripture speaks to us – or not. The men who canonized the Bible and the Quran depended on the Holy Spirit or Allah; but the Holy Spirit or Allah could only communicate to them through their intellects informed by their hearts – the really existing intellect-cum-hearts that they brought to the task. God didn’t directly do the editing himself.

 

XII.      Conscience has been called the voice of God in us. It can be activated or expanded – for example, by the story of Jesus I related – by revelations. Our intellects-as-informed-by-our hearts may function as spiritual antennas. But no revelation can make sheer power, however infinite – loveable. No revelation can make genocidal commanders loveable. In short, scripture, revelation can inspire us precisely because the truth revealed is something we were created to understand, even in a finite way. The shore of the ocean is still the ocean. Our minds/hearts may indeed be too limited in our ability to know and love to grasp the infinite mind/heart of God. But as the dog I loved grasped something of my love for her without really having an adequate understanding of what she grasped, so it may be with us and God. Indeed, I read this as a main revelation of Christ. But I can only know in my heart (mind-informed-by-heart) that it is true. That is where truth happens.

 

XIII.    I would not know how to love the power-God of Calvin. If I believed that such a power existed, I would be prudent not to offend him least I be punished beyond my endurance. I might choose punishment to preserve my dignity, but I guess I would not have the courage for that. In truth, I would prefer not to be born into Calvin’s Creation. I would prefer a reductionist universe ala Richard Dawkins. But even if I believed in such a punishing, all-powerful, to me arbitrary God, a God I had to obey out of fear, I could no more love him than Winston Smith could truly love Big Brother in Orwell’s 1984. Nor could I believe such a God could love me. Indeed, that is my reading of Jesus’ truth.