RE: Reason and Faith

That is pretty interesting. The basic idea boils down to how both
"Reason" and "Faith" involve belief. I recently started reading C.S.
Lewis's Miracles and came across a part that tackles this issue. I don't
have the text with me, but it described how difficult it was for him to
see how a rational mind evolving without a rational mind having first
designed the system in which the mind formed. That is here I am at. It
seems unbelievable to me that our minds can be said to be rational if
indeed there is no such thing as an ultimate source of ration. To me it
looks like the atheists are saying, "Hey it's obvious to us that there
is no God, but it's also obvious that everything obeys rational
principles, but please don't think that means there is a ration-giver
behind such principles. That would make you a dumb, while we are the
brights."

-Josh

If everything is relative, why do you disagree when I say everything is
not relative?
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: Al Koop [mailto:koopa@gvsu.edu]
>>Sent: Saturday, December 20, 2003 11:45 AM
>>To: asa@calvin.edu
>>Subject: Reason and Faith
>>
>>The New York Times today has a worthwhile article on Faith and Reason
>>and how the two are inseperable and seemingly incompatible.
Especially
>>read the last several paragraphs, even if you don't like those at the
>>beginning of the essay.
>>
>>
>>
>>http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/20/arts/20FAIT.html?ex=1072936830&ei=1&
en=4
>>4d0cec78f5d3aad
>>
>>
>>Reason and Faith, Eternally Bound
>>
>>December 20, 2003
>> By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
>>
>>One might have expected the forces of Reason to be a bit
>>weary after a generation of battling postmodernism and
>>having its power and authority under constant scrutiny.
>>Reason's battles, though, continue unabated. Only now it
>>finds its opposition in the more unyielding claims of
>>religious faith. This latest conflict is over seemingly
>>incompatible ways of knowing the world. It is a conflict
>>between competing certainties: between followers of Faith,
>>who know because they believe, and followers of Reason, who
>>believe because they know.
>>
>>This battle echoes others taking place between
>>fundamentalist terror, which claims the authority of Faith,
>>and Western modernity, which claims the authority of
>>Reason. But some of Reason's combatants - as if reading
>>from the postmodernist strategy book - are also challenging
>>the heritage of the West, arguing that it, too, has been
>>riddled with absolutist faith, that the reasoned
>>achievements of the Enlightenment are still under threat
>>and that a new understanding of the past must take shape,
>>in which Reason's martyrdom and trials take center stage.
>>
>>One motivation for Reason's latest salvos is political. A
>>Gallup poll last year said that about 40 percent of
>>Americans considered themselves evangelicals or born-again
>>Christians. They include the president, the attorney
>>general, the speaker of the House and the House majority
>>leader.
>>
>>Critics of the Bush administration's policies sometimes
>>cite such beliefs as evidence of the administration's
>>potential fundamentalism and intolerance. In the recent
>>book "A Devil's Chaplain" (Houghton Mifflin, $24), for
>>example, Richard Dawkins, the Oxford University
>>evolutionary biologist, worries about American responses to
>>the attacks of 9/11 because "the United States is the most
>>religiose country in Christendom, and its born-again leader
>>is eyeball to eyeball with the most religiose people on
>>Earth."
>>
>>Mr. Dawkins has long been a harsh critic of religion, which
>>he considers a form of infectious virus that readily
>>replicates, spreading its distortions. Last summer he
>>lobbied in The Guardian for adopting "bright" as a noun to
>>mean atheist (as in "I'm a bright. You're a bright").
>>
>>The philosopher Daniel C. Dennett echoed his urgings in an
>>Op-Ed article in The New York Times. Mr. Dawkins and Mr.
>>Dennett argue that brights are a beleaguered group
>>confronting a growing religious right; they urge brights to
>>emerge from their closet and boldly proclaim their
>>identity.
>>
>>"So, what's the opposite of a bright?" Mr. Dawkins imagines
>>someone asking, "What would you call a religious person?"
>>
>>"What would you suggest?" he coyly responds.
>>
>>There are of
>>course approaches that are less blunt and more liberal
>>minded, but the sense of embattlement and polemic has
>>become familiar. In the recent book "The Closing of the
>>Western Mind" (Knopf, $30), for example, Charles Freeman
>>argues that Western history has to be retold. Over the
>>course of centuries, he points out, the ancient Greeks
>>recognized the importance of reason, giving birth to the
>>techniques of modern science and mathematics, and
>>establishing the foundations of the modern state. But then,
>>he writes, came "the closing of the Western mind."
>>
>>In the fourth and fifth century, he writes, the Greek
>>intellectual tradition "was destroyed by the political and
>>religious forces which made up the highly authoritarian
>>government of the late Roman empire," particularly with the
>>imposition of Christian orthodoxy. For a millennium
>>doctrine ruled. Reason became heresy.
>>
>>It is precisely this sort of heresy that Jennifer Michael
>>Hecht celebrates in "Doubt: A History" (HarperSanFrancisco,
>>$27.95), which outlines the views of those who rejected
>>dominant doctrines of faith or proclaimed disbelief in the
>>existence of God. Her loosely defined roster of doubters
>>ranges from the ancient Greeks to Zen Buddhists, along with
>>such familiar figures as Galileo, Hobbes, Gibbon, Tom Paine
>>and Thomas Jefferson.
>>
>>Ms. Hecht is more generous than Mr. Dawkins, noting that
>>just as there are believers who "refuse to consider the
>>reasonableness of doubt," so, too, there are nonbelievers
>>who "refuse to consider the feeling of faith." But her
>>sympathies are committed to the doubters, including such
>>unusual figures as the Islamic philosopher and physician
>>Abu Bakr al-Razi (854-925) and Annie Besant, who wrote a
>>"Gospel of Atheism" in 1876, helped reform London schools
>>with free meals and medical care, and later in life became
>>a theosophist and a translator of the Bhagavad-Gita.
>>
>>Ms. Hecht's goal is to provide an affirmative history for
>>doubters. "To be a doubter," she writes, "is a great old
>>allegiance, deserving quiet respect and open pride."
>>
>>What, though, is the nature of this doubt? Its demarcation
>>from faith is not as precise as these descriptions suggest.
>>Doubt can become a rigid orthodoxy in its own right. In
>>contemporary life, as Ms. Hecht seems to know, doubt has
>>become almost axiomatic (as if it were a matter of faith).
>>
>>Meanwhile faith itself is riddled with doubt. As Ms. Hecht
>>points out, many religious texts (like Job or Augustine's
>>"Confessions") are also accounts of doubt.
>>
>>Yet in these arguments faith is often portrayed as
>>monolithic, a host for intolerance and inquisition. And
>>while that has been part of many religions' history - and
>>is, as Mr. Freeman shows, part of the history of
>>Christianity - the nature of faith is far more complex.
>>
>>In his recent book, "The Transformation of American
>>Religion" (Free Press, $26) for example, the sociologist
>>Alan Wolfe suggests that evangelical Christians in the
>>United States cannot be thought of as they once were.
>>Religion, he argues, has been transformed by American
>>culture to become therapeutic, individualistic and less
>>interested in doctrine than in faith.
>>
>>Nor is faith always unreasonable. Religious beliefs were
>>fundamental to the abolition of slavery in the 19th century
>>and to the civil rights movement in the 20th. Faith may
>>even be latent in some of science's triumphs, inspiring
>>such figures as Newton and Kepler. The conviction that
>>there is an order to things, that the mind can comprehend
>>that order and that this order is not infinitely malleable,
>>those scientific beliefs may include elements of faith.
>>
>>Reason also has its own problems. Isaiah Berlin argued that
>>the Enlightenment led to the belief that human beings could
>>be reshaped according to reason's dictates. And out of that
>>science of human society, he argued, came such totalitarian
>>dystopias as the Soviet Union.
>>
>>Reason then, has its limits. The philosopher Robert
>>Fogelin's new book, "Walking the Tightrope of Reason"
>>(Oxford, $22) is subtitled "The Precarious Life of a
>>Rational Animal" because, he argues, reason's own processes
>>negotiate a precipice. Mr. Fogelin quotes Kant, who
>>described a dove who "cleaving the air in her free flight,
>>and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight
>>would be still easier in empty space."
>>
>>Failing to understand what keeps her aloft and taking a
>>leap of faith, the dove might set off in "empty space" - a
>>vacuum - and plummet. But reason might lead to the same
>>end: if something offers resistance then logically can't
>>one proceed more easily if it is eliminated? So why not
>>try?
>>
>>The problem is that the bird can never fully comprehend the
>>medium through which it experiences the world. In many
>>ways, Kant argued, neither could the mind. Reason is still
>>the only tool available for certain knowledge, but it also
>>presents questions it is unable to answer fully.
>>
>>Some of those questions may remain even after contemporary
>>battles cease: how much faith is involved in the workings
>>of reason and how much reason lies in the assertions of
>>faith?
>>
>>
>>
Received on Mon Dec 22 09:41:55 2003