Faith, Reason and Evil

Faith properly understood, does not contradict reason in the least; indeed, it is nothing less than the will to keep one’s mind fixed precisely on what reason has discovered to it.

Pure reason can reveal to us that there is a God, that we have immortal souls, and that there is a natural moral law. Does belief in such a revelation go beyond reason? Is this where faith comes in? the answer is no, for the claim that a divine revelation has occurred is something for which the monotheistic religions typically claim there is evidence, and that evidence takes the form of a miracle, a suspension of the natural order that cannot be explained in any way other than divine intervention in the normal course of events.

Given that God exists and that He sustains the world and the causal laws governing it in being at every moment, we know that there is a power capable of producing a miracle, that is , a suspension of those causal laws.

The case for the resurrection of Christ doesn’t exist in a vacuum then; it presupposes this philosophical background. Pure reason proves through philosophical arguments that there is a God and that we have immortal souls. This by itself entails that a miracle like a resurrection from the dead is possible. Now the historical evidence hat Jesus Christ was in fact resurrected from the dead is overwhelming when interpreted in light of that background knowledge. Hence pure reason also shows that Jesus really was raised from the dead. But Jesus claimed to be divine, and claimed that the authority of His teachings would be confirmed by His being resurrected. So the fact that He was resurrected provides divine authentication of His claims.

Suppose you know through purely rational arguments that there is a God, that He raised Jesus Christ from the dead, and therefore that Christ really is divine, as He claimed to be, so that anything He taught must be true; in other words, suppose that the general strategy jus sketched can be successfully fleshed out. Then it follows that if you are rational you will believe anything Christ taught; indeed, if you are rational you will believe it even if it is something that you could not possibly have come to know in any other way, and even if it is something highly counterintuitive and difficult to understand. Reason tells you to have faith  in what Christ teaches because He is divine. That is what faith is from the point of view of traditional Christian theology: belief in what God has revealed because if God has revealed it, it  cannot be in error; but where the claim that He revealed it is itself something that is known on the basis of reason faith doesn’t conflict with reason, then; it is founded on reason and completes reason.

Benedict XVI on Faith and Reason

 Ratzinger was concerned with the faith-reason relation.

In (Intro to Christianity p.26) he wrote: “Ever since the Prologue to the Gospel of John, the concept of logos has been at the very center of Christian faith . . . The God who is logos guarantees the intelligibility of the world, the intelligibility of our existence, the aptitude of reason to know God and the reasonableness of God, even though his understanding infinitely surpasses ours and to us may so often appear to be darkness. 

“The world comes from reason, and this reason is a Person, is Love.” Ibid.

In ITC Ratzinger is dealing with a text governed by the word credo and can hardly avoid giving some account of the act of faith.

He begins with the assertion that for human living, openness to a reality that exceeds the visible and tangible is an existential prerequisite, even an imperative. p.52

Until the early modern period, rational thought assisted, rather than inhibited, the act of faith in the invisible.

For ancient and medieval ontology, being is true—intelligible, meaningful—because it is creatively thought by God, who is absolute spirit. So long as this presupposition is in place, we can describe human thinking as the “rethinking of being” or the “rethinking of the thought that is being itself.” Man can rethink the logos, the meaning of being, because his own logos, his reason, is logos of the one logos, thought of the original thought, of the creative spirit that permeates and governs his being. Ibid p.59

This (healthful)assumption was abandoned, highly influentially, by the eighteenth-century Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico.

According to Vico, understanding is or should be of the humanly initiated.

Not verum quia ens,”true because being,” but verum quia factum, “true because made”. 

Eventually it produces the technological rationality which Ratzinger takes to be normative today. The true is now the feasible.

Here we have a further definition of truth, verum quia faciendum: something is “true because it can be done.” 

In the context of the ancient thinking and of the Bible, a stand was taken trustfully on the ground of the word of God. op.cit.p69

That word is meant to clear a path to the total of reality.

Such a total meaning cannot be made, it can only be received. 

This enables Benedict to make a link with the New Testament concept of faith. 

Christian faith is a faith that comes “from hearing”. Romans 10:17

To put it in another way, such a faith is the reception of something that I have not thought out, so that in the last analysis thinking in the context of faith is always a thinking over of something previously heard and received.op.cit.p.91

The affirmation of “credo in” ends not with a ground but with a person: the incarnate Word, in whose life “the meaning of the world is present before us”.

So that beside the language of logos is the language of love.

“Meaning knows me and loves me.” Ibid p.80

The self-communicative fullness of being(a philosophical description) is identical with the self-donation of the God of love. Absolute being, unsurpassable love.

Theology must continue to draw from the treasury of knowledge that it did not invent itself, that always surpasses it and that, never being totally exhaustible through reflection, and precisely because of this launches thinking.

Philosophy must truly remain an undertaking of reason in its proper freedom and proper responsibility; it must recognize its limits, and precisely in this way also its grandeur and vastness.