Correcting Your Miseducation, Part 4: Faith Is Trust, and Reason and Faith Are Friends

Many people think faith and reason are mutually exclusive--that when you hold some belief by faith you can't be holding it be reason. I've been writing about this since my first year on Ricochet. It's not true.

Let's keep it simple and, for heaven's sake, start with a freakin' dictionary. While the word "faith" has, like most words, more than one possible meaning, the basic definition of faith is simply trust. That's the first definition at Dictionary.com, the first at Collins, and the first at Cambridge. (Merriam-Webster dallies in some other definitions, but gets to this one eventually.) Note, also, for the Greek πίστις/pistis, the definition "faith, belief, trust, confidence; fidelity, faithfulness." And, for the Latin fides, the definition "trust, faith, confidence, reliance, credence, belief."

I can't comment on the Hebrew. But apparently Genesis 15:6 uses a verb for Abraham believing G-d which suggests confirmation or support or fidelity. And Habbakuk 2:4 uses a noun for the faith by which the just/righteous live which looks very similar to pistis and fides. If there's any shift in emphasis, it's not away from reason but towards faithfulness or fidelity. Faithfulness or fidelity are in pistis and fides as well. Can you be faithful without acting, and is acting something different than trust acted out?

Trust is an act of reason.

Except when it's not.

I have my doubts about the theory of global warming caused by your car (promoted by scientists who are funded by the government that benefits from their theory). But I trust the scientists on electrons, xylem and phloem, chemiosmotic phosphorylation, and other stuff.

But that only means that faith is reasonable if "reason" means something like what our minds do when we're using them properly to learn the truth. There is still a difference between belief based on trust and belief based on reasoned argument that I can understand and prove for myself. That means that faith (even when reasonable) is not the same thing as reason if "reason" means something like full comprehension or thinking logically for myself.

Who told us that faith and reason can never be the same thing?

At the risk of oversimplifying, I'd have to say it was Enlightenment philosophy.

Descartes is an example--the philosopher Descartes tells us in the beginning of his Discourse on Method that he gained no knowledge at all in his education, despite being taught rather a lot of theology. Then there was Kant’s observation that “I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith."

Who refutes this error?

I like to think I just did. The dictionary did it first. But if you want some big fancy philosophy names, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas are good examples, and there are many others.