Faith And Reason - Are They Compatible?
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The fact of the matter is, comparing faith and reason is like comparing apples and oranges. They are completely different ways of gauging reality. Faith, according to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, is defined as: "firm belief in something for which there is no proof ." In my opinion, faith is the antithesis of reason. A person who relies on reason to interpret reality is relying on empirical observation and the the tenets of logic, both of which have proven themselves to be reliable (not perfect) ways of gauging reality.
Some people make ridiculous analogies to prove that we all, to some extent, rely on faith. For example, a person might say "You have faith that when you start your automobile, it won't blow up. It takes faith to rely on the engineering principles of internal combustion." - or something to that effect. However, I wouldn't say that I have faith that my automobile won't blow up for the simple fact that, I have repeatedly observed that automobiles do not just blow up spontaneously upon ignition. There is a great deal of evidence attesting to the soundness of automobile design.
There is, however, a stupendously improbable chance that my car will blow up when I start it (Unless of course, I was a member of the Mafia; but I digress.). Maybe my automobile came off the assembly line with a horrible defect - who knows? So, I actually recognize the fact that nothing is for certain. That doesn't stop me, however, from recognizing probability. To me, no faith is required to have a high degree of confidence in the soundness of my automobile's design. ,
In contrast, let's say that a person said "I have faith that when I start my automobile, it will levitate off the ground." I think anyone would agree that the unaided suspension of an automobile in the air would be a violation of the laws of physics. To my knowledge, there has never been an instance where the laws of physics were observed being violated, or at least, there has yet to be definitive evidence of such a violation. I know that I have personally never witnessed a violation of the physical laws. In my opinion, a person believing without evidence that their automobile can levitate would be exhibiting a great deal of faith. This type of thinking is similar to the type of thinking that is exhibited when people say "I have faith that Jesus walked on water." Believing that a man can walk on water without any evidence whatsoever is, to a rationalist (a person who uses reason rather than faith), unwarranted. There is no evidence for it. However, there is a significant amount of evidence that such a thing is not possible.
Now, if a person did in fact make their automobile levitate and could repeat this process for an in-depth scientific investigation, this would be proof that levitation is possible and would then be considered knowledge. We would have to rethink our concept of what is possible in reality. However, to believe in the phenomenon of levitation before there was evidence of its existence would be believing it on faith.
Of course, some people can and do use both reason and faith. However, just like oil and water, faith and reason do not mix. What some people manage to do is compartmentalize. In psychology, compartmentalizing is the act of keeping ideas separate in an attempt to keep thought processes that are used to examine one set of ideas from affecting others. When a person compartmentalizes, they have effectively created a chasm in their mind where they are able to use different thought processes for each set of ideas. In this way, they are able to apply reason to most aspects of daily life, but then invoke faith when it comes to other things, like religious belief.
There are some individuals who will play a semantics game and totally change the meaning of faith in order to make it seem more reasonable. When you go about changing to meaning of words and tailor them to your own personal liking, it makes rational discourse almost impossible.
Faith is the irrational belief in things that are not observed aspects of reality. There is nothing reasonable about faith. Faith, defined as "firm belief in something for which there is no proof" is absolutely antithetical to reason - in my opinion.
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avangend - I see where you are coming from, and I guess for the most part I agree. However, I choose not to call the act of believing in the probability of events that, while they may not have happened yet, are commonly observed to occur "faith." Just my personal preference.
Thanks for the comment.
David:
Well written hub!
It's incomplete tho.
You have taken only one connotation of the word "faith."
Your "hub" is absolutely correct in ref to the connotation you use.
Another connotation of "faith" is: "Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing."
The Operative word in this connotation is "truth" i.e. "the real state of things."
That connotation of faith would be used thus: "I have faith that the sun will rise from the East and set in the
West," "I have faith that on flat, solid ground, the earth will meet my every step."
Faith, as it is used in that connotation, has been empirically proved.
Religious "faith" has it's foundation in the premise of your hub.
Thanks tho for your correct offering. :-)
quark - You're right. Faith can mean different things depending on the context. That is why I was careful to define the terms I used in the article.
Thanks for reading and commenting.
Here's a story for you that defies reason with intellect.
In my family, we have a spiritual discerment we believe comes from the spirit we recognize as God. My mother has this special insight, I have it and recently I found out my daughter has it. She's a college grad, about to turn 20 years of age. You may in fact know her and could ask her about this someday. This just occured less than 3 months ago.
She had a date to go out with several friends but hours before they came by to pick her up she had a foreknowledge that they would be in a car wreck. It deeply concerned her and she called her boyfriend who lives 150 miles away and asked him to pray with her for safety.
When her friends picked her up she told them about it and also had them praying about it. Within minutes of the accident which did occur, she began praying again and telling her friends they were about to experience an impact and she positioned herself in her seat, in the vehicle to prepare for the impact. A vehicle then struck them from behind - a hit and run accident as they were stopped at a red light but the driver later turned himself in.
Her foreknowledge experiences are rare, in fact I don't know of others she's had but she recognized this for what it was - a spiritual discernment. Who knows if she will ever experience this type thing again but regardless, I don't feel it would affect her firm belief in that which goes beyond the intellect, either way.
I've personally had many such experiences as has my mother and we could not deny the reality of them and is literally impossible for coincidence to explain so many of these type experiences, especially when lots of detail is sometimes involved.
Intellectual reasoning is great but faith has a power that far exceeds it.
YODG - You might be surprised to know that I don't doubt the existence of precognition. I think there is ample evidence both from personal testimony, my own personal experiences, and scientific research in that area. We may, in time, understand the mechanism that causes this to happen. Could it be supernatural? Possibly. Could it be a natural phenomenon that we don't yet understand? Possibly. There have been many mysterious phenomena that were once explained by invoking the supernatural that are now understood in strictly naturalistic terms. I don't think we should be so quick to slap a supernatural label on things we don't yet understand.
Some of these experiences are mundane - like a person thinking of a family member and then a few seconds or minutes later the phone rings and it is the family member they were thinking about. I've done that many times. Or thinking of an old friend that you haven't seen in years only to see them later that day at the grocery store. I've done that as well. It is hard to see how any of these could be contrued as having a spiritual significance. Precognitive experiences are ubiquitous throughout the world in many cultures. Even animals exhibit precognitive tendencies.
Einstein described time as an illusion. He envisioned the past, present and future as existing simultaneously, yet, we experience it one moment at a time. Just as we are able to recall memories from our past experiences, we may be able to do this on occasion with future experiences, albiet, not willfully. It is possible that the underlying mechanism of precognition can be understood when we have a better grasp of physics. Or, maybe the answer will forever elude us. I'm just not confident enough to speculate on what it might be, but it is a very intriguing subject. There is an interesting article that you might be interested in reading about precognition. Here's the link http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-2339511
If someone has had a personal validation of something, they are no longer believing something on faith, they are now using reason - even if their conclusions are false. If someone were to believe in something without such a validating experience, they would be operating on faith. As I stated in the article, faith is defined as "belief in something without proof." Personal experiences may not count as objective proof, but they certainly count as subjective proof.
Hi David - good article. I've missed your writings during my 6 months absence from Hubpages. I also enjoyed and agree with your response above to YODG's comment. There are many things we do not (yet) understand, but the problem with assigning irrational 'explanations' to such phenomena is that doing so tends to restrict further inquiry. This might not matter on the individual level, but it is a serious problem when the denial phenomenon is societal.
I enjoyed reading this Hub and find myself in agreement with it. I also think there is much we don't understand and pre-cognition is one of them
I had an experience just two days ago. I was with a friend and we were talking about things in general and he, quite out of the blue, brought up the name of a woman with whnom he had, many years before, had a relationship. It was not apropos to the conversation at that point. Later on Tuesday evening he got a call to say the woman had just died. This is not the first time he has had this sort of thing happen.
Coincidence? That's what I tend to believe, but it is still quite strange.
Thanks for the interesting read.
Love and peace
Tony
Paraglider - Thanks, and glad to see you back. Indeed, explaining the mysteries of the universe by invoking the supernatural - which would itself be an equally vexing mystery - gets us nowhere closer to an answer.
tonymac04 - Interesting story and I'm glad you enjoyed the article. People underestimate how often coincidence can account for experiences like the one you just described.
Thank you both for reading and commenting.
(David Bowman: There are some individuals who will play a semantics game and totally change the meaning of faith in order to make it seem more reasonable.)
Like this?
(Qwark: Another connotation of "faith" is: "Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing.")
The "theist twist" that Qwark uses is the same basic methodology used by ID proponents - let's redefine everything until all ideas are ambiguous, at which point there will be nothing left but opinions and then it can all be treated as equal and taught in our schools.
Well, faith would rather be that which give you a starting point. You have some faith and you act on it. You don't act solely on logic. Logic, based on observations, may change the course of your actions.
How do you suppose the scientific discoveries were made? The scientist had to start having some faith in a model, which he put to test by experiments he designed, and the results of those experiments confirmed or invalidated his faith.
What about the most widely accepted cosmological theory that 73% in the universe is "dark energy", 23% is "dark matter" and only 4% is matter that we can see and energy that we may detect as some kind of radiation? Is this not faith? For it speaks about things that we cannot see or touch. Still, you cannot say it has nothing to do with reason.
Therefore, one must conclude that faith does not exclude reason, but there is a dialectical relation between faith and reason.
BEDE - I completely disagree with your assessment. Scientists don't have faith in models before they have been confirmed through rigorous testing. For example, Einstein didn't have faith in relativity before it was confirmed through testing and observation. He speculated that such a thing might be the case, but speculation is not synonymous with faith. Scientists speculate that there is such a thing as dark matter and dark energy. Such speculation is called a "hypothesis." A theory is different than a hypothesis, in that, it is based on a framework of facts and observations. A theory in the scientific sense means something different than what it means to lay people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory
There are many things we cannot see or touch but we can observe them indirectly through instrumentation and/or inference. It is my understanding that dark matter is speculated to exist because of a thing called gravitational lensing which only occurs when light bends around matter. We cannot directly see dark matter because it doesn't emit light in a spectrum that is detectable, however, it is possible that it could be confirmed to exist through inference or other methods.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter
I stand by my statement that faith is absolutely antithetical to reason. Thanks for the comment.
about the experience thing i do have some doubts. "like a person thinking of a family member and then a few seconds or minutes later the phone rings and it is the family member they were thinking about." i agree but how many times we think about a person and nobody calls??
we remember things that happened and forget about the rest. if you analyse, the things that has not happened are more than that happened. it is just one form of bias and selective memory that make as think that "stuff happens"
jomine - Yes, you are spot on. Selection bias, as it is called, is one possible explanation for these seemingly mysterious events. Even if we didn't have a plausible explanation for why mysterious things happen, it still wouldn't justify throwing up our hands and attributing them to the supernatural. This has been done prematurely on many occasions in the past, but then the scientific method was put to use and discovered that natural mechanisms were at work.
Thanks for the comment.
EXCELLENT READ!
Excellent article!
Logic and reason are what have built this civilization. Without them, humanity's "shining moment" in the sun would crumble. I find it disturbing that so many unintelligent people hold such sway over politics that could affect the direction of education in the United States.
I agree with most everything you say in your article, but I think there is far more to the subject of "faith."
DEFINITIONS
There are many definitions for the word. Most people associate the word "faith" with the word "belief." They are related, certainly. And what someone believes is not necessarily truth or reality, though some could argue that each individual reality is based largely on one's personal beliefs, but that veers into the realm of "delusion."
The "faith" used by Jesus to perform all of his miracles is not found in the dictionary. The "faith" used by Peter, when he stepped out of his storm-tossed boat to talk a moment on the water, is transcendent. The "faith" of Moses to part the sea goes beyond mere belief.
When I was in calculus class in college, the professor drew a graph of the derivative of one function. For the life of me, I cannot remember what the function was, but the graph has stayed with me all these years. It showed a horizontal line along the X-axis at Y=0, with a discontinuity at X=0. At that value of X, Y= +/- infinity. I still get goose bumps thinking about it, for this was a picture of the constraints of "faith" and extraordinary, cause-and-effect miracles. If X is a measure of ego, and Y is a measure of power over physical reality, then this shows what a narrow window there is for performing miracles, such as your "levitation of a car."
Thirty-seven years ago, I discovered the mechanics of creation and have used them dozens of times in various ways. The results were always instantaneous. In one of my own Hubs, I analyze one of these "miracles."
Faith, as I define it (and I could just as easily have created a different word), is that of perfect, 100% confidence.
"BLIND FAITH" IS AN OXYMORON
Now, some have called my definition "crazy." For instance, someone could have faith that they could fly off the top of a tower and land safely on the ground, as Simon the Magician did in the Paul Newman movie, "The Silver Chalace," only to go splat! Such blind belief is not "faith" by my definition. It is, instead, delusion. The proof is in the splat. And there is no such thing as "blind faith" by this definition. That would be an oxymoron. Such is never blind, but there are many who dwell in blind belief. Like the strange belief that the Bible says that Earth and the universe are only 6,000 years old. The error is in the interpretation. There is a timeline in Genesis compatible with those of science, but you have to know how to look. It takes work. Most who read the Bible are too lazy.
At 100% confidence (plus 100% humility--the antidote to ego), one has infinite power over physical reality. Yet, even at 0.0000001% ego (or 99.99999999% confidence), one has zero power as a non-physical, spiritual and immortal source of creation.
MIRACLES ARE EASY!
Miracles are easy. We just make it tough on ourselves by our disbelief.
And proof? Scientists (skeptics) make a big mistake with their demand for proof. "Skepticism" is the problem. I know this is the S.O.P. for a scientist, but the definition of scientific method requires scientists to be objective and without bias. Alas! Skepticism contains an inherent bias -- that of doubt.
Any scientist knows that an experiment requires the right ingredients. If you are studying fire, you don't go throwing buckets of water all over the laboratory. If you are performing a sensitive chemical analysis, you don't go throwing chunks of elemental sodium in the test tube (boom!). If you are studying "faith" (100% confidence), you don't go spraying doubt (an ingredient of skepticism) all over the room.
IN A PIG'S EAR
Each of us was created in the image of God (at least according to Genesis 1:26). That means scientists, too. And that means that skeptical scientists, attempting to study the paranormal, are spraying doubt all over the experiment. Not very smart for someone with a college degree. That's why the guy on the rescue mission to Earth said that selling "faith" to such skeptics was like trying to make a silk purse from a pig's ear. It ain't gonna happen.
A group of scientists are creating against the success of such an experiment, so naturally it fails. And that's why the CIA had such a problem making remote viewing work, when it could have been such a cool tool during the Cold War. Oh well. Even scientists can have their dumb moments, especially when ego gets involved. Like the time the Manhattan Project scientists were trying feverishly to solve the wear and tear from friction on the parts of their device. Or when the powers that be in North American anthropology ridiculed those who talked about anything "pre-Clovis." That kind of childish hypocrisy only gives those who have "blind belief" (not faith), "reason" to diss science. And that's a tragedy, especially in the political arena, where the numbers of "blindly faithful" appear to be growing.
Perhaps "faith" (as I define it) is not entirely incompatible with reason. I have used a certain amount of reason to analyze the "faith" I've come to know from my experiences with miracles and the mechanics of creation. Yet, I have to agree with you that they are very much like apples and oranges, because "faith" covers the realm of creation, which is discontinuous in nature. Physical reality, on the other hand -- the realm studied by science -- is based on continuity (the antithesis of discontinuity).
UNREASONABLE
Yes, "faith" (even as I define it) is unreasonable. And there are many cases when you really do want someone who is unreasonable. Chuck Yeager was unreasonable when he broke the so-called "sound barrier." Audie Murphy was unreasonable when he became the most decorated hero during World War II. Einstein went beyond reason when he imagined Relativity. Some things require going beyond reason. It's a shame that those who profess to embrace "faith" all too frequently find their way into delusion -- entirely the wrong direction.
Thanks for writing this article. It's given me some good ideas for hubs to write. Now, I'll just have to find some time to write them. I found your writing to represent a large portion of mainstream thought--the idea that faith and reason don't fit together unless you compartmentalize them. However, I find this line of thinking to be illogical.
I follow both faith and reason, and they are indispensable to each other. I'd even argue that you, whether you acknowledge it or not, do the same. For example, how do you know you can know things through reason? You can't prove it. If you tried to use proof or logic to show you can know things through reason, you'd be creating a circular argument--using reason to prove reason. Likewise, how do you know you can know things through observation? Again, you can't prove it, and to use observations--it's always been this way--as your proof would again be a circular argument. We have no provable basis to know how we know things. Instead, we have, as you define faith, "firm belief in something for which there is no proof." We all have faith.
avangend 2 years ago
This is an excellent article, but I do wish to take a bit of a counter-stance. Your Webster definition says that faith is "a belief in something for which there is no proof." To go from your automobile example, you cannot prove that your car will not blow up until you actually turn it on. One can calculate odds, perhaps, but one cannot "prove" the future. Like you said, it very reasonable to believe that your car will indeed remain intact when you turn the ignition, but I will hold that there is an element of faith there, one based on reason. Because you have seen it repeatedly, reason leads you to believe that this outcome will happen repeatedly. Pavlov's dogs, by this definition, had faith.
In my opinion, then, a "good" faith is something based on reason, while a "bad" faith lends itself the product of superstition.