Faith, Doubt, and Reason

you here at Villanova it's my pleasure to welcome here in this afternoon I have to put in a shameless plug for an event were sponsoring next week there is a conference that will be next Thursday April 12 called to ministry and it features jean-luc very own William Desmond and Amy Hollywood portions of that event are open to the public and you can check out our web site calendars find out more information because you're most welcome to attend today we're fortunate to have Peter crepe with us he is professor of philosophy at Boston College he also actually taught here at Villanova fifth time and what he tells you is the Jurassic age but I think it was a little more professor crakes is the author of more than 67 books he's incredibly thick his volumes include Christianity from our pagans handbook of Christian apologetics fundamentals of the faith between Allah and Jesus what Christians can learn from Muslims and a relatively new novel called an ocean full of leaders he's been honored with various awards and forms of recognition including the Woodrow Wilson fellowship and Yellowstone Fellowship he speaks excessively around the country if you go to his website you'll see a running time of events that happened books nearly every weekend sometimes during the week as well and it was way back to speak on a wide range of topics both formal academic lecture Torian Cox's all-in why recognition I think that the many years of scholarship service to be a cofee Academy and the church th offered his dog for us today is called faith thank you all for coming out especially to hear me talk about a subject that sounds very abstract let's start with doubt is it good or bad I like simple questions and simple answers so here's a simple question is this a good thing or a bad thing well before we answer that question let's ask another question how do we find out well if we're Christians we'll start with our ultimate standard Christ what does he think what you think about Christ is much less important than what Christ thinks about you and therefore what your doubt faith or reason thinks about Christ is also less important than what Christ thinks about your faith doubt or reason so let's ask him well on the one hand he always encouraged questions he never once said to his disciples don't ask stupid questions he was a rabbi and next to Socrates the rabbi's are the most famous for asking questions classic Jewish joke why does a rabbi always answer a question with another question answer why shouldn't a rabbi answer a question with another question on the other hand he did discourage doubts on numerous occasions he says to his disciples why did you doubt when Peter started walking on the water and then sank when Thomas said he wouldn't believe unless he touched his wounds he's certainly big on faith and doubt is in some sense the opposite of faith so we've got apparently contradictory data here but whenever you have apparently contradictory data which you often do in theology freewill and predestination good stuff and bad stuff you do the same thing as you do in science you find a hypothesis that includes all the data to do that you probably need distinctions so let's start with two kinds of faith and two kinds of doubt one definition of faith is an act of the intellect that embraces an idea without proof the object of faith then is an idea a proposition another kind of faith is personal trust in a person Thomas Aquinas says a faith has two objects a proximate object and an ultimate object the proximate object is the kreen's and the ultimate object is God that's like saying I I trust this road because I trust the road map parallel to that there would be two kinds of doubt distrust in an idea or distrust in a person that distinction I think is essential for answering an argument from the Oxford logician Clifford which he implied in his famous rule Clifford's rule which is essentially that it is always amoral it is always a CLE unjustifiable to accept any idea or to believe any idea without sufficient evidence that's very true in science and it's very wrong in religion and it's always also very wrong in life suppose a policeman came into this room right now and said professor Craig we have to interrupt your lecture we're sorry we're taking it down to the police office because we have evidence that your wife just chopped the heads off of 13 of your neighbors back in Boston and we have photographic evidence so we want your sworn testimony I would say no you bet that is impossible couldn't happen they said but but but we've got evidence I say yeah but I got more evidence than you love you don't know where I do she would never do that impossible well that evidence doesn't register on the police blotter in one of the famous trial scenes in world literature Dimitri Karma's off in dusty I see great novel The Brothers Karamazov who is innocent is a tried and found guilty for the murder of his father and nobody makes a mistake the evidence gatherers are perfectly objective and the the judge is perfectly objective and there's no injustice or irrationality at all in the trial and yet it's a mistrial because although they understand the evidence they don't understand him they don't understand his sense of honor so there's two different kinds of evidence here there's the evidence about who you are and there's the evidence about what in fact is in an impersonal and abstract sense troupe CS Louis wrote an essay entitled on obstinacy in belief which answered the charge that very many atheists lay on the backs of Christians namely that we are intellectually cowardly and weak thinkers because we don't demand absolute evidence for things we we don't believe in Clifford's rule for instance even after we pray for something good and God doesn't give it to us we don't say therefore God is not trustable and even after horrors like the Holocaust we can still believe that God is good well that seems like simply intellectual obstinacy and he argues that that would be true if religious belief were a scientific hypothesis but it isn't we must move from the logic of the relationship between ideas into the logic of relationships among persons and those two are not the same thing we have to throw a third term into our hopper here and relate them the term is reason doubt has a certain relationship to reason on the one hand it holds back from saying that there is enough rational evidence so that I can rationally say that this is rationally certain on the other hand doubt Spurs reason that is in one sense an opponent to reason and in the other sense is a friend of reason it's sort of the ants and the pants that keep your mind moving and it does the same thing to faith in one sense it weakens faith in another sense it strengthens faith this is getting more and more confusing so if I had a blackboard here I would make a chart and I would distinguish four different areas where faith doubt and reason work one area is science one is philosophy one is religion and one is life or common sense and if I had that chart here and you can have it in your mind here we could go through each of these three mental attitudes doubt faith and reason and ask what is the appropriate form of it in each of these areas and we would see that the appropriate form is not the same at all in these four different areas I doubt very good for science necessary beginning for science first step of the scientific method is not to gather evidence or to form a hypothesis or even to gather data first step of the scientific method is not even to ask a question first step of the scientific method is to erase all prejudices from your mind assume nothing science is like politics if you assume nothing you'll probably succeed if you begin with doubt you might end with certainty but if you begin with certainty you'll end in doubt in religion however the role of doubt is quite different doubt towards God as the opposite of personal faith in God is deadly it cuts the umbilical cord and you don't get born you get dead and even doubting certain ideas certain ideas is a bad thing whereas doubting all other ideas is a good thing if there are certain ideas that come from God's mind if there is such a thing as divine revelation then it is perfectly proper and perfectly reasonable to say God said it I believe it that settles it unless God is not God God preached what is to my mind the shortest sermon ever preached when he revealed to Saint Katherine in a mystical experience that she needed to learn only two things and each of these two things could be expressed in two words so all of divine revelation to be summarized in four words think number one I'm God think number two you're not we keep forgetting that second thing so to doubt God's ideas if we have access to God's ideas is a bad thing to doubt human ideas is a good and necessary thing big distinction go to philosophy uh is that a good thing well obviously but is it where you begin must philosophy begin where science begins Descartes think so the discourse on method one of the most influential philosophy texts ever written it really starts the whole new thing called modern philosophy by a new method assumes that philosophy should work by the scientific method Descartes noticed that all the sciences in his day were progressing remarkably and he isolated the common factor that caused their immense progress namely scientific method so he said let's apply it to philosophy it's a noble and necessary experiment of course it didn't work I've never in my life met a living philosopher who called himself an Orthodox Cartesian everyone in Mis Descartes is great but nobody is his disciple I myself think that Socrates is a better guide than Descartes both are masters at questions but Socrates begins with faith and then doubts everything interlocutor what is your opinion now let's examine it Descartes tries to begin with nothing with doubt and proceed to something I don't that works but with that proviso Dow it's very important in philosophy and in life if we asked more questions and had more doubts we would probably be richer we would certainly be more content our economy would probably go down the drain but we would we would ask do we really need this but life also contains persons of all those ideas and to doubt persons to start with universal doubt to say in conversation when a friend innocently says you know the wind is blowing very hard today to reply prove it I won't believe it unless you proved it or when somebody says I just met such and such a person I would say I won't believe it unless you show them to me that would not only be a conversation stopper that would be a life stopper notice that religion is more like common sense or like life than it is like either philosophy or like science with regard to doubt let's ask about faith in these four areas there's not much room for faith in science maybe a provisional faith in your teacher or some great scientist so that you direct your attention to a respectable theory rather than a disreputable one but the only place I think you need a strong faith in science is a faith in science itself that is faith in the enterprise faith in the possibility of it faith in reason I don't think that there is in science or for that matter in philosophy the possibility of proving by a scientific or a philosophical method that reason is valid how could you how could you do what Descartes tried to do and try to prove the validity of reason itself by reason I mean reason concretely means these thousands of acts of reasoning that all of us do all the time about all sorts of things all right each of these is on trial now imagine everybody in this room is an act of reasoning and you're on trial are you guilty or innocent can we trust you or can we not trust you it's by an act of reasoning that I have to answer that question so one of these prisoners who's on trial has to jump up into the judges bench and say I declare all of us innocent what right does he have to do that if all reason is on trial then the active reason by which you validate reasoning is also on trial that's simply self-contradictory so I don't think the Cartesian program can work that sometimes called foundationalism although that's a an ambiguous and dangerous term so there is I think room for something like faith in the area of science that is faith in the power of human reason to know truth I see no scientific proof of that for that matter I see no philosophical proof of that Pascal argues contrary to Descartes that his doubt wasn't as deep as he thought it was that the ultimate level of doubt namely is the devil perhaps hypnotizing me are all my thoughts perhaps the direct effect of a an almost omniscient and omnipotent deceiver that was never really answered because my mind is either programmed rather like a computer Pascal invented the world's first working computer by the way it's either programmed by no mind at all by blind chance or it's programmed by a mind that's either wicked or foolish or both or it's programmed by a mind that's neither wicked nor foolish so it's either chance Satan or God that programmed the hardware in my computer and if it's either Satan or chance there's no reason for me to trust the computer I came here by plane if I had heard on the public address system the following announcement namely both the pilots are dead but not to worry because the plane is on autopilot and this autopilot was a program by a computer and this computer in turn was programmed by a football player stamping on computer cards with spiked shoes last night or by someone throwing a bunch of marbles at the keyboard would I settle back into my seat comfortably assured that the plane would land no I'd start praying so I don't really see how natural selection justifies the brilliance of our inherent programming and of course if the devil programmed you you can't trust him so you need something like God to validate reason but on the other hand you need something like reason to validate God so we're in the Cartesian Circle in religion obviously faith is not only a good thing but it's necessary for salvation it's the first of the three part a biblical cord that plugs you into God it's also necessary for wisdom unless you believe you will not understand it also true that unless you understand you will not believe but we'll get to that later when we get to reason finally in life or in common sense faith is absolutely necessary for persons and is necessary for ideas because most of the things that we learn we learn through faith faith in human Authority your textbooks your teachers your parents your friends you don't start with doubt you start with faith and then you check it out by reason so once again religion resembles life more than it resembles either science or philosophy notice I'm not talking about theology I'm just talking about religion theology can be seen either as a subdivision of philosophy philosophical theology or as a subdivision of religion revealed theology finally reason in all four areas of human life you need reason there's a significant difference as to the form it takes in the four areas but it's the only one of these three attitudes which has an unqualified affirmative in all four areas and yet I wonder if it can begin any one of those four areas life begins with experience science begins with with questioning religion begins with faith what this philosophy began with all of them above well we need to go further into reason we talked about doubt and faith but we didn't talk that much about reason and especially when we are going to think about the relation among these three things reason is probably going to be the the mediator between faith and doubt or the judge of the role of faith and the role of doubt so it's essential to define reason let's start historically the very word reason as a history it doesn't mean the same thing in all areas like like a number in fact you can learn much about the history of consciousness by looking at the different uses of the word reason in ancient times in pre Socratic times reason was not yet isolated and distinguished as a differentiated psychic function reason meant simply everything that distinguishes man from the beasts including intuition and mystical experience and and wisdom and it was incarnated in in ritual and in institutions and in everything that distinguished men from the Beast enter Socrates the fact that there was no Socrates in the Orient was a shattering event and came to subsequently distinguished the two halves of the world the Orient is certainly not intellectually inferior to the Occident but because it had no Socrates it didn't make that the stinking between the rational and the non rational what reason meant to Socrates was essentially logic that is proof that is having reasons for your wisdom that involved a withdrawal an abstraction a distinguishing of oneself from the object a a critical looking at the object instead of a an inherent participation in the object something like the distinction Gabrielle Marcel mix between problems and mysteries Socrates the first person who took lived mysteries and turned them into thought problems and that was an immense advance but it also had an immense price philosophy emerges from that the sciences until fairly recently were children who lived in the home of philosophy and only when they got old enough did they leave home and set up housekeeping on their own and that happened only sometime between the Renaissance and Newton even as late as Newton his great physical work is called principles of natural philosophy but Descartes is the first one who narrowed reason and clearly distinguished a reason in the sense that we usually use it today from reason in an ancient broader more Socratic sense the distinction between de cartes meaning of reason and socrates meaning of reason can be best seen by the standard of plato's divided line in the republic you remember there are four levels of reason there corresponding to the four levels of being it's a summary of Plato's epistemology as well as the metaphysics and the first level is images pictures representations copies of concrete real things the second level is the direct experience of those concretely real individual things the third level is mathematical and logical reasoning if-then reasoning and the fourth level is the intuition into a platonic form an absolute like justice ah an education goes from level one through level four and many Platonic dialogues the Republic itself for instance can be outlined by the the process of a mine through those four levels now one way of seeing the difference between des cartes meaning of reason and Socrates is to look at the discourse and method the very first paragraph when he says reason is by nature equal in all men and we all have as much of it as we need and we all have the same thing essentially well that can apply only to two of the four levels it certainly does not apply to level four we don't have equal wisdom and I don't think it applies to level one we don't have equal opinions but if we evaluate our opinions by the twofold scientific method of empirical data and quantitative mathematical and logical reasoning then we become scientists so in a sense the essence of science is to lop off level one and level four of the divided line and combine level two and three Descartes of course emphasized level three whereas the more Baconian tradition in science emphasizes the empirical level two but it's the combination of the two that produces science and that's a narrowing of reason such that we all have the same amount of it obviously I can do logic a little faster than my students but it's not a different logic and someone who has more data more sense experience knows more facts than someone who has less but the one who knows less can always check up on those facts and catch up to the one who has more so Descartes is right that is a kind of reason that is equal enter David Hume and you have a fourth notion of reason which is such a narrowing that he seems to have Plato in mind there in saying that he's going to reverse Plato's cave he's going to send you into the cave instead of out of it he's going to undo Hamlet's famous saying to Horatio when Horatio doesn't believe in ghosts and yet he sees Hamlet's father's ghost and doesn't know what to think and Hamlet says to him Horatio there are more things in heaven and earth that are dreamed of in your philosophy well that's Shakespeare's philosophy and that's Plato's philosophy and that's the point of the cave Hume said no that's exactly wrong there were far fewer things in heaven and earth that are dreamed of in your philosophy we know far less than we think we know not because our knowledge is not as big as reality but because it's too big Hume is certainly the most influential skeptic in the history of human thought he had to be answered enter can't but the only way Kant could see to answer Hume was by another redefinition of reason itself a fifth meaning of reason the Copernican revolution according to which reason constructs everything knowable rather discovers it thus there is no knowledge of things in themselves at all possible in principle ever by the human mind which to my mind is a more serious skepticism than even Hume because humans at least a probabilistic and narrower until we get in reaction to all of this Enlightenment rationalism especially in the 19th century a kind of existentialism or romanticism which is something like a return to the ancient holistic more intuitive notion of reason but with a modern dress and just because seven is the magical number I have to add a seventh one so I'll say that deconstructionism is the seventh and most apocalyptic I can't even finish the sentence because my mother who is present whenever I speak is frowning now I can feel her frowning she used to say to me if you can't say something nice about somebody don't say anything at all so I won't say anything more about because action ISM except to say in its own words that all reasoning is rationalizing and it's all a power struggle and there's nothing more than that well which of these seven meanings of reason am I going to talk about in my talk socrates that is my choice I am the talker you are the listener you have to follow me I've got the power here so get somebody else to talk about the other six notions of reason but when I talk about the relation between reason and doubt and reason and faith that is what I will use to summarize probably the single most important distinction that I've been trying to make in perhaps two rambling and confused way let's say that all three of these things reason faith and doubt have at least two different levels a deeper more holistic and existential level of meaning and a surface meaning especially today first of all faith if in the surface meaning it's an opinion faith in an idea in the deeper meaning it's a relationship with a person a kind of fidelity a kind of commitment doubt doubt in the surface meaning is suspension of judgment not affirming an idea the kind of agnosticism doubt in a deeper more holistic and existential sense is a a doubt of a person doubt of a relationship with a person whether God or yourself or somebody else and thus it is an existential crisis not just a crisis of thought and finally reason reason on the surface is simply empirical facts plus logical consistency in a deeper sense it's wisdom an understanding of the things they're most important to understand the typically modern mind is suspicious of that it thinks that the only things teachable are the things that aren't really worth teaching and the things that are the most worth teaching are the to teach in other words you can't be profound and clear at the same time has there ever been a philosopher since Thomas Aquinas who was both very profound and very clear at the same time the English Channel seems to make that impossible even though there's the Chunnel now and there's a lot of philosophical bridges over the channel and analytic philosophers and continental philosophers are talking to each other still continental philosophers sound like muttering locomotives and English speaking philosophers sound like chirping birds so they're still they're still not being both clear and profound at the same time all right we now come to the question of the relation between faith and reason especially religious faith and Socratic recent the prime and a legate here the the touchstone is of course Aquinas let me try to summarize Aquinas his position before I related to other positions and other alternatives when Aquinas talks about faith and reason he's talking about intellectual faith a faith in propositions not the act of faith not the personal relationship of faith imagine all the truths known by reason by human reason unaided by faith in God faith in divine revelation in one class and imagined in another class all the propositions that are known by faith that is religious faith in the Western sense divine revelation for a Jew a Christian or a Muslim is a public thing it comes in propositions divine revelation in the Orient for a Hindu or a Buddhist or a Taoist does not come in propositions it comes only in some sort of mystical experience so we're talking about two classes of propositions here truths known by faith and truths known by reason how are they related well there are five possible answers to that question whenever you have any two things or classes of things there are five possible relations between let's say a and B either a is a part of B or B is a part of a or a and B are identical or a and B are simply separate or else a and B overlap so those are five possible epistemologies of faith and reason so to speak one of them would be that faith is totally surrounded by reason has no independence from reason if reason validates it fine if not not that's enlightenment rationalism that's Clifford's rule the second position would be an even more extreme rationalism which I would identify with both Spinoza and Hegel they would identify reason in faith or say that the real is the rational and the rational is the real and therefore there's no room for faith at all unless it's identical with reason a a third possibility would be the separation between the two things I would call that a kind of typically Reformation a separation of well the natural and supernatural things of faith are affirm things of reason are affirmed but there's a skepticism of the interlocking of them and the interlocking of them the fourth possibility would be the tow mystic and Augustinian position that there are three categories the categories of propositions that can be known by reason alone most of the propositions of natural science and common sense those things that can be known by faith alone like the Trinity and the Incarnation and those things that can be known by either faith or reason or both faith and reason such as that God exists that he's one that he's good natural moral law and so on then finally a fifth and opposite extreme from enlightenment rationalism would be the fiddy ISM that says reason has no independence of faith that reason is totally surrounded by faith this could be simply a naivete or an ignorant of reason or it could be a kind of pragmatism so the faith will be a secular faith or it could be perhaps a Pascal Yin critique of Cartesian foundationalism which says that since reason cannot justify itself faith has to justify it but that too would not necessarily be a religious faith you could ground your faith and reason on a religious faith or you could ground it on a human faith or a human need I don't know by the way myself the answer to that question I've been puzzling over the Descartes versus Pascal argument about the justification of reason and although I don't see how Descartes can hold up I'm a little troubled by Pascal's fiddy ISM but let's turn to Pascal see what he says about doubt faith and reason it's a very famous Paul say number 170 first don't quote it and then I'll comment on it he says one must know when it is right to doubt to affirm to submit anyone who does otherwise does not understand the force of reason some men run counter to these three principles either affirming that everything can be proved because they know nothing about proof or doubting everything because they do not know when to submit or always submitting because they do not know when judgment is called for see what he's doing here he's taking these three attitudes doubting what he calls affirming by which I think he means affirming that I have rational certainty certainty by reason and then finally submitting which I think means for him faith faith in authority uh since he's a traditional Catholic he doesn't believe that faith is a psychological attitude that you created yourself by pushing the faith button but faith is simply a response to divine revelation so you have these three attitudes doubting affirming and submitting so you could make two errors about affirming or the role of reason it could be too great or it could be too little too great would be rationalism too little with the irrationalism which would be either skepticism Allah home or fiddy ISM Allah Luther or maybe Pascal so he says some men run counter to these three principles either affirming that everything can be proved this is rationalism because they know nothing about proof that's a very severe critique of Descartes or doubting everything because they do not know when to submit or always submitting because they don't know when judgment is called for so imagine down faith and reason in a kind of a circle with arrows going round let's say clockwise and doubt is that twelve o'clock and faith is at 4 o'clock and reason is at 8 o'clock if you start with doubt the only way out is faith if you start with faith you absolutely need reason if you start with reason you absolutely need doubt if everything is doubt you're a skeptic there's no room for either reason or faith how do you get out of that well you get out of that by faith and then then by reason if everything is faith you're naive you're a fittest there's no room for either reason or doubt how do you get out of that by reason by expanding your mind up if all is reason you're a rationalist and there's no need for either room for either down or faith how do you get out of that at that by doubt but so skepticism needs faith fiddy ISM these reason rationalism needs doubt you need all three it's like the Willie Nelson song you gotta know when to fold what are the three I'm not a card shark but it's like the Willie Nelson song so you need all three now have I either defined the question very simply and very clearly so that even though you don't have an answer you can very easily find one for yourself or have I given you a definite answer and proved it conclusively to you or have I simply begun a little more confusion in your mind so that the the gray matter is moving and I've set up a kind of a diving board to plunge into the pool of discussion it's the third thing that I tried to do so if you think that I've done neither the first thing the second thing I failed but if you feel a bit confused but slightly interested at this point then I've succeeded now I like I like to keep my talks fairly short so that we can keep the question-and-answer sessions fairly long and I often speak to Catholic audiences and Catholics believe in purgatory so they they're used to the purgatory of a long monologue which is always dull because they hope to get to the dialogue which is a kind of a foretaste of heaven so I announce to you that your purgatory is over you're in heaven now questions please Aristotle was once lecturing in his university according to diogenes laërtius as gossipy lives of the great philosophers and there were no questions after his lecture and he was very disappointed so he said to the students if you were listening my lecture was on levels of intelligence in the universe and in my philosophy there were three the intelligence the gods the intelligence of us humans us mortals and the intelligence of the beasts and I said that we could distinguish human intelligence from both divine and animal intelligence by the very same thing humans alone asked questions the gods know too much to ask questions and the beasts know too little so if you have no questions shall I congratulate you on having risen to the level of the gods or shall i insult you upon having sunk to the level of the beasts after that there were questions any human beings among you yes that is not a thing for faith however questioning I feel I don't want to agree and questioning sometimes strength space because it makes a mess and here we are mental question yes there's three kinds of asking questions if you start with some sort of religious faith that means you're starting with some sort of relationship to God you believe in God you you talk to him now and then okay within that context questioning can be either a kind of talking to God like jokes questioning hey God why did you allow this what's going on here anyway sometimes it's calm sometime it's it's hysterical as it wasn't joke God likes that likes that very much at the end of the book of Job when God finally shows up he says to the three friends I'm mad at you for not having talked rightly about me as my servant drill pass and yet job asked all sorts of blasphemous questions and the three friends didn't they were polite they just said basically God is great and God is good let us thank him for our food amen with a few more poetic images but Jobe shook his fist in God's face and said you bloody butcher how can you get away with this anyway and God like that because it was in the context of prayer Joe prayed the three friends only theologist so that's that's religious doubt that's that within the relationship at the opposite extreme it could be doubt against the relationship Nicci's kind of doubt if there were a God how could I bear not to be a god consequently there are no gods that's a lived doubt a lived anti faith thirdly it can be simply neutral simply exploring ideas as possibly true and possibly false and that attitude I think is religiously neutral depending on whether it's taken up into the deposit of faith relationship or the negative anti-phase relationship so there's a kind of doubting that God likes when when two people marry each other they should expect to fight the family that fights together stays together if you keep it all in you don't fight it's a kind of a polite divorce already happening throw dishes at each other when my wife and I got married she's Italian and I'm Dutch who were opposites we thought we thought that the movie divorce italian style was a hilariously funny movie it was a movie about an italian guy who wanted to divorce his wife but he couldn't because divorce was illegal in italy so divorce italian style was murder so he hired a mafia hitman to murder his wife and he murdered everybody else but not her she survived and we thought it was funny because we were catholics and we don't believe in divorce Protestants do Protestants say that they can change the clear teaching of Jesus in all four Gospels that there is no divorce but the Catholic Church doesn't claim that kind of authority so so there is no such thing is divorced so we said we're going to fight a lot but we're never going to divorce because divorce doesn't exist we might murder each other but will never divorce so if we don't murder each other we'll stay together we thought that was great we just don't keep any lethal weapons in the house now that I think is a model for the relationship with God God is not comfortable God is not nice God is not a grandfather he's a father he makes trouble you're going to have a stormy relationship with him that's good that's good doubt both intellectual and lived as long as it's within that relationship ask any Orthodox Jew they know very well it's just that's traditional there you were you make a fist you shout as long as you do it in that context of faith and love even though you're testing both that's good it's wonder if you might comment on that because I think there's sometimes a crude tendency to assume that agustín's position is a bit more presupposing faith first and then reason and then Thomas is sort of you know reason first and then there's these kind of crude separations that you're either an Augustinian or at home Esther historians love to make simplifications everyone is either a little play tennis tore a little Aristotelian well Aristotle is 90% of latest and Thomas never thought of himself as a Thomas the always thought of himself as an Augustinian he quotes Augusta more than anybody both of them teach both things that faith seeks understanding and understanding seeks faith the emphasis is different the the method and attitude and and situation and how you're coming at it is different but but the content the teaching is clearly on this issue anyway not contradictory there are issues where Aquinas contradicts agustín's theory of sense perception for instance but those are technical issues no point is an Augustinian faith first and reason first that's like saying men are superior to women and women are superior to men they're both true everybody knows that so faith has to come first reason has to come first both right yep well let's take a concrete example let's take the famous problem of predestination in freewill in the context of faith that is for a Christian who believes that God has spoken and has created us with freewill and predestined us these are these are both data they're not hypotheses they're data so the hypothesis is a rational explanation of how the data fit together now one role of faith in is accepting the data a second role of faith is testing hypotheses by the whole of divine revelation the whole rest of the data if your notion of predestination for instance is a double Calvinism where God hates the Damned and sends them to hell against their will that obviously contradicts divine revelation and if your notion of free will is the Pelagian where you can buy your way into heaven by a big enough merit pile that obviously contradicts the data so once again it's faith that gives you the data both the specific data and the whole context but it's reason that figures out how these two things can be won how divine grace since it treats nature as itself and not as something else and since it it affirms and supports and perfects nature since it created it and loves it therefore predestination will have to not only first of all set up freewill in creating human nature but also using freewill as the instrument by which the predestination gets what it wants and then reason might say well let's find a human analogy for that a writer writes a story and if the writer really loves his characters he's not going to turn them into robots he's going to let them be free but it's the writers sovereign predestination that makes those characters free and there's not a thing that happens in a novel that isn't due to the author but there are many things in the novel that are due to the characters free will and other things that aren't in the setting so that's at least an analogy that's meaningful it's not a total answer to the question but that's reason starting with this whole context of faith exploring how much light we can get the two mistakes are to think that we just can't get any light about it or to think that the light can eliminate all mystery and all darkness like common sense philosophy and good theology I think are taking a little bit of light and expanding it a little bit but the more light you get also the more questions in the more darkness she had life wouldn't be interesting of that word so probably the most boring building the history of the world is the Crystal Palace built in the London exhibition at the end of the 19th century as a temple to science everything was transparent no mystery you could see through everything made of glass how boring my family was eradicated how would you recommend that I as you faithfuls you were trying to be a faithful Jew but dowing whether God exists how would you recommend that I proceed to think about if you were a secular Jew or something other than a practicing Orthodox Jew I'd say go to an Orthodox joke if you were an Orthodox Jew I would say you have a wealth in your tradition of answers to that questions more than any other people in the history of the world and the answers are always job like they're not easy but they're there there's a story I don't know this is apocryphal or or true to Jews and Auschwitz one was a rabbi who was very pious and said that God will deliver us God will never abandon his chosen people we are the chosen people we will not die the war will end Hitler will die we will not go to the gas chambers and the other was an atheist who had lost his faith because such horrible things how can God allow them to happen both men were targeted to the gas chamber and they knew that it was the end and as the rabbi entered in he looked around he said God will will help us God will help us and God didn't come and just before he closed the door he said there is no God with the rabbis last words the atheist entered the door chanting the shema yisrael he took his place there's always the option faith is never immune from doubt doubt was never immune from the possibility of faith the door is always open of course the Christian answer and I don't know how scandalous this would be to a Jew was that the answer to the question where was God in the Holocaust is he was gassed it was present in every one of the victims because that's the essence of the Christian story God solves the problem of evil by enduring it which is certainly not a philosophical solution I wish I knew somebody who knew Pascal much better than that and that's exactly the question I would ask them Pascal seems to me to be an incredibly rich thinker so you can get out of him not quite anything that you want but apparently opposite things like Agustin I mean Luther loved him council of trent loved him Agustin might be in fact the bridge back to pre Reformation unity on the one hand Pascal clearly is not an irrational astre SPECT for reason a role for reason on the other hand he's certainly an anti Cartesian and an anti foundationalist and doesn't see faith as subordinate to reason simply or reason is subordinate to faith simply it's easier to say what he would disagree with than exactly what he would agree with like well to take your last question first doubt can move both faith and reason forward in fact I'd say that doubt is necessary to move both faith and reason forward doubt in at least your present quality or amount of both faith and reason dissatisfaction Agustin's restless heart that kind of doubt secondly human flourishing human perfection human happiness is not just an intellectual contemplation of or understanding of the truth it's it's the whole human being being fulfilled by the truth of the beatific vision which is not just philosophy but seeing God face to face it's it's more like sex than philosophy Romeo just what wants to stare into Juliet's face that'sthat's his heaven a book about her wouldn't suffice but understanding is that necessary part of that he's got to he's got to penetrate into her mind but not just as a philosopher but as a person and whatever your vision of ultimate happiness the truth has to be more than your vision because otherwise it's boring otherwise it's it's something that we can put limits around and and say I will settle inside these walls and then there's always the but one of us what is outside the walls but God has no walls there's nothing outside of these infinite and therefore it's an eternal dynamic learning every day something new what does the verse of the great him say when we've been there ten thousand years bright shining as the Sun we've no less days to sing his praise and movies first begun and that song will have a new stanza all the time they haven't divided it in fact the division between the baby and the rest of the world which physically happens at birth doesn't register his mind his first word is usually mama well he calls everything that interest in mama and precocious kids who learn language at a very early age often can't use the word I appropriately they say johnny has to go to the bathroom now instead of I have to go to the bathroom now in other words self-consciousness comes rather late and keeps developing but certainly experience comes first in life you you pop out of the womb you say what's that and that's not skepticism is not rationalism it's not faith it's not doubt it's just experience Wow which is the three merges first I guess doubt let's see I got everything I wanted in the womb it tasted good now oh here comes mommy that tastes good mommy goes away I'm hungry mommy's not here how can that happen how can how can desire and satisfaction not be identical how can there be a gap between what I want and objective reality that's a that's a live doubt I think that comes before reason no I think faith comes first I trust mommy I trust everything I trust the world and then there's an experience that seems to betray my trust pain so I have to reconcile those two things and maybe a kind of very primitive reason does that let's see if I cry hard enough maybe mommy will come gee it didn't work that time let's see what else shall I do might be a poop in my pants maybe that'll make mommy come maybe there's a subconscious reasoning there I tell my students very often when they ask me for for essay topics I say I will not do that for you because the topic of an essay is a question in the essay is the answer and questions are so very precious that I'm not going to steal that work for you you've got to get the question out I'm getting a question out is much harder than you think great philosophers like Socrates who get the question out in a passionate way that changes their life even when they don't find answers answers on the other hand are probably more plentiful than you think students are usually pretty cynical or skeptical or or relativistic about about getting answers I think the world is full of answers it's difficult because there are too many answers not too few so I want you to get the question out so getting that question out that's that's precious so when that first emerges in the experience of pain I think that's probably when reason first emerges in an unconscious way but I guess they all begin together you have faith you have doubt have reason it's like the chicken and the egg neither one is temporarily first in fact you could say you can define a chicken as one eggs very clever way of making more eggs don't it all goes together yes from not only but as in almost everything reason is an an ingredient it's like light here's here's a hospital it's got a lot of ingredients in it it's got money and it's got walls and it's got doctors and it's got instruments and it's got rooms and it's got nurses but unless there's light you can't cure a patient or do an operation so nothing really can happen without the light of Reason so in order to have faith you've got to understand something of what the faith means you can't just have faith faith in something uh the standard model is that faith comes first then hope then love that's not the only way it can go uh there's two other ways it can go all three can happen at the same time or you can start with love for instance in The Brothers Karamazov when fathers are some of the wise old guru is about to die and Madame polikov who's a skeptic comes to him and confesses that she she's lost her faith in the next world and she's terrified of death because now she believes there's only going to be flowers on her grave prove to me that there's a God in an immortal soul and father's awesomeness is I can't prove it to you but you can prove it to yourself how I've been to college I know all the arguments no no you can prove it to yourself not not that way but if you if you really love your neighbor as if he is an immortal soul created the image of the God who has absolute love if you if you practice it you'll learn that it's true if you if you act as if it were true that will open the eye in in your heart and you will see that it is true it's an experiment so faith can arise through love love can produce faith ortho prac si can lead to orthodoxy or can work the other way around orthodoxy leads to orthopraxy I want to love the God that I believe in and hope always connects the two so I don't think there's any Universal schema that says first comes this then that then the other thing there's many different ways it can work I like to use the the analogy of the flower faith is the root and and Hope is the stem that makes it progress forward and and love is the the most beautiful fruit or flower on the fruit but that's not the only way of looking at it sometimes all three grow together yes sure long as the leaf in the light not a leap in the dark yeah it's got to be a leap when when you propose you don't say you don't you don't bring a battery of philosophers and lawyers to prove that it is the rational thing to do to accept a marriage proposal you say leap into my arms trust me yeah there's just plenty of rules relief's but it's not an arbitrary and irrational leap and it's not a merely subjective leap either it's not a I'm bored what shall I try boy let me try faith who knows maybe it'll poison me but maybe it'll be my food no this there's got to be there's got to be enough light to give some sort of justification for the leap but not so much light that it's so totally justified that you're an idiot you don't make it if if God gave us not enough light then all leaps of faith will be arbitrary and someone who's even minimally skeptical and minimally demanding of data wouldn't find enough and very few people would make the leap even those who wanted God and who loved him if they had no evidence they probably would make the leap on the other hand if he gave too much light then everybody find him it would be like the Sun nobody doubts the Sun so there wouldn't be any love needed have to love the Sun to know that the Sun exists so I think religion is like a marriage proposal you don't just propose to a stranger on the other hand you don't propose to somebody that you know like like a mathematical equation so there's no doubt you say trust me enough light for lovers not enough light for non lovers more questions good yeah insta lastik philosophy and aquinas for instance there are two different kinds of theology Agustin doesn't make this distinction sharply but Aquinas does there's a purely rational theology which is a part of philosophy Aristotle had that Aristotle proved by reason alone that there was one supreme god who was eternal and the first cause of everything he didn't get to love or Trinity or incarnation or anything like that by reason but he got pretty far secondly there's revealed theology which is the use of philosophical reasoning on the data of divine revelation everything that God has revealed in Salvation history as taught by the church and as summarized in the Bible so that's a an immense piece of data that's much much richer than simply natural or rational theology Agustin tends not to make many distinctions because he's so in love he just plunges into uh into things he's like a he's like a little kid at the at the beach he just jumps into the wave whereas Aquinas is more like a professional surfer who looks at the at the waves for an hour before he gets on his board both attitudes are good so considering the point you're making earlier about which might come first faith reason or doubt I wonder if it might be the case that you would actually expect our desire to come first mmm and then out of that all three sort of the concommittant would spring forward because it seems to be grounds for all three at the same time and almost eliminates a question which comes first that's a great answer as soon as you've said that I said yes of course you know it's like it's like that that sudden epiphany in the movie moon lighting when when Olivia Dukakis asks why do middle-aged men have affairs and and this guy was having an affair says well maybe it's because we were afraid of death that's it she says well maybe that's so or not I don't know I don't think about either death or Affairs but what you said is like that epiphany that's it yeah nation that that falls in the category of the reverberation of state Katherine Rosenberg gosh as I am Don you or not that God has he has more than enough evidence to believe which of course unless you mean by compelling evidence compelling to our will rather than to our reason so that there's no wiggle room and no possibility of freedom obviously not that kind of compulsion nor is it enough purely intellectual compulsion to make it impossible for the will to say no once the will looks at the evidence if I want to believe let's say that Villanova University is really a Oh a hotbed of Iranian terrorism I couldn't believe that if I talked to the people here or if I look at the evidence but if I wanted to write a crazy novel I could make myself believe that just for purposes of writing a crazy novel but as soon as I look at the real evidence I couldn't so there are some things that we can believe until we look at the evidence there are some things that we can't believe once we look at the evidence and then there are things in the middle now the evidence that God has given us in conscience in nature and if we're even aware of these historical facts in the history of the Jewish people and in Christ and in the church if we're aware of that how much evidence is there is it so strong that if we look honestly at the evidence we will inevitably be compelled to believe not quite not quite but I think if we look at the evidence with a pure desire for truth and an open mind it'll be very very strong there are examples of brilliant very good people who looked at the evidence and couldn't bring themselves to believe Camus I think of Kabul was a wonderfully honest atheist and he he knew the meaning of life was to be a saint and you couldn't be a saint without God but he couldn't bring himself to believe in God he agonized over that and dr. ruined the plague is his own alter ego because the good doctor believes all three things and is willing to be a martyr to save innocent human lives in the plague and yet he can't he can't doubt any one of these three things Camus himself met with a priest every week for the last year or two of his life trying to bring himself to believe and the priest apparently wasn't very good couldn't answer his questions adequately and he never got that far so it is possible to look with a pure honest mind at the evidence and still say no it's not quite enough for me but that's very rare the more you look the more you'll you'll see so that's like that's like the question is it is it possible to to meet Mother Teresa and still she think that she's a fake well if you're very wicked yeah is it possible well that brings in another dimension the moral is it possible to to look at Michelle Pfeiffer and think she's ugly well not really unless you have a very weird aesthetic sensibility so you know just enough wiggle room but what determines what determines whether you believe or not on the human level discounting divine grace or putting that in brackets what determines it is much more desire than intelligence if if your if your desire is pure if what you desire is that which God is namely truth goodness and beauty then you will almost certainly find him if your desire something other than that money sex and power then maybe you won't and probably won't Jesus solved the hermeneutical problem over which billions of tons of ink have been spilled in our age in a scandalously simple way in John's Gospel chapter 7 verse 17 I think it is when he said if your will were to do the will of my father you would understand my teaching and you would know that it comes from him so most problems of discernment are rooted in the will and desire more questions well you've been human-beings for at least a half hour congratulations thank you

Channel: villanovauniversity

Views: 37,517

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Keywords: villanova, Peter Kreeft, faith, doubt, reason

Id: Cd9GhnMlMWE

Length: 76min 57sec (4617 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 04 2012