The Virtue of Faith and Reason

Since my purposes assume a Christian conception of the virtues of faith and reason, I will naturally leave aside most non-Christian answers. An exception must be made where the Christian and non-Christian are in dialogue and demonstration is either offered or else avoided. Both sides will lay obligations on the other. The believer informs the unbeliever that eternal life and everlasting judgment hang in the balance upon faith. The unbeliever demands in return that the believer provide some sufficient level of evidence to justify his commitment.

Latent in each claim is the assumption that the other is acting both irrationally and immorally. Furthermore, these two vices do not simply lay side by side. What both sides seem to understand is that there is a kind of virtue to using one’s mind in the right way. Rationality cannot be divorced from morality. There may be moral causes (whether in prior virtue or vice) to reasons concluded, but what both believer and unbeliever are saying up front is that it is immoral to be so unreasonable.

The question of the relative virtues of faith and reason is not neutral to which worldview is correct. Nor is this only the case about faith. Reason, too, will take on a different role in one view versus the other, and their virtues will depend upon what each side considers to be proper function.

To the extreme rationalist, faith is never virtuous; and to the extreme fideist, reason is never virtuous. Most serious thinkers do not live on these outermost extremes. Instead, the bulk of the controversy will settle on the virtue of proper order and therefore the alleged seat of judgment. Whichever “comes first” is conceived of as being judge, jury, and executioner of the other. This is precisely the impression that my thesis is meant to expose as false. 

Turretin spoke for the majority of the earliest Protestants in holding that reason was the “instrument of faith” rather than “the foundation of faith,”1 or to put it another way, reason has a ministerial use (servant) rather than a magisterial use (despot). Yet this did not mean that there was no sense in which reason grounded faith. Elsewhere he distinguishes, “Although the human understanding is very dark, yet there still remains in it some rays of natural light and certain first principles, the truth of which is unquestionable. . . . These first principles are true not only in nature, but also in grace and the mysteries of faith. Faith, so far from destroying, on the contrary, borrows them from reason and uses them to strengthen its own doctrines.”2

With the Enlightenment, theological prolegomena became entrenched in apologetics. In one sense this is always unavoidable, since differences in method between one theology and another is going to signal different suspicions about what worldviews the opposing methods are borrowing from. It is another thing altogether when Christian theology is held up in its task by forever answering the demands of unbelief. What counts as virtuous at the foundation gets delayed at the modern checkpoint of what counts as rational. 

The “ethics of belief” became quite a different subject to the modernist. In his 1877 essay, “The Ethics of Belief,” William Clifford delivered what became a maxim of late modern epistemology: “it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”3 Clifford uses the example of a sea captain that had serious reservations about the sea-worthiness of his vessel just before a voyage carrying immigrants to the new world. He suppressed those doubts with many hopeful thoughts. Was he any less guilty for their death at sea because he worked himself into a state of sincerity? Not at all. Another example he cited was of an unorthodox sect being falsely charged for stealing children away to indoctrinate them. The agitator society responsible for prosecuting them was sincere and yet could easily have obtained the information that would have shown the group to have been innocent.

The moral of Clifford’s two examples is clear: Sincerity of wrong belief, if that belief is contrary to evidence both easily attainable and sufficient to believe the opposite, is actually immoral. Specifically it is “suppressing doubts and avoiding investigation” that is at the core of the immoral act. What does it hurt? He replies that, “no one man’s belief is in any case a private matter which concerns himself alone.”4

William James gave one of the earliest responses to Clifford. Although the classical theologian would not agree with James’ overall conception of faith, nevertheless there is something at the heart of his criticism that we can seize upon. For him, there are different kinds of “belief options.” These match the whole of belief to the whole of its existential import to one’s self. In other words, the religious commitment is most rational because it chooses a belief option that is both of what he called “live” (rationally viable) and “momentous” (existentially ultimate). There are some questions that force themselves upon us. “Moral questions immediately present themselves as questions whose solution cannot wait for sensible proof.”5

So we must ask the question that the skeptic presses upon us: Is suspending judgment not always the more rational and moral thing? That certainly may be the case in the science lab. Although, while it is true that we have a need to know both truth and error, these are at once moral duties and experiential needs. But one of these two may function for us more primally than the other in a given case. The modernist is more consumed with not being wrong than with discovering the right. Historically, Christians have maintained that there are worse things in this world than being found to be a dupe before men. The fixation on strutting one’s tough-mindedness through the fields of philosophical inquiry breeds indifference to the momentous; and furthermore it cheats, as it already decides the question on whether ultimate things are really real things to be concerned with at all.

Now how did all of this become obscured in the modern era? Epistemology is often thought to have been birthed in the Enlightenment, but it seems more accurate to say it came to the forefront at this time only by turning philosophy radically inward. Truth justification after Hume and Kant became detached from metaphysics. On this there is no disagreement. What is often missed is the consequence to the “new” discipline of epistemology.

Put simply, the questions of objective truth criteria that had long possessed universally binding character over all minds became consumed with subjective matters like “free thought.” Such free thinking was so defined as a mind’s independence from any help outside of itself, and, as a subsidiary virtue, not “being duped.”6

This turn inward and away from the objective prospects of epistemology, ironically proclaimed itself more “tough minded.” What was left of “answering” to a world outside of individual minds was to convince each other that we had all used our brains. Epistemology came to the dead end of a person believing certain things “without flouting any epistemic duties or obligations.”7 Now to whom or what are such duties owed? The inward turn, by itself, cannot answer that question.

The subjective turn in epistemology explains how the most notorious objections against the Christian faith in the post-Kantian era (with the lone exception of Darwinian evolution: and even that can be psychologized) have focused on the subjective formation of belief being wrongheaded. Think of the cases of Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. The whole case became psychological and sociological explanations for how such a thing as religion could have emerged inside of our minds—an interesting enough question, perhaps, but one that tells us precisely nothing about whether said belief is more or less likely to be true outside of our minds.

Accordingly, Plantinga describes the difference between de facto objections and de jure objections.8 The first set objects to Christian belief on the ground that it is untrue, while the second set objects to Christian belief on the ground that it is formed in a rationally unjustified manner. However one defines a “rationally justified manner,” what we will find is that the de jure objections really depend upon the de facto, as proper method ultimately reduces to proper correspondence of reason to reality. After all, how does one know that reason is not properly functioning without first settling the question of what reality it ought to be transcribing in the first place? 

Having considered the “ethics of belief” in a way that the skeptic presses upon the Christian apologist, it seems to me that the Christian theologian also needs to get on with his own intellectual service to the church. Here the very same questions of ordering faith and reason must account for other factors. These will not be irrelevant to engagement with skepticism. However, they will not neglect other aspects of which the skeptic has no interest, but which we really would be acting irrationally (and thus immorally) to ignore on the skeptic’s account. Let us call these 1. the clarity factor, 2. the certainty factor, and 3. the inverse relationship factor.

The clarity factor. Owen Anderson suggests a turning of the tables on the modernist when it comes to the ethics of belief. In the biblical view, especially in texts like Romans 1:18-32, the righteousness of eternal judgment is tied to the clarity of God’s revelation to all mankind. Redemption assumes guilt. Such guilt cannot be initiated by mankind’s failure to handle the gospel in special revelation. On the contrary, the gospel came as a response to that guilt.9 Hence it is how mankind handled the prior general revelation that explains the guilt. And all of this is rendered unintelligible if the clarity of God’s existence is not established.10 The clarity factor does not simply call for a renaissance of a more classical apologetic method (actually Anderson is not entirely affirming of that tradition); but it calls for a more positive appraisal of natural theology precisely as a foundation in systematic theology.

That which is clear to reason, in nature, explains a great deal of the intellectual categories and tools that the theologian is always working with, even when he is exegeting Scripture. This is the case whether the theologian has a positive view toward natural theology, or a negative view. He will always be borrowing from objective, extra-biblical natures in everything that his mind processes and his propositions affirm. Things which are both clear and clarifying.

The certainty factor. Bavinck wrote that, “Certainty … is not a relationship but a capacity, a quality, a state of the knowing subject.”11 The quest for certainty need not be pride; nor should it be blamed for being birthed in fear. Some things are inescapably fearsome. Religious certainty is therefore a virtue of existential necessity. It is an application of James’ point about the “momentous,” except that as one moves closer to orthodox Christian belief, the opposite state to certainty is not limited to “finding” God as scientist finds his confirmation, but as a fugitive “finds” his bounty hunter. What the believer needs to know with certainty covers the whole spectrum from epistemology to soteriology.

Is there also a virtuous “obstinacy” of faith, as C. S. Lewis called it? In his essay by that title, Lewis speaks of Christians occasionally setting aside evidence contrary to faith, even though they did not come to faith by accepting its propositions against the evidence.12 It may often seem like Christians hold to a double-standard in this respect: either one is loyal to Christ or else unprejudiced toward truth! But this is misleading. Lewis moves the reader from the false picture of the man of science (for reality) and the man of faith (afraid of reality), bringing us instead to the more real-world examples of “getting a dog out of a trap, in extracting a thorn from a child’s finger, in teaching a boy to swim or rescuing one who can’t, in getting a frightened beginner over a nasty place on a mountain.”13 

In the real world, reason does not stand dispassionately at the worldview buffet table, mixing and matching apart from desperate faith. In the position of that dog or child, reason and faith must work together on the way out of the escape room. With each act of favorable condescension to us, the level of rational certainty about the Divine Rescuer increases, even as more faith is summoned for the next difficult step in our ascent. Lewis adds,

“If human life is in fact ordered by a beneficent being whose knowledge of our real needs and of the way in which they can be satisfied infinitely exceeds our own, we must expect a priori that His operations will often appear to us far from beneficent and far from wise, and that it will be our highest prudence to give Him our confidence in spite of this.”14

This raises the question, though, as to whether what many Christians call “certainty” in faith is not actually mere stubbornness. If so, then it is a stubborn loyalty to One who has proven trustworthy. 

Can it be, though, that prejudice on these greatest of questions is virtuous? What postmodernism has identified as the Enlightenment “prejudice against prejudice” is surely naive. All human beings have presuppositions. If Locke was correct that a newborn baby comes into the world as a tabula rasa, then it is just as certain that there can be no “erasing the blackboard” of a normal human being at any point thereafter. So while we can say that this general prejudice is unavoidable (and not necessarily immoral), we sense that there is a specific prejudice that is immoral. What then is the difference between these?

Perhaps we can say that immoral prejudice in such a question occurs when one’s passion disallows further inquiry in a matter where persistent commitment is either (a) harmful to others or else (b) not ultimate to the self (or both). We may be prejudiced about our favorite burger restaurant, and, unless that indulgence forces someone else with high cholesterol to gorge themselves there, there seems to be no immorality involved in stifling further debate. However, in the case of choosing between the propositions, “Jesus is Lord” and “Muhammad is the final prophet,” there can be no indifference. Neither can there be any mistaking the fact that commending the wrong Lord or Prophet is to sentence our hearers to divine judgment.

Under the weight of such consequences, our certainty may be deconstructed by a critic as a mere coping mechanism. Whatever this implies for apologetic encounters, the theologian has made his choice. He is commending an entire life and worldview as if it were the very truth of God. The notion that one can avoid this responsibility by rationalism’s “further investigation” or by fideism’s non-systematic “humility” is all a cheat. 

The inverse-relationship factor. It is commonly supposed that faith and reason, even if not at odds, at least stand in an inverse relationship in terms of experiencing one in such a way that the other is excluded, or one might say “crowded out.” Before evaluating various thinkers who hold this view, it will be well to ask whether Scripture suggests this. I maintain that it does not. Although the two are distinct, and although one or the other is appropriate in a way that the other is not, yet they are not so alien to each other that they are competing for the same task in a fully virtuous soul.

Consider, for example, the oft-quoted verse from 2 Corinthians 5:7, where Paul says, “We walk by faith, not by sight.” The Apostle does not pit faith against reason here, but faith against sight. In other words, it is a trust in God against the fears that naturally arise out of the distressing circumstances of this life. Might reason be faulty in just this same way? Certainly. That is, human reason may “take the side” of sight rather than the outlook of trusting God. However, when it does so, it will be acting irrationally. To act contrary to ultimate reality is, to that extent, to act contrary to right reason. Hence it is always unreasonable to act contrary to faith in God. Consider also in the example of Abraham, so often used to highlight a “faith-against-reason” paradigm, that the Scriptures say he reasoned that God was able to raise Isaac (Heb. 11:19), and so his faith, while unknowing what God would do, knew the God who would do it.

Faith does relate to epistemology, but many people will speak of this relationship in such a way that conflates faith identically with knowledge. No doubt faith does relate to the reason that we believe ultimate things (cf. Heb. 11:1, 3, 6). However, this still does not make faith an alternative to reason. It is always reason that knows and always faith that trusts.

Often the notion of an inverse relationship is more sophisticated than recasting faith as a kind of “knowledge,” but instead it is bound up in the following notion: Since faith is an act of the will, it must choose freely; since persuasion of the mind conditions free choice, more rational persuasion equals less freedom. One example of this line of thinking comes from William Rowe: “For it is impossible that one and the same propositions should be (at the same time) both an object of knowledge and an object of faith.”15 In simple terms, if the proposition is demonstrated, it is seen to be true; but if it is seen to be true, there is nothing left to take on faith. The thing is known. End of story. Such a “faith” would not be a virtuous faith because it wouldn’t be genuine faith at all. So the argument goes. 

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1. Turretin, Institutes, I.1.8.6, 7.

2. Turretin, Institutes, I.1.9.5

3. William Clifford, “The Ethics of Belief,” in Michael Peterson, ed. Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001), 80.

4. Clifford, “The Ethics of Belief,” 82, 83.

5. William James, “The Will to Believe,” in Peterson, ed. Philosophy of Religion, 90.

6. James, “The Will to Believe,” 88.

7. Alvin Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Belief (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 2015), 36.

8. Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), viii-xii, 190-91; cf. Knowledge and Christian Belief, 7-9.

9. Anderson, The Clarity of God’s Existence, 34.

10. Anderson, The Clarity of God’s Existence, 2-5.

11. Herman Bavinck, The Certainty of Faith (St. Catherines, Ontario: Paideia Press, 1980), 19.

12. C. S. Lewis, “On Obstinacy in Belief,” in The World’s Last Night (Orlando: Harcourt Brace & Co, 1987), 16.

13. Lewis, “On Obstinacy in Belief,” 23.

14. Lewis, “On Obstinacy in Belief,” 24-25.

15. Rowe, Philosophy of Religion: An Introduction, 76.