Is Religion Inherently Rational or Irrational?

There are two schools of thought on the epistemic status of religious belief. One school of thought holds that religious belief is inherently rational, while the other school of thought holds that religious belief is inherently irrational (for better or worse). The great Christian theologians and apologeticists have almost universally held that their faith is rational in some form or another, while the irrationalist school of thought has its roots with Kierkegaard and the rise of the existentialist movement in the 19th and 20th centuries. In this article I will present both views and give arguments defending the view that religious belief can be based in rationality (although certainly individual Christians do not all necessarily view their faith in this way).

Faith as Rational

Within the school of thought that holds faith to be rational in nature, there are three distinct views on the relationship of faith to rationality. The first view holds that religious belief is only rational if one is able to provide adequate justification, proofs, or reasons for the beliefs. Christian apologetics in general fits into this category, as do the classic philosophical arguments that attempt to prove the existence of God through reason (e.g., Thomas Aquinas' Five Ways, St. Anselm's Ontological Argument, and William Paley's Teleological Argument, etc.). The second view on the relation between faith and reason is that religious beliefs are rational if and only if there is no counter-evidence to disprove one's religious beliefs. This view is akin to a falsification model of scientific knowledge, which holds that current theories are acceptable after the failure to falsify those theories through experiments designed to disprove them. In terms of religious beliefs, one justifies his/her beliefs in this model by defeating counterarguments against one's beliefs. The third view holds that religious beliefs are rational as long as they are coherent with the rest of one's fundamental beliefs. On this model, one is concerned with the internal coherence of a a belief system. With coherence as the standard for rationality, this view holds that religious beliefs are justified insofar as they mesh well and cohere with all our other beliefs and experience; including our beliefs about science, the human condition, religious experience, etc. My own view is that this third view under the blanket of rational faith, i.e. that religious beliefs are rational if they are coherent with our other beliefs, is the most promising of these views for showing religious faith to be inherently rational instead of irrational.

Faith as Irrational

Although there have always been irrational religious people who do not attempt to give their religious beliefs a rational foundation, the irrationalist movement really gets off the ground in the late 19th century and in the 20th century with Kierkegaard and the rise of the existentialist movement. Kierkegaard held (at least on one reading of his work) that religious belief was inherently irrational, as characterized by the "leap of faith" that one takes, often to the contrary of any evidence our grounding for that leap. While I will not go into detail about the specifics of Kierkegaard's philosophy, this view should be familiar to those of us living in the 21st century who are familiar with the schism that was created between faith and reason as a result of this existentialist/irrationalist movement. One sees the legacy of this view in the continuing conflict (or pseudo-conflict, as I believe it to be) between religion and science. It is no accident that we are left with the irrationalist view of faith and reason (and faith and science in turn) as the received view after the influence of the existentialists on 20th century thought. I will argue, however, that there are problems with this view and that the resulting conflicts between faith and reason, and between faith and science, are merely pseudo-conflicts that are (albeit difficultly at times due to our still limited understanding of the natural world) in principle able to be resolved.

Coherence

As stated above, I believe option #3 under the rationalist category is the best way of conceiving the relationship between faith and rationality. Again, under this view one's religious beliefs count as rational if they can be shown to be coherent with our other beliefs (e.g. those about the natural world and its laws). I will show what is wrong with each of the other views, including both other rationalist views and the irrationalist view in general.

The first rationalist option, that faith is rational if adequate justification can be given for one's views, seems doomed to failure. Many attempts to try to prove God's existence rationally have been made over the millennia, most of which (such as the Ontological and Cosmological Arguments) are generally accepted to be unsound arguments (although the coherence view I advocate gives these old arguments new life due to their often rigorous conceptual analysis of concepts associated with divinity). In addition, the modern iteration of this approach, the Intelligent Design movement, I believe incorrectly assumes that God is the only way to account for the complexity and variation one encounters in the biological sciences and in the universe as a whole from the perspective of cosmology. Each attempt to show that God is necessary for the events described in the various natural sciences is defeated as our knowledge about the natural world increases. This attempt to place God's interaction with the world in the gaps of our understanding has become known, somewhat pejoratively, as "God of the Gaps Theology". As we learn more about the natural world, the gaps in our understanding narrow and God gets squeezed out of the picture more and more. So if we are to show that faith is inherently rational and coherent with the natural world we live in, it cannot be through abstract philosophical arguments or by invoking God merely to fill the gaps in our own understanding. I argue below that the coherentist option best allows for a robust theology that places faith on a rational foundation without falling prey to bad arguments or to a God of the Gaps Theology.

The second rationalist option, that faith is rational if there is no counter-evidence, is likewise doomed to failure. When presented with counter-evidence, one can always give a clever interpretation to make that new evidence fit nicely into one's current belief system (the recent press coverage of the Creationist Museum is an example of this in action). With this being the case, it is impossible to ever provide evidence that will conclusively disprove a religious belief system. While one might cynically think that this is a problem with religious belief in general, showing it to be irrational, it is worth noting that the natural sciences have the same problem. As Thomas Kuhn has shown in his account of paradigm shifts in scientific knowledge, it is always possible to revive a dying theory by trying to make the new seeming counter-evidence fit into the current theories. If there is repeated failure to do so, then science may or may not abandon those current theories and a paradigm shift occurs taking new theories as fundamental and accepted. But the problem should be apparent: there is no clear counter-evidence that will disprove a theory directly; one can always attempt to save the theory (or save the religious commitments) by offering an interpretation that incorporates that new evidence into current beliefs. For this reason, I do not believe that the second rationalist option above is a fruitful way of thinking of the relationship between faith and rationality.

As for the irrationalist view above, I also believe that this notion of an irrational faith is not the correct way of conceiving the relationship between faith and reason. Being a Christian myself, I believe that God the Father is the creator of the universe. If this is the case, then the world that God created and the world that we live in and learn about through the sciences are one and the same world. There should not be a conflict (as our knowledge becomes adequate to show this) between one's faith and the things that are true of the natural world as long as one has a correct understanding of each. The irrationalist movement creates and dichotomy between the world of faith and the world of reason that does not acknowledge that the worlds described by each are actually one and the same reality. So in principle there should not be a schism or a conflict between faith and reason, and where there is conflict, it is merely apparent conflict and apparent contradiction due to the limits of our own human and fallible understanding. Notice now that we are talking about coherence between faith and reason and between faith and the natural sciences. This is the heart of my conviction that rationalist option #3, which is the view that faith is rational if it is coherent with or other beliefs, is the most fruitful and promising way of conceiving the relationship between faith and reason.

The Coherence Project

It is over-quick to use the insight that faith and reason describe the same reality as a way of justifying faith outright. Our understanding of things divine and our understanding of the natural world are still limited in nature due to our imperfect and human perspectives. Even if God has revealed some truths to us about his own nature and his relationship to mankind (especially in his incarnation in Jesus of Nazareth), it would be hubris to claim that we had a full understanding of the divine nature. Likewise, no one would deny that scientific knowledge is constantly progressing, or at least evolving, which points to the limitation of our own understanding of the natural world and the universe in which we live. Because of this lack in our understanding, there is still much work to be done to show that religious beliefs are actually coherent with the natural sciences.

Care must be taken not just to invoke God as a way of explaining away the gaps in our understanding, though; but where we have positive knowledge (or at least well founded beliefs) of the natural world and positive knowledge (again, or at least well-founded beliefs) of things divine, the task is to show how the two systems are coherent and compliment one another. The mistake made by the Intelligent Design movement is that the Intelligent Design movement tries to use the natural world as a means of proving conclusively that there is a divine being. I believe that project to be doomed to failure, but nonetheless I believe that there is promise in trying to show that religious belief and beliefs about the natural world are coherent beliefs.

Without a doubt, Big Bang cosmology has reopened the door to belief in a creator who set the Big Bang in motion, and there has been much research into the possibility of using top-down causation as a means of explaining God's action in a world that is governed by natural laws without violating those natural laws themselves. This approach is also being used as a means of explaining how God could use the natural laws themselves as a tool in his creation of beings in his own image (i.e. with free will and a spiritual life) through the evolutionary process. Again, care must be taken to distinguish this view from the Intelligent Design movement. The difference is a question of trying to prove coherence of two different belief systems rather than trying to use one system to prove the other.

Of course, due to the type of being that we are (an imperfect, created being, from the Christian perspective), we will never be able to accomplish this project fully; for presumably only God has the perfect intellect needed to grasp the whole of creation and the whole of divinity in its fullest coherence. But I believe that it is crucial that we use the gift of reason that God has given us to understand better the world that God has given to us and mystery and revelation of God in that world.

Note: The philosophical background for this article is provided by the work of Philip Clayton, Arthur Peacocke, and John Polkinghorne. Their influence on my thought in these matters cannot be overstated. Visit also the website for the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences for more information on current academic research on the relationship between theology and science.