LOGIC
Are Faith and Reason Irreconcilable? by Martin Cothran
IT
is not unusual in today's postmodern world to hear people criticize the idea of "binaries"—the idea that things can be classed into two distinctive groups. The distinction between males and females, right or wrong, beautiful and ugly, true or false—all of these distinctions are now to be interrogated and seen as questionable. And, of course, there are those who point out that the people who are opposed to thinking in binaries can be distinguished from people who don't oppose such thinking, which implies that there is at least one binary—that between people who oppose binaries and people who don't. In the long history of human thought there has been much discussion about two things that have often been categorized as binaries: faith and reason. There are many people who think that these two things are irreconcilable. Are they right? Martin Cothran is the editor of The Classical Teacher and author of Traditional Logic Books I & II, Material Logic, and Classical Rhetoric.
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Are Faith and Reason Irreconcilable?
Let's first define our terms. What do we mean by "faith" and "reason"? By the term "faith" we usually mean a sentiment of belief or trust. When I say, "I believe in him," it means I trust the person, usually based on what is already known about his character. But most often we use the term "faith" to refer to the religious faith we have in God. This is often how the word is used in the Bible. As Mortimer Adler once pointed out, "In the Old Testament, the term 'faith' has the sense of absolute steadfastness, assurance, and loyalty." The word "faith" does not refer to anything we can empirically prove or be certain about. We do not know that the person is as good or trustworthy as we think, or that God is God, but we believe. The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard is famous for having characterized faith as a "leap." This has given us the expression "leap of faith." This conception of faith has been the cause of so many people considering faith to be a merely subjective thing, opposed to reason. We often think of the "leap of faith" MemoriaPress.com
