Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins also base their criticisms of religion on the claim that it is irrational. Both tend to contrast a positivist view of knowledge, with science as the ideal, to a propositionalist view of religious doctrine, missing, many would argue, the complexity of both religion and science. Nonetheless, it remains important to understand the relation of reason and religion. Philosophers of religion explore this issue in a variety of ways. Some view religious doctrines as “properly basic beliefs” that can be experientially and communally justified and, therefore, considered rational. Others argue that not all religious language makes claims about the world or reality. They view religious doctrines as pictures or frames through which we see the world, as rules that shape our lives and our reason, or as analogous to poetry in their capacity for opening up new ways to see the world.
Outline
I. Is there such a thing as religious reason?
A. The world of late antiquity that saw the formation of Christianity and rabbinic Judaism was deeply shaped by Greek philosophy, which was the paradigm for rationality.
B. In the medieval period, Greek philosophy continued to play a major role for Jews, Christians, and Muslims.
C. In the later medieval period and into the Reformation and modernity, some well-known conflicts developed, particularly as reason came to be defined in terms of scientific reason.
II. Mainstream thinkers in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam have had extensive debates regarding the relation among faith, revelation, and reason.
A. Mainstream thinkers in each tradition have held sophisticated views of the relation between religious faith and reason.
B. In the past lectures, we have seen a number of answers to the question: How are we to understand the role that reason plays in faith?
III. Certain kinds of religious faith are rational. _
A. Throughout the modern period, some religious thinkers and philosophers have offered arguments that take what is called an evidentialist approach to the knowledge of God.
B. If one’s criterion of rationality is modern scientific evidentialism, then it would be difficult to show persuasively that religion is rational. °
C. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein offers some ideas regarding faith and religious belief that have been influential on this issue.
IV. There are some good reasons to doubt whether strict rationalistic criteria are appropriate when it comes to the question of religion and reason. '
A. Philosophers Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff suggest that belief in God is not a matter of evidence and that one can be rationally justified in believing in God without evidence if this belief serves as what is called a "properly basic belief."
B. The theologian George Lindbeck distinguishes among three ways of thinking about religion and religious doctrine: a cognitivist approach, an experiential-expressivist approach, and a cultural-linguistic approach.
V. We can reasonably draw two conclusions on the question of reason and religion.
A. If religious beliefs can be rationally justified, it likely will not be in a way that will be universally accepted.
B. However, one thing we have seen over and over is that religious thought can be self-correcting and self-critical.
VI. For many religious thinkers, faith must take itself through the trial of suspicion, and such critical thinking is one mark of rationality that is as close to universal as we can get.
Suggested Reading:
Lindberg and Numbers, When Science & Christianity Meet.
Kitzmiller, Tammy et al. v. Dover Area School District, et al.
Peterson, Reason and Religious Belief
Plantinga and Wolterstorff, Faith and Rationality.
Ruse, Can a Darwinian Be a Christian?
Questions to Consider
1. What does Wolterstorff mean by “basic belief’ and how does this idea help us understand such religious thinkers as Barth and Henry?
2. Is going back to the original sources essentially a conservative activity, or might this process produce surprising new insights into faith?
Lecture Thirty-Four -- Transcript
Religion and Rationality
In the previous lecture, we saw that Sam Harris criticizes the irrationality of religion, and that Daniel Dennett wants us to break the taboo against the scientific study of religion. Like a good scientist or philosopher, Dennett is not sure what we will find when we do this, but he believes it’s imperative that we subject religion to rational scrutiny. But as I have noted, the taboo against such scrutiny is a strong one. At Grinnell, I often have students tell me that religious belief cannot be examined critically either because it’s too personal and ineffable or because religion is not about reason, but about what they call “blind faith.” It’s always a little hard to know what this means, but generally it seems to mean the idea that faith involves something like belief in something for which one has no evidence-and that is something like what Harris is criticizing when he calls religion irrational and contrasts it to modern rationality and science. Religion, he says, is essentially the unthinking adherence to truths found in a literal reading of scripture, regardless of the evidence brought to bear on these truths by reason or science. So, we have this question now: Is religious faith blind, or is there such a thing as religious reason? It might seem that this question is coming a little late since we’ve seen numerous examples in these lectures of religious reasoning, but in this lecture I want to make some general comments about this issue. I’ll first consider some of the historical evidence to make the point that at least in the contexts of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam the claim that faith and reason are mutually opposed is the exception rather than the rule. I then want to consider some of the ways in which contemporary philosophers of religion and other religious thinkers approach the rationality and meaning of religious beliefs
The world of late antiquity that saw the formation of Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism was dominated politically and socially by the Roman Empire, but culturally it was deeply shaped by Greek intellectual traditions -- particularly Greek philosophy, which was at that time the paradigm for rationality. Therefore, one of the main challenges faced by Jews and Christians at that time was to articulate the relation between truth as revealed by God and truth arrived at through philosophy. There is evidence that Saint Paul, for example, thought that faith and philosophy were at odds with one another -- for he tells of being laughed out of an audience with Greek philosophers and acknowledges, with pride, that his faith, in their eyes, is foolishness. In the third century, the Christian theologian Tertullian asked the famous question: What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? Or, what he meant was: What does Greek reasoning have to do with our understanding of the Bible and God?
But the Jewish thinker Philo, who wrote in the 1st century C.E. and lived in Alexandria, one of the ancient world’s intellectual centers, argued that biblical revelation and Greek philosophy were two paths to the same truth. He claimed that reason is God -- given and so could not conflict with God’s revelation in scripture. In order to see this, however, in order to see how Greek philosophy and the biblical traditions actually converged on truth, Philo said it was necessary to interpret the scriptures allegorically -- that is, to read them in a non-literal way because the true meaning of a scripture was not to be found on the surface of the text. This approach to the Bible was embraced by the greatest Christian biblical interpreters of the next few centuries, such as Clement and Origen. So, from very early on, significant figures from both Jewish and Christian traditions understood that the Bible cannot simply be read literally, that reason had to be employed in interpreting the Bible to get at its true meaning. When Christians articulated the basic creeds of the Church in the 3'd and 4'h centuries, philosophical concepts were crucial for formulating doctrines, such as the Trinity and the humanity of Jesus.
In the medieval period, Anselm offered his famous definition of theology as “faith seeking understanding” -- that is, our thinking about God and human life begins with belief in God, but we only understand what this means by using our reason. During this period, Greek philosophy continued to play a major role for Jews, Christians, and Muslims. During the Early Middle Ages, science was far more advanced in the Islamic world than in Europe, and the great Islamic philosophers Avieenna and Averroes kept the tradition of Greek philosophy very much alive. In fact, it was their interactions with Jews and Christians in Spain that provided the route through which Aristotle was rediscovered by Western Christians from Islamic translations of the original Greek. Jewish philosophy also flourished in the Islamic context, reaching its pinnacle with the great Maimonides-who produced most of his work while in Morocco and Egypt in the 12"‘ century. As we’ve also seen, with the rediscovery of Aristotle, the pinnacle of medieval Christian thought was reached in the theology of Aquinas.
As we move into the later medieval period, and into the Reformation, and into modemity, we do find some well -- known conflicts developing between faith and reason -- particularly as reason came more and more to be defined in terms of scientific reason or in terms of the foundationalist epistemologies of Descartes and others -- where reason was a matter of beliefs formed on the basis of evidence that could be linked clearly and logically to self-evident ideas. One of the episodes that helped shape the modem narrative of a fundamental conflict between religion and science was the Catholic Church’s condemnation of the Copernican idea that the earth revolved around the sun, and the subsequent trial of Galileo before the Inquisition for defending this idea. As modernity established itself; the Catholic Church, as we’ve seen, retreated more and more from the open exchange of ideas.
On the Protestant side, Martin Luther -- though, himself, deeply learned -- argued that the only authority for the Christians was the Bible, and he referred to that “whore reason” in his polemics against the way the Bible had been misinterpreted in the Catholic tradition. Although other Reformers, and Calvin is a good example here, did not share Luther’s suspicion of reason, the -- principle of Sola Scrgvtura (“Scripture Alone”) did make possible a certain kind of scripturalism that has Fundamentalism as one of its logical consequences. So, in both Protestantism and Catholicism, the challenge of modernity did produce-for some groups and some thinkers-a more intense suspicion of reason than had been evident in Christianity for most of the early and medieval periods. A not too dissimilar pattern can be seen in Islam-where the reformers, such as the Wahhabists, sought to purify Islam by rejecting the long traditions of reasoning that had developed in the medieval period and to go back to the ultimate authority of Qur’an and Sunna. This pattern is less pronounced in Judaism-where, for the most part, the Jewish philosophical tradition has remained strong, even among more Orthodox Jews.
The evidence from all three traditions makes it clear: The relation between faith, revelation, and reason has been much debated in these traditions, and mainstream thinkers in each tradition have held sophisticated views of the relation between religious faith and reason. Reason has been defined in different ways over the centuries, but thinkers in these traditions have carefully considered and debated the connections between revelation, faith, reason, and philosophy. There have always been Jews, Christians, and Muslims who’ve downplayed or dismissed reason-but these, again, are the exceptions and not the rule. If we can take this as a good indication of the role of reason in these traditions, if faith is not blind, how are we to understand the role that reason plays in faith?
In the past lectures, we’ve seen a number of answers to this question. For Kant, religion is not a matter of knowing facts in the world, but primarily a matter of practical knowledge. Belief in God, which is rational according to Kant, makes it possible to act morally. For Hegel, religious faith is a kind of knowledge, but a kind of picture knowledge that in the end will be supplanted by the cognitive knowledge of philosophy. Horace Bushnell claimed that religious doctrines and ideas were more like poetry than proposition, and Paul Ricoeur develops this kind of idea in sophisticated ways in arguing that poetic language of religion opens our minds and hearts to new existential possibilities. In Ricoeur, but perhaps especially in Rowan Williams, one of the interesting things we see is that revelation, in constantly posing questions to us, forces us to think critically about the way we organize our worlds, and to imagine new ways of doing so. Here, we see revelation and reason as critical thinking being closely linked
At this point, rather than rehearsing the positions we’ve already discussed, I want to suggest that if we are going to inquire into the rationality of religious belief we need to be as precise as possible with respect to what it might mean to say that at least certain kinds of religious faith are rational or make very significant use of reason. We can begin by noting that the standard for rationality for someone like Sam Harris and for many philosophers and some religious thinkers is established by what we can call “modem scientific naturalism.” On this account, in order for a religious claim to be considered rationally justified, it has to be convincing to any reasonable person -- and the way to show this is to provide evidence that any reasonable person could understand and accept. Throughout the modern period, some religious thinkers and philosophers have tried to construct arguments for the existence of God that, they argue, should be accepted by every reasonable person. Some, like Descartes, have tried to prove God’s existence deductively, and others have tried to argue from empirical evidence, such as the complexity and intricacy of the world. Such arguments take what is called an “evidentialist approach” to the knowledge of God, and the philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff talks about the evidentialist approach in this way: “The evidentialist approach,” he says, “holds that it is not rational for a person to [accept theism] unless he holds his religious convictions on the basis of other beliefs of his which give to those convictions adequate evidential support.” The problem, of course, is that many, many thinkers have found the arguments for the existence of God unpersuasive-so, it seems clear that they, at least so far, have failed the evidentialist test. Kant was a bit more modest than this in his effort to show not that we could prove God’s existence, but that we could show that it was rational to believe in God. But Kant’s arguments for this also have been found wanting.
There are contemporary philosophers and religious thinkers who will disagree with me on this, but I am inclined to say that if one’s criterion of rationality is modern scientific naturalism, then one will be hard -- pressed to show persuasively that religion is rational. The arguments so far have not been persuasive. But I do think that there are good reasons for holding that this paradigm of rationality is, itself questionable -- and especially with respect for thinking about religion. I want to suggest that as we’re thinking about religion and reason, other ways of thinking about rationality can be more useful for us.
Let me make three points here. First, many philosophers, historians of science, and cultural critics over the past century have argued that what counts as evidence in any given context is what they call “deeply theory-laden” -- that is, what we count as evidence, and this includes empirical evidence, is already shaped in significant ways by the theoretical frameworks one brings to the evidence. So, it’s not simply that evidence supports theories, but that there is a much more complicated interaction in relationship between theory and evidence. Insofar as a religious claim such as “God exists” is not just a simple belief but is embedded in a larger philosophical or theological framework, what will count as evidence for this claim will not necessarily be something that everyone can see or that will be universally accepted. Second point: In thinking about the rationality of religious beliefs, it’s also necessary to consider the meaning of religious language -- for as we’ve seen in a number of the religious thinkers we’ve discussed, what can appear to be a propositional statement about states of affairs in the world may well be meant in an allegorical, or metaphorical, or symbolic way.
One philosopher who’s been influential on this issue in recent decades is Ludwig Wittgenstein, who made the point that in order to understand the meaning of any statement, it is necessary to attend closely to how the statement is used in different communities. What is it doing in context really is the question. So, when a Christian says: “Jesus Christ rose from the dead,” should we take this claim literally? That is, should we say that what this person means is that this person, Jesus Christ, was literally physically resuscitated and came back from a state of death to a state of life? Certainly there are Christians who do take this as a statement of historical fact: This did, in fact, happen. But following someone like the theologian Rowan Williams, we might say that the statement: “Jesus Christ rose from the dead” is not a literal report on a historical occurrence-though Williams himself is a little cagey on this point-but should be understood primarily as language that Christ’s disciples developed to point to their own unusual and hard-to-understand experiences of inspiration after Christ’s death, and as language that can function for Christians now to point them to new possibilities for their own lives. So, in context, the meaning of the statement is not necessarily a propositional statement about facts in the world.
So, from this perspective, it’s not possible to simply read the Bible or other religious texts and assume that all statements that have the form of a statement of fact should, indeed, be read this way. One would want, instead, to pay attention to the literary genre of the text, to consider how the text has been used in a religious community, or to consider how it has functioned historically within the community. Only in this way does it become possible to consider carefully how certain kinds of religious language or religious belief are being used, what they mean, and then how we should understand their rationality. A third point to make is that we have to keep in mind that to believe something from a religious perspective may not always mean that one is asserting it as a matter of fact.
Again, we can talk about Wittgenstein here. He described faith as a passionate commitment to a system of reference, and it may be helpful to think about religious belief more in terms of something like passionate commitment, or another word we can use here would be “trust,” than objective knowledge. We don’t come to trust a person in the same way we test a scientific hypothesis, but we also wouldn’t want to say that such trust is blind or irrational -- for we base our trust, usually at any rate, on our experiences with the person, with our judgments about their character, and to do this requires certain skills that involve both reason and emotion. We don’t always know what we’re doing. Sometimes our trust is misplaced-sometimes we place our trust in someone for the wrong reasons. Here is one place that the hermeneutics of suspicion can play a significant role in religious faith, for -- it offers methods by which to explore one’s faith-to explore one’s trust, one’s commitment -- to investigate whether it is motivated by unhealthy fantasies, as Freud agues, or by a desire for certain kinds of power over others, as Nietzsche argues. If Ricoeur is right, then in exploring one’s faith in this way, usually in a communal context, one might not be able to convince non-believers that it is true, but one can be reasonably sure that one is being responsible, self-reflective, self-critical in placing one’s trust in God, and this is a sign of reason.
On the basis of these considerations, there are at least some good reasons to doubt_ whether the strict scientific or rationalist criteria set down by the scientific naturalists are appropriate when it comes to the question of religion and reason. In the remainder of this lecture, then, I want to consider two distinct proposals for thinking about the rationality of religious belief that is based on other kinds of criteria. First, I want to consider a proposal by philosophers Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff, who argue that belief in God is not a matter of evidence-that one can be rationally justified in believing in God without evidence if this belief serves for them as what these philosophers call “a properly basic belief” Most of the beliefs we hold are based on evidence. So, I believe that Immanuel Kant wrote the book The Critique of Pure Reason not because I saw him write it, but because my copy of the book attributes it to him; because my philosophy teachers all said that he wrote it; because I’ve never seen anyone try to argue to the contrary. Each of these pieces of evidence is itself a belief so I hold my belief that Kant wrote the book on the basis of other beliefs that serve as evidence for it.
But Plantinga and Wolterstorff make the point that not all beliefs are based on the evidence that’s provided by other beliefs -- rather, some beliefs serve as the basis for our other beliefs, but themselves are not supported by beliefs, and these are what they call “properly basic.” Recall Descartes, who doubted everything until he got the belief that he could not doubt, and that was “I think.” This belief was not held on the basis of evidence -- rather, Descartes claimed that he was rationally justified in holding it because it could not be doubted, because in other words, it was self-evident; it supplied its own evidence. This self-evident belief formed, for Descartes, the epistemological basis for all his other beliefs.
Plantinga and Wolterstorff argue that belief in God can be properly basic in this way. It is not a belief we form on the basis of evidence. It’s a belief that forms the basis for our other beliefs. Belief in God is not as obviously self-evident as “I think,” as Descartes’ “I think.” But Plantinga and Wolterstorff argue that such self-evidence is not the only criterion for determining whether a belief is properly basic, and they argue that different communities will have different criteria for determining basicality. For example, in the Christian context, someone who has had an experience of God and has no reason to suspect that the voice she heard was the result of a hallucination or a hoax, can be rationally justified in believing that the voice was God’s -- and this belief is based in first -- hand experience, not in evidence supplied by other beliefs. So, the point here is not that this experience should be enough to convince all other people that God exists, but that for this person in this communal context it is not irrational to believe in God’s existence and to base other beliefs on it.
There are many questions raised by this approach to the knowledge of God and belief in God; there’s a lot of debate about it. There are philosophers who reject this way of thinking about God as a basic belief and Pm not going to get into that here. What we should keep in mind, though, is that the defenders of the idea that belief in God can be properly basic are rejecting the idea that what will count as basic belief will be the same for everyone -- and that, therefore, they’re suggesting that there is not one set of criteria for all rational people when it comes to these specific kinds of beliefs. So, they are questioning in certain ways the modernist claim that all reasonable claims can be universally accepted. They’re arguing that there’s a communal aspect to it here, and different communities will see different kinds of beliefs as more rational than others, and there’s this kind of postmodern criticism of the universalism of modernist epistemology.
Another way of thinking about reason and religious belief has been proposed by the theologian George Lindbeck. Lindbeck distinguishes between three ways of thinking about religion and religious doctrines. The first he calls a “cognitivist approach” -- in which religious doctrines are thought to be factual, objective statements about the world, and religions are said to be similar to science and philosophy in the way that they make general, comprehensive claims about human beings, the world, and reality in general. The second approach Lindbeck calls the “experiential -- expressivist approach.” He traces this back to thinkers such as Schleiermacher who argue that the essence of religion is a fundamental human experience, and that different religions and different religious claims are different expressions of this experience.
From this perspective, religious doctrines should be viewed not as factual statements about the world, but as expressions of inner feelings or existential attitudes. Lindbeck thinks that both of these approaches are flawed, and he offers a paradigm for thinking about religion and religious doctrines that he calls a “cultural-linguistic approach.” This approach follows from what I described in Lecture 31 as the “linguistic turn” -- the idea that language is not simply a transparent medium for thought, a tool for communication, but is constitutive of thought and of the way we experience the world. For Lindbeck, religion is like a language or a culture. He puts it this way:
A religion can be viewed as a kind of cultural and/or linguistic framework or medium that shapes the entirety of life and thought like a culture or language, it is a communal phenomenon that shapes the subjectivities of individuals rather than being primarily a manifestation of those subjectivities.
We can think about it this way. A cognitivist will affirm a religion if he or she thinks that it accurately represents the world. An experiential -- expressionist, by contrast, will evaluate a religion on the basis of its ability to express fundamental human experiences that emerge independently of particular religious frameworks. In both cases there is something that exists independently of the religious framework -- the objective state of the world or the fundamental experience -- to which the framework must conform for it to be seen as true. Lindbeck, however, views religion as something that actually shapes the way we see and experience the world, shapes our reality. This is what he means when he describes it, religion, as a “medium that shapes the entirety of life and thought.” So, on this account, it’s not that we can test our religious doctrines or beliefs against the world in any simple way to see whether the facts conform with our statements of belief, because the very way we see the world has already been shaped by our religious beliefs. It’s not the case that we can say simply that religious statements express prior experiences because religious ideas, doctrines, and rituals also play a formative role in shaping our emotions and our deepest experiences. In other words, in the same way that we learn a language or come to inhabit a culture, we learn to be religious-we inherit and are instructed in a set of skills, habits, dispositions, perspectives through which we learn to see, think, and feel in certain ways. So, Lindbeck says this:
To become religious -- no less than to become culturally or linguistically competent -- is to interiorize a set of skills by practice and training. One learns how to feel, act, and think in conformity with a religious tradition that is, in its inner structure, far richer and more subtle than can be explicitly articulated.
From this perspective, doctrines and religious narratives are not so much statements of fact about states of affairs, but rules for shaping the subjectivities of adherents, and for speaking and thinking religiously in a specific context. Think about the lecture on Rosenzweig and his claim that adherence to Jewish law is a discipline for cultivating love for the other. Following the law in all its details is a way of interiorizing a certain way of looking at the world that Rosenzweig argues makes it possible, and even natural, for us to love the neighbor. It’s a training in love. If this is the case, it’s not surprising, then, that many people -- especially in a pluralistic modem culture -- do not experience God or cannot accept that belief in God could be properly basic because they’ve not learned how to see the world in this way -- they haven’t developed the requisite skills and practices.
For Lindbeck, although this means that there is no universal, overarching framework for adjudicating religious claims, then, and again like Plantinga and Wolterstorff -- this is based on a kind of critique of a certain modernist universalism, because what Lindbeck is saying is that there are different communities, different cultures, different language games or language communities out there, and that they all shape subjectivities in different ways. So, trying to find a universal standpoint that they’re all going to agree on can be difficult, if not impossible. But at the same time, he wants to argue that this is not to fall back into blind faith, because each religious framework will develop internal criteria for evaluating doctrines and practices. As he puts it, one of the major criteria for judging the rationality of a religious scheme will be how well it can provide its adherents with what he calls an “intelligible interpretation, on its own terms, of the varied situations and realities adherents encounter.” So, on this view, religious schemes shape our thinking and experience, but there is a world out there against which these schemes do, in some sense, test themselves, because unless a religious scheme, a framework, can account for, and make intelligible, what goes on in the world, it will start to fail. Again, one mode of testing a religious framework or doctrine would be to apply to it the hermeneutics of suspicion -- not as Marx or Freud would have it, as a way of showing that religious beliefs are illusions (though specific beliefs may be exposed as such by religious communities themselves), but as a self-critical mode of religious reflection.
I’d like to end this lecture by pointing to two conclusions I think it’s reasonable to draw from this discussion of religion and reason. The first is if religious beliefs can be rationally justified, it likely will not be in a way that will be universally accepted. Many of the contemporary thinkers who defend the rationality of religious belief argue that standards of evidence and intelligibility are shaped within particular religious communities -- and this makes it difficult, if not impossible, to apply external, or at least universal, standards in deciding whether a given belief is rational. That said, however, it does seem to me that one thing we have seen over and over in these lectures and that we find in someone like Lindbeck is that religious thought can be self-correcting and self-critical.
A major point I’ve been making in these discussions of faith and suspicion is that, for many religious thinkers, faith must take itself through the trial of suspicion -- and such critical thinking is one mark of rationality that is, I think, about as close to universal as we can get.
