THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FAITH AND REASON

INTRODUCTION

As a matter of fact, one of the major problems that religious thinkers inevitably stumble upon in their philosophical journey is the relationship between faith and reason, that is: the relationship between theology and philosophy respectively. This has remained a boiling issue in Philosophy of Religion even from the Ancient Period, in the second (2nd) century, with Justin the martyr and even Paul the apostle among the first set of philosophers/theologians to make their contributions in attempts to synthesize the two. The metaphysical problem has since then remained open-ended, and as such has been a nice topic for debate especially among philosophers of the Middle Ages. The problem still lingers and remains a source of lively discussion among philosophers of religion even till this twenty-first century.

The age-old conundrum of the compatibility or incompatibility of faith and reason has left many philosophers of religion not unconcerned with the demand of contributing their own quota towards the voyage of discovery of the true relationship between the two sources of religious truths. Thus, this issue was a major concern in the early centuries of the Church, and continued to be debated during the medieval period, as most philosophers of this period tried to justify their religious faith using philosophical approach. For some philosophers, especially rationalist theologians, philosophy and theology are intertwined. Some others, especially the Ancient Greek philosophers (who are regarded as pagans by the Christians), atheists, pantheists, deists, and religious extremists hold tenaciously that philosophy is highly incompatible with matters of faith. As it is widely believed that two captains cannot man same ship at same time, whenever it comes to the question of “which one takes precedence?”,  it is often the case that rationalist theologians and religious extremists claim superiority of faith over reason, while the ‘pagans’, atheists, pantheists and deists argue that the reverse is the case.

Originally, the problem was without precedence in the history of philosophy. For the Greeks there was no problem. They had only one principle to guide their thinking: philosophical reason. The Greeks had no divine revelation in the form of sacred scriptures, for most of their religious notions were transmitted through their poets in the form of myths and tradition. Hence Greek philosophers either rejected these myths and tradition or downplayed their importance. In like manner, the Jewish tradition had no problem with faith and reason. They avoided the problem by adhering to only one side of the dichotomy, but in their case it was faith. Their patriarchs, priests and prophets would continue to emphasize the stories of God’s faithfulness to his people, and thus made philosophical grounds for belief seem superfluous.

 On the contrary, it is not so with the Christians. The Christian evangelizers wanted to be “all things to all men” (1 Cor. 9:22) in line with St. Paul’s evangelical outlook, in order to carry out Jesus’ mandate of evangelizing the whole world. (cf. Matt. 28:19). So as Greek ways of thinking gradually displaced the Jewish influences on Christianity, Christian thinkers found themselves having to answer attacks from philosophers without, resolve controversies within, and satisfy the Greek thirst for a systematic worldview.