Intro
The question to whether Faith in God is rational rests upon the bases for which we define both terms: Faith and Rational. Here, one can characterize faith with belief. In the intellectualist perspective, faith in God is the same as belief that God exists. One can believe that God exists without trusting in God at all. To trust in God is to count on God for something, but belief that God exists does not require one’s counting on God for anything. So, the idea of faith in God is, in its essence, the reduction to the base idea that God exists. The term “reason” is more ambiguous than the term “faith,” and this has hindered inquiry about the relation between rational faith in God. A prominent definition of “reason” offered by the Oxford English Dictionary is: “A statement of some fact (real or alleged) used to justify or condemn an action, or to prove or disprove some assertion, idea, or belief.” If a reason is a “statement used to justify” a claim or an action, then reason has a crucial role in an argument. Therefore, faith in God is rational insofar as it only concerns one’s pure belief about God’s existence.
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard dedicated his life to a defense of Christianity that was truly a way of life rather than simply the acceptance of a church creed. Kierkegaard was especially disturbed that the Danish church had accepted its definition of Christianity from G. W. F. Hegel. For Hegel, rationality was the supreme virtue, and Christianity was the ultimate religion because the doctrine of the Trinity was in accordance with his own understanding of logic: God the Father and Jesus Christ are identical since each is God, and yet they are different from one another since they are distinct individuals. This apparent "difference" is then reconciled by the fact that God has made Himself known through the Holy Spirit's birthing of the church. Because Christianity is based on faith, Hegel taught that to be rational we must go beyond religion and turn to his own philosophy if we are to understand ultimate reality.
Kierkegaard felt that it was his duty to confront Hegel's thinking and to present the supremacy of the Christian faith to the Danish people. In one of Kierkegaard's more famous works, The Philosophical Fragments, it is suggested that the doctrine of the Incarnation is indeed the ultimate paradox: How can it make sense that God became man? He was intent on demonstrating that, if Hegel is right, then Christianity is completely wrong. But, if Hegel is wrong, then it is possible to understand that doctrines such as the Incarnation reveal the logical superiority of Christian faith.
He begins by asking if the truth can be learned. He therefore questions what kind of teacher would be capable of bringing the truth to human beings who do not know the truth. Since all people are created by God, it must have been God who made it possible for human beings to know the truth. But since people don't know the truth, then only a divine being could teach human beings the truth. And what is it that prevents people from knowing the truth? It is sin. And since the teacher must bring people out of this sinful condition in order for them to understand truth, this teacher should also be seen as a savior, a deliverer. But, to be a savior for humans, this divine being must also become human as well, which is illogical to those who have not received the truth. All this is to suggest, however, that the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation is perfectly consistent for the person of faith. For Kierkegaard, biblical faith takes us beyond what human reason can possibly conceive.
Therefore, Kierkegaard claimed that absolute knowledge can only lead us to what was the realm of knowledge before we went into the boundaries of the “Unknown” which he believed was what Man called God. Here, faith acts as to discover God and reach into the realm of the “Unknown” because reason and pure rationality only can venture so far until they are blocked by the limitations of thought.
Kierkegaard on Abraham
How is it that Abraham is routinely recognized to be one of the greatest figures in all of Scripture, the father of faith, and yet at the same time we must admit that he was a split-second away from murdering his own son? If anyone were to emulate Abraham in modern times, we would do our best to prevent such a heinous act. Yet, at the same time preachers routinely preach on the greatness of Abraham. Kierkegaard concludes that what made Abraham so amazing was his belief that he would receive Isaac back in this life, rather than just in the life everlasting. Still, this leads to the conclusion that Abraham was willing to kill Isaac. How, then, can we exalt Abraham as a great man?
Kierkeagard proceeds to examine the purpose behind Abraham's action. According to Hegel, the individual was to subordinate his own desires for the broader good of the institutions of family, civil society, and the state. Consequently, it would have been Hegel's position that Abraham's actions were both ludicrous and evil since they did not conform with the ethical standards of a civilized people. As a result, Kierkegaard forces us to ask whether the philosophy of Hegel or the teaching of Scripture is to take priority.
Kierkegaard’s own unique answer is that, in order to understand Abraham's relationship to God, there must be what he calls the "Teleological suspension of the ethical." For Hegel, the ultimate purpose of ethics was for the members of a state to share the same moral virtue, under which circumstances a nation can be joined together with a common bond. But for Kierkegaard, the individual takes priority over the state. Abraham's actions were guided by a higher purpose than simply conforming to the ethical norms of society. His faith enabled him to obey God to the point of becoming a murderer, while believing that God would raise his beloved son from the dead. Who then is greater? Hegel, or Abraham? Human reason gives one answer, but Christian faith another.
Here, we see how reason, faulty and inconsistent, gives one answer which is inconsistent with a person’s innate moral and ethical values and contrary to the essential Christian doctrine whereas faith provides us with the right conclusion on the actions of Abraham – by right I mean by what God thinks is correct. Therefore, faith is a completely rational point of inference as part of a method to understand the world but more importantly God, and so faith in God is wholly reliable and thus rational.
James and Kant
However, in his book, The Will to Believe (1903), William James held that men must believe something out of psychological necessity. Something offered for our belief is a hypothesis. If we label a decision made from various hypotheses an option, then our options may be of several kinds. The “religious hypothesis” is chosen on the basis of the greatest “cash value” (a term he used often in his essays), in spite of the fact that such questions cannot be decided intellectually at all. In his essay, The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life (1903), James argued that one should live “as if” God exists because this forces one to live a more strenuous moral life. No one can know that God exists, said James, but in order to live the best type of moral life, we must live as though we do know that He exists.
Therefore, faith might be useless here as if we can never know that God exists and are meant to “live as though we do know that God exists”, as James posited, then we would be wasting our cognitive faculties. If we can’t get to know God through pure knowledge then we would be placing belief and faith into a being which does not metaphysically exist and so we would be making a Category Error (as Gilbert Ryle formulated). Therefore, faith in God might be irrational if our basis for belief in God and thus our basis for Faith – God’s very existence – is faulty.
Furthermore, after Kant, many thinkers not only distinguished faith and reason, but also separated them. Faith and reason were thought to occupy two entirely different spheres. One could speak of faith in terms of probability, mystical experience, irrationality, being “beyond knowledge,” etc., but certainly not as a form of knowledge. This assumption became so influential and prominent that members of the body of Christ began to advocate it as being the truth. “Absolute, final knowledge beyond which there can be no greater, would not leave room for faith. One of Webster’s definitions of faith is, “firm belief in something for which there is no proof.” Here we are seeking to answer the question of proof of God but we must come to the reverse conclusion that no one can positively prove God, he cannot be positively and scientifically proved in the same way more ordinary things are proved. The existence of God cannot be proved in a final absolute sense. After all, there must be room for faith if we are free beings. The choice between belief and unbelief hinges on the strength of evidence for and against. Alexander Campbell said “We have learned one lesson of great importance in the pursuit of truth… It is this: Never to hold any sentiment or proposition as more certain than the evidence on which it rests; or, in other words, that our assent to any proposition should be precisely proportioned to the evidence on which it rests…”
Therefore, by the definition of faith given here, we can see that faith is wholly irrational as what is the purpose of belief in a non-existent being. If belief hinges on empiricism and, by definition, God can’t be defined by merely human evidence, than our belief would not be based upon any solid evidence and so our belief and thus our faith would be wholly irrational.
Kierkegaard and Truth
Kierkegaard says all truth is subjective. He is again attacking the philosophy of Hegel, who claimed that it was possible for human beings to possess absolute knowledge through carefully analyzing human existence. He questions how it is possible to have absolute certainty in this life, especially when we consider the wide variance between philosophers since ancient times. More importantly, the claim of absolute knowledge seems to mean that, for the Christian, knowing is more important than believing. Since faith, as in the case of Abraham, often requires patience and endurance before reaching its fulfillment, there must be a qualitative difference between faith and knowledge. According to Kierkegaard, only God can have absolute knowledge. This is important to consider when pondering the assertion that all truth is subjective, for Kierkegaard makes a major distinction between the faith and knowledge.
One of Kierkegaard's major emphases in his writings was that the Christian life is more than simply believing in orthodox doctrine. Consequently, when he claims that all truth is subjective, he is claiming that human beings must appropriate the truth of whatever they believe if it is truly to take hold of their lives. The Christian must make a leap of faith, in the sense that faith always involves risk. Kierkegaard contrasted the willingness to believe and live out the truths of Christianity against the passive acceptance of philosophical systems. This is the difference between subjective and objective truth.
Therefore, faith is qualitatively different to mere knowledge insofar as it is applied to God. Knowledge can not be more important than faith as we can not get to know God through knowledge even absolute knowledge. Therefore, faith in God is necessary if we ever expect to come close to knowing him and thus it must be rational as the ability to believe in God was endowed thus by God and so to not try to comprehend him would be a large misuse of our God-endowed faith.
Conclusion
To conclude, faith in God may be rational insofar as it is used alone and separate from the grasps of reason and knowledge. In this essay, I have explored the limitations of knowledge and of reason to discover whether faith in God is possible and if so when it should be used. All these questions are essential and were used to come to the final conclusion: is faith and rational and can faith in God thus be so.