Faith and Reason

Donald A. Crosby

Description

Few words are as widely misconceived as the word "faith." Faith is often set in stark opposition to reason, considered antithetical to scientific thought, and heavily identified with religion. Donald Crosby's revealing book provides a more complex picture, discussing faith and its connection to the whole of human life and human knowledge. Crosby writes about that existential faith that underlies, shapes, and supports a person's life and its sense of purpose and direction. Such faith does not make a person religious and being secular does not mean one rejects all forms of faith. Throughout the book Crosby makes the case that faith is fundamentally involved in all processes of reasoning and that reason is an essential part of all dependable forms of faith.

Crosby elaborates the major components of faith and goes on to look at the mutually dependent relationships between faith and knowledge, faith and scientific knowledge, and faith and morality. The work's final chapters examine crises of faith among several noted thinkers as well as the author's own journey of faith from plans for the ministry to pastor to secular philosopher and religious naturalist.
Preface

1. Initial Sketch of a Concept of Faith

2. Facets of Faith

3. Faith and Knowledge

4. Faith and Scientific Knowledge

5. Faith and Morality

6. SecularFormsofFaith

7. Crises of Faith

8. My Personal Journey of Faith

Notes
Works Cited
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie de la religion
• Philosophy of religion
• Philosophy

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 02 janvier 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438436159
• Langue: English

Extrait

FAITH AND REASON
Their Roles in Religious and Secular Life
DONALD A. CROSBY
S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS

Published by S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS , A LBANY
© 2011 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production, Laurie Searl Marketing, Anne M. Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Crosby, Donald A.
  Faith and reason : their roles in religious and secular life / Donald A. Crosby.
      p. cm.
  Includes bibliographical references and index.
  ISBN 978-1-4384-3613-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)
  1. Faith and reason. 2. Religion—Philosophy. 3. Faith. I. Title.
  BL51..C698 2011
  210—dc22                                                                                         2010032066
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my grandchildren Brianna, Jonathan, Kyle, and Savannah
Their promise for the future and that of thoughtful young people like them are grounds for reasonable faith in the wellbeing of the earth and its creatures— human and nonhuman alike— in the years to come.
PREFACE

What is faith? What are its roles in human life? What are some different conceptions of it? How does faith relate to knowledge, reason, and experience? Do faith, on the one hand, and scientific methods and claims to knowledge, on the other, necessarily conflict with one another? Are there such things as secular forms of faith? Are all types of faith obsolete and superstitious in our modern age? What are the relative roles of discursive thought and symbolic expressions in systems of faith? Under what circumstances of thought and life do conversions from one form of faith to another take place? In addressing these and similar questions, this book brings to light and takes issue with a number of serious misconceptions of the nature of faith and its roles in human life.
One of these misconceptions is that to have some type of faith is necessarily to be religious, whereas to be secular in one's outlook is to have rejected and be rid of all forms of faith. Another is that to have faith simply means to lay claim to a system of beliefs. A third misconception is that faith is opposed to knowledge and knowledge to faith, because faith is holding to beliefs with little or no evidence in their support, or even in the face of evidence weighing strongly against those beliefs, whereas knowledge consists of affirmations for which adequate and convincing evidential support has been sought and found. A fourth mistake regarding the nature of faith arises out of these second and third misconceptions. It is the idea that faith and the investigations and findings of the natural sciences are necessarily opposed to one another or can coexist, at best, only in separate compartments completely sealed off from one another.
A fifth misunderstanding is that faith is purely emotional in character, having no cognitive relevance or significance, and a sixth is that it can be produced in its entirety by an act of the will. This act of the will usually is regarded as a determination to believe something or other, in keeping with the idea that faith consists solely in the endorsement of a set of beliefs. A seventh misconception is the view that the whole significance and value of faith consist in the motivation faith may provide in at least in some of its forms for people's moral lives, the cohesiveness of social relations, and the stability of social systems. The final mistake is thinking that doubt is the sinister enemy of faith to be resisted at all costs because a strong personal faith, once established, must be by its nature something fixed, settled, and unchanging over the course of a person's life.
Some or all of these misconceptions of the nature and roles of faith are commonly and uncritically assumed in our culture, and they cry out for critical reflection and correction. They can seriously distort our ideas about such things as religion, secularity, knowledge, and science. They also can have adverse effects on our interpersonal relationships, on interactions within and among our institutions, and on our political dialogues. In the place of these misinterpretations of faith and for the sake of much needed criticism and correction of them, I offer a characterization and analysis of the twin conceptions of what I call reasonable faith and faithful reason . When properly understood, these two closely related conceptions can help to expose and avoid the misunderstandings of the nature and roles of faith to which I call attention in this book. I develop and defend them with that purpose in mind.
But I seek to do more in this book than to expose what I regard as misconceptions of the nature of faith and its roles in human life. My primary purpose is to set forth a positive conception of faith by identifying six interrelated facets or traits of it I consider essential for an adequate understanding of it. I also explore the intimate and indispensable connections of faith with knowledge in general and scientific knowledge in particular. I examine the relations of faith and morality, showing how they differ from one another but also how they influence and have need of one another. I discuss secular forms of faith in order to demonstrate not only that it is possible but also that it is generally inevitable that a person or system of thought will give expression to some form of faith even when the person or system is avowedly secular and intentionally nonreligious. Faith does not belong, therefore, exclusively to the province of religion. And what may initially look like an encounter of a form of faith with a secular outlook assumed to be a kind of non-faith will, on deeper analysis, need to be acknowledged as an encounter between two different forms of faith.
Finally, I discuss four examples of crises or radical changes of faith, in order to exhibit the dynamic character of an actively lived faith and some of the factors that may be involved in fundamental shifts and alterations within a particular form of faith or in a transition from one form of faith to another. I present the fourth example of such crises of faith in the last chapter of this book. In it, I describe some stages of my personal journey from an earlier form of faith to the different path of faith to which I am now committed.
All four of these crises of faith exhibit the distinctive contributions of critical reason and ongoing experience to the life of faith, as against the misguided idea that faith and reason, or faith and the evidences of ordinary experience, are somehow opposed to one another or should be kept separate from one another. Reason and faith are enemies of one another only when faith is viewed as forever fixed and unchanging, and as immune to critical reflection. The crises and their outcomes exhibit, in other words, the concept of reasonable faith, a faith responsive to the critical eye of reason and to what can be learned and needs to be learned from the experiences of everyday life. In other parts of the book, as indicated earlier, I explain and demonstrate the complementary truth that forms of faith and tacit influences of faith are necessarily involved in all processes of reasoning, scientific or otherwise, thus illustrating the concept of faithful reason.
I express my great appreciation to William L. Power and Robert E.Innis, as well as to an anonymous reader from State University of New York Press, all three of whom read previous drafts of this book in its entirety, encouraged its publication, and made helpful suggestions for its improvement. My wife Pam, who does her journal editing and her own writing across from me each day on a shared desk, read drafts of each chapter with care and indicated ways in which the chapters could be better organized, more clearly written, and more convincingly argued. I am grateful for her persistence in addressing points of disagreement that often persuaded me that she was entirely right and I was wrong with respect to particular claims, arguments, or matters of organization or style in those earlier drafts. Without her honest love and support, and the stimulation and provocation of our ongoing conversations, it is doubtful that this book could have been written or have reached its present form. I take full responsibility for undeniable deficiencies that remain in what I have written here, but the persons I mention have given invaluable assistance in urging me on, noting ways to improve the content, and helping me to recognize and avoid specific infelicities and inadequacies. I wish also to express my thanks to the courteous, capable, and responsible people at State University of New York Press with whom I have had the keen pleasure of working over the years in the process of bringing this book and other books into print.
ONE
INITIAL SKETCH OF A CONCEPT OF FAITH

I take reason to be deeply structured by faith and I take any faith that is not simply madness to be obliged to be articulate about itself and, so, rational in that sense.
—John D. Caputo 1
The term faith has many uses in our language. I can speak of having faith that my brother will pick me up each Thursday morning for our regular breakfast together. I can talk of having faith that the salad I am eating for lunch will not make me sick. I can ponder the faith it requires to drive with confidence in a blinding rain—what my dad called a “gully washer”—when the streets are slick and slippery and one can hardly see the traffic