Month: February 2007

A reader writes:

I may be a little young to start dreading oblivion after death. But I
can’t help it. Whenever I am told to believe in some religious truth, I
always find myself asking “why?” So often people only talk about what they
believe, but never why they believe it. My constant questioning ensures that
I will have many sleepless nights, but it also makes me think of religion as
an intellectual pursuit of some ultimate truth. I want to be comforted by
truth, not seek truth in only that in which I am comfortable.

To ease my fears of infinite nonexistence, I try to rationalize faith in an
afterlife. I think to myself, “if God exists, and there are eternal
consequences for going against his will, then he would make his will known
to me.” I base this opinion on the fact that God is obviously a fan of free
will. He allows us to make choices, even if those choices hurt ourselves or
others. Therefore, any damnation would only occur after a knowing rejection
of his will. (A “knowing” rejection because I also assume that God is
merciful).

That’s why I appreciate Catholic websites like yours. On Catholic websites
have I found honest historical/logical arguments for objective truth, not
merely “look inside your heart and you will know the truth.” As implied
above, I have looked into my heart and it has made me want to find God.
However, people can easily confuse their desire for something to be true,
with truth itself (i.e. Jim Jones’s Kool-Aid, 9-11 hijackers, etc…).

Therefore, my question is this: At what point does reason give way to true
religious faith? Authentic faith can only occur if the person has “faith” in
some objective truth. Consequently, is faith only possible after you’ve
proven a religious fact to be objectively true? Or, is faith the leap from
the cliffs of reason to the rope of objective truth? In other words, is
faith a necessary component in proving an objective truth about God? I want
faith, but I need to ensure that I am not one of the billions of people with
the wrong faith.

I want to commend the reader for his thoughtfulness and the obvious sincerity of his search, as well as his openmindedness. Truth is what is important, and the diligent search for the truth is something God will certainly reward. A verse that was very important to me when I was at an early stage of my journey to the Christian faith was John 7:17, where Jesus tells us that "if any man’s will is to do his [God’s] will, he shall know whether the teaching
is from God or whether I am speaking on my own authority." I took that to mean that, as long as I was sincere about trying to follow the truth and willing to do what God wants, he would make sure I would get the evidence I need to support embracing the faith.

I’d commend this verse to the reader as well.

To answer the question, we may distinguish between two types of truths that are part of the faith.

The first class of truths is those that can be proven by reason. A classic example of this is the existence of God. The existence of God can be proved by human reason, though it is not always easy for everyone to do this. Not everyone has the training in philosophy or the patience to follow the lines of reasoning that show this.

That’s not surprising, becasue we all have different areas of expertise. I, for example, do not have the training or the patience to follow the lines of reasoning needed to show that certain concepts from physics are true. Therefore, on those concepts, I must defer to the experts who have studied matters.

We thus see that there are two ways in which a provable truth can be believed: On the part of those who have thoroughly studied the matter, it can be believed on the basis of having studied the demonstration of the truth. On the part of those who have not thoroughly studied the matter, it can be taken on faith on the word of the experts.

There’s nothing wrong with taking the word of experts. In fact, most of our knowledge (everything that we haven’t studied and proven ourselves) is based on taking the word of others, and unless we have reason to think that the person whose word we are taking is untrustworthy, it is reasonable to operate in this manner.

Indeed, humans are designed in a way that makes it impossible for us to function if we systematically mistrust others. We crash and burn if we try that kind of global skepticism.

It is thus normal for people to simply accept the religion in which they are raised. Their parents teach it to them, and kids are biologically programmed to accept what their parents tell them. They’d never survive if they weren’t, because it would be impossible to pass on human culture from one generation to another.

Because this is the way humans are built to operate, we may trust that God recognizes this and does not hold people accountable if they have grown up in a religion that has false elements or that is entirely false. People are only responsible for how they handle the grace that they are given, not the grace that they are not.

Some–such as the readers–are given the grace of desiring to press further and to examine the rational basis of religion, and I would encourage him to do so. At the end of this post, I’ll recommend some books that can help him further his study of this, but to answer his question about the relationship of faith and reason, when it comes to provable truths of religion, these can be accepted either on the basis of proving them oneself or on the basis of the testimony of experts who have, just as it is in every other field of human learning.

The trick, of course, is making sure that you’re listening to the right experts, which gives us a nudge to at least study a little bit so that we can have something of a feel for which experts are right.

All that I’ve said thus far applies to provable truths, but there are also truths that human reason cannot prove. This is something that exists in every field of learning. There are truths about history that cannot be proved because the data to prove them no longer exists. There are truths about astronomy that cannot be proved because they concern stars whose light hasn’t yet reached earth. And there are truths about biology that can’t be proved because we haven’t studied the relevant life forms sufficiently. In the same way, there are truths about religion that cannot be proved–or at least proved directly–because we don’t have access to them in this life.

But whereas in other areas of learning we’re simply out of luck if something can’t be proven by human reason, when it comes to religion we aren’t in quite that situation. The reason is that–according to the revelatory religions like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam–the realm of the divine is willing to make contact with us and tell us about the things that we can’t observe or prove by human reason.

The situation is analagous to a traveller from a foreign land telling us about what his homeland is like; the homeland in this case being heaven. Or, to use a different analogy, it’s like a person who can see telling a blind person what color objects are. The blind person can’t know this directly, by his own experience, but he can know it indirectly with the help of someone who can see.

God and his messengers, the angels, thus can reveal to humans truths that cannot be proven by human reason alone. A classic example of this is the fact that God is a Trinity–three Persons in one Being. That’s something we can understand, at least partially, once it is revealed to us, but it is not something that human reason alone can prove.

The question is why we would want to accept truths of this sort. Why wouldn’t we want to just stop with a religion of what can be proved by human reason alone?

The fundamental answer is: Because if something is a truth then we should accept it. The real question is how we can know which things that cannot be proven by human reason alone are true.

Here we are in the same situation as someone who has never been to another country or who does not have the ability to see. We can learn things that we can’t sense for ourselves from others, but we need a way to establish whether the person telling us about them knows what he’s talking about and is reliable or not.

What people who are questioning what they’re being told by others need is a reason to believe them, or what is sometimes called a "motive of credibility." The more motives of credibility they can establish regarding the truthfulness of what they are being told, the more reason they have to accept it.

For example, if a person who was blind from birth wants to know why he should believe, on the word of someone else, that grass is green and that the sky is blue, he is asking–in essence–for a motive of credibility. He can’t perceive these things for himself, but he’s seeking a reason that make the claims credible.

The logical one to offer in that case would be the testimony of others. The sighted person who has just told him that grass is green and that the sky is blue might say, "Don’t just take my word for it. Ask other people! They’ll tell you the same thing."

While a person blind from birth could never completely rule out the possibility of a society-wide conspiracy of Santa Claus-like scale to deceive blind people about the colors of objects (or even the existence of color itself), each person he talk to who confirms that grass is green and that the sky is blue provides him one more motive of credibility to accept these facts, and at some point the volume of the motives becomes such that (if he is rational), he’ll end up saying, "Okay, I can’t see these colors for myself, but it’s reasonable for me to believe both that color exists and that grass is green and the sky is blue."

This is essentially the same situation as that of a person inquiring into the rational basis of religion. While he can’t (unfortunately) go ask a bunch of angels about various truths of the faith and test their answers against each other the way a blind person can with sighted people, he can nevertheless see what motives of credibility can be offered for particular belief systems.

Some of those motives of credibility will be related to things that can be proved (e.g., I can prove that God exists, and this religion agrees with that, so it’s a sign that this religion may be on the right track). Others will be based on things that can’t be proved but that are consistent with our intuitions (e.g., this religion teaches that killing innocent people is morally legitimate, and that seems wrong to me, so it’s a sign this religion is not the right one).

Ultimately, if Jesus was right about people who are open to God’s will finding out if his teaching is true, we’ll get the motives of credibility we need to accept the Christian faith (and, I would say, the Catholic understanding of it).

The process thus involves reason leading to faith. Motives of credibility are assessed by reason and, though not everything about the faith can be proved by human observation and reason, the reasonable evaluation of motives of credibility leads us toward the act of faith–that what we place our faith in is itself true and reasonable.

The study of motives of credibility is known as "apologetics," and there have been many works of apologetics that have been written in support of the Christian faith. I would particularly recommend the following:

THE HANDBOOK OF CHRISTIAN APOLOGETICS by Peter Kreeft and Ronald K. Tacelli

MERE CHRISTIANITY by C. S. Lewis

MIRACLES by C. S. Lewis

If the reader decides he’s looking for something on an academic level, I’d also recommend

SCALING THE SECULAR CITY by J. P. Moreland

And since he’s expressed particular interest in the subject of life after death, I’d recommend

BEYOND DEATH by Gary Habermas and J. P. Moreland (though I have to mention on this one that the authors are Protestant and the book’s treatment of purgatory is innacurate)

Hope this helps, God bless the reader on his journey, and I hope he’ll ask more questions when he has them!

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