Faith and Reason
Part 2
Steps towards overcoming the division
1. Faith also has a cognitive dimension
uWhile faith is much more than just belief, either on the level of overall vision as to the way things are,
or on the level of facts or events as understood and interpreted in the context of this overall vision,
it is at least this much as well.
uThat is, it does have cognitive relevance.
2. Faith is more than just response to testimony
uIn its initial phases, faith is often a response to testimony usually of other people, testimony both of word and of life
uBut faith in its maturity usually has come to be confirmed by the life experiences of the person believing as they try it out for themselves, that reality might well be this way, that this makes sense in the light of my own experience
uThis is probably enough for us to be able to rate faith as a species of empiric believing, albeit more or less heavily contextualized
2. Faith is more than just response to testimony (cont’d)
uParticularly as the vast bulk of our everyday ‘secular’ and scientific knowledge is in practice accepted on the basis of other people’s testimony, because of what teacher says, or recorded in textbooks and internet sites, via a kind of argument from authority, though congruent with our own experience and the little specialist areas we may have
uThis is the case even for most scientists nowadays, outside the area of their specialization.
3. All empiric believing is contextually determined, it’s only a question of more or less
uEmpiric believing: belief on the basis of my own or other people’s experience. As distinct from our knowledge of logic or pure mathematics, which are not based on experience.
uPost-Popperian philosophy of science and the psychology and neuro-physiology of perception as well as post Humean and post Kantian philosophy would all seem to push us in the direction that both everyday world and scientific world are constructed, and also that this constructing is not immune from historical process.
3. All empiric believing is contextually determined (cont’d)
uIt seems that what we take to experience, i.e. theories, interpretative structures, already existing belief formations, has a number of effects:
•What we take to experience makes some experiences more likely than others;
•What we take to experience sometimes shapes the experiences themselves
•It determines how we interpret our experience, including what we interpret them as experiences of (if anything); and
3. All empiric believing is contextually determined (cont’d)
(d) It determines what we will come to believe on the basis of those experiences.
Experiences in their turn
•Will tend to feed into and help to determine our interpretative structures, and
•Will affect the belief formations which determine further possibilities for belief.
4. This tends to relativise the
distinction, without abolishing it altogether
uIt seems that empiric believing always happens inside traditions of experience and interpretation (Schillebeeckx, Dupre, for religious experience), paradigms, research programs, traditions of enquiry
uIt would seem, then, that it is only a matter of more or less: more or less particular versus more or less general, more or less concrete and close to life versus more or less abstract
4. This tends to relativise the distinction, without abolishing it altogether (cont’d)
uThere are also a number of common life examples of this ‘hermeneutics of empiric believing’
uE.g. the boy who cried wolf
uE.g. the Chinese
Emperor and his paramour and the
uE.g. the un-corroborated alibi
uE.g. what I had for breakfast yesterday
uCompare also Hume’s Indian prince
4. This tends to relativise the distinction, without abolishing it altogether (cont’d)
uThere would seem to be no reason to exclude interpretative structures as illegitimate entrants into such a hermeneutics of reasonable believing
uIt would also seem to be somewhat arbitrary to draw the line at any particular point on the spectrum of particularity or generality, seeing as it seems, given contemporary theory of empiric knowledge, to be largely a matter of more or less
uThis may or may not have been arguable when we had a clear distinction between general/universalizable/rational and particular; with everything as more or less particular, however, it’s not at all so clear
4. This tends to relativise the distinction, without abolishing it altogether (cont’d)
uThis does not mean that all traditions of experience and interpretation are good ones; some could seriously lead us astray. But before we decide on a question like this in any particular case, we would need to investigate in detail how belief gets to be determined inside a particular tradition.
uThere may be some general principles that we can come up with, to
enable us to at least eliminate in advance the Jonestownian,
4 (cont’d): Some criteria for distinguishing good and bad
traditions
uLogical Criteria: coherence, consistency, elegance
uEmpirical Criteria: applicability, adequacy
uPragmatic Criteria: what kinds of transformations it leads to or makes possible
uPersonal criteria: whether I can cop it, how it fits in with my sense of narrative identity, and whether my bias is towards simplicity or adequacy
uOpenness: open systems generally preferable to closed (cf.Whitehead’s plane)
uIn these days post September 11th: The Empathy Test (Edith Stein), how well it survives a generalized application of Hume’s ‘sympathy’ or ‘humanity’ or fellow feeling (cf. “I, Robot”)
4 (cont’d). Some criteria for distinguishing good and bad traditions (cont’d)
uSuch criteria are probably enough to get rid of our Jonestownian and other extremes
uThe only difficulty will be, that concrete application of criteria will themselves be tradition dependent and also there is an internal interplay between experience and interpretation
uNon-chauvinistic application will thus likely leave a lot standing, on both sides of the previous science-religion supposed divide
5. Epistemic Rights and Epistemic Obligations
uGiven that empiric belief is contextually determined, reasonable believing on the basis of experience is generalizable only in a context-mentioning sense: a belief that any reasonable person in that particular context might have.
uThis
can mean that I can have an epistemic right and even an epistemic obligation to
believe something, while you lack such a right let alone such an obligation and
vice versa.
uCf. Nicholas Rescher
uAll that is required is that interpretative structures be allowed as part of such a mentioned context, or at least not ruled out a priori, without investigation of how that particular tradition goes about determining belief.
References
u(This rendition presumes the notes on Philosophy of Science – see above, under Course Material)
u(It also presumes, and should be taken with, the notes that follow on Religious Experience)
u(Compare the overheads on Faith and Reason Naturalized and Relativised which follow immediately.)
u(Compare finally ‘Faith and Reason: Complete’, the full, integrated version of two or three conference papers, on my web site.)
6. What we don’t want to lose
u(a) the personal dimension of ‘Faith’ and ‘Revelation’: they are both personal or interpersonal categories, and we wouldn’t want to lose this.
uNote: this is mainly for personal religions such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam, theistic versions of Hinduism etc. Not the case for some other forms of Hinduism, and the original Buddhism.
6. What we don’t want to lose (cont’d)
u(b) All ‘religions’ or the complexes we isolate as ‘religious’ could be rated as ‘transformative practices’, and this is a very big distinction from most other ‘knowledges’: they are meant to have transformative effects on individuals and communities, to transform rather than to describe.
uThis transformative effect can outlast, to some extent at least, a loss of confidence in the ‘scientific’ character of their pronouncements – though possibly not a loss of all cognitive confidence.
7. A Pluralism of Reasonable Believing within a Well
Ordered Society under the Rule of Law.
uThis all tends to justify a pluralism of reasonable believing on both sides of the science-religion divide, while yet probably making dialogue more reasonable than it was before
uThis is consistent with the later but probably not the earlier Rawls: the later Rawls relies on overlapping consensus between a pluralism of reasonable comprehensive doctrines… (John Rawls perhaps the most important English speaking political theorist of 20th C.)