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Faith and reason

Faith

R

eligious faith is at its core an acceptance of the diagnosis and cure
proposed by some religious tradition accompanied by an attempt to
live in the light of that tradition’s teachings. In monotheistic
traditions, it includes personal trust – trust in God as loving and faithful. In
nonmonotheistic contexts, it includes acceptance of the efficacy of
particular esoteric experiences achievable by prescribed efforts. There is
thus a close connection between a faith – the doctrinal content of a
religious tradition as embedded in its rites, institutions, practices, and its
oral or written texts – and faith or acceptance, and life in accord with
acceptance, of that tradition. Having faith involves having some
understanding, very limited in some cases and quite rich in others, of the
tradition within which the faith is had. Whether having faith involves some
sort of conflict with reason – believing against evidence, accepting on
authority an alternative no more favored by evidence than many others, or
the like – depends on what tradition one accepts, and what the evidence is.
Our focus here will be on the completion of the overall argument, which
requires facing the general question: how, besides appeal to religious
experiences and the sorts of arguments already considered, can one
rationally assess religious traditions. In terms of the issue we put off until
later in discussing the argument from design, how can competing large-
scale explanations be evaluated?

Knowledge

There is, of course, considerable skepticism that, if the explanations are
religious, rational assessment is possible. Religious belief is often
presented as far removed from “ordinary” and from “scientific” belief.
The current fashion is to think and speak of religious belief as a private
matter – supposedly religion and morality are deeply individual,
subjective affairs ruled by “the heart” (which here means something