Is FAITH compatible with REASON?

[Soph0571]

It is a fact that in the face of over whelming evidence to the contrary, or a complete lack of any evidence at all, people will still stick to their belief systems. It is akin to having a filtering system in your mind. People decide what to believe with their emotions, we are confronted by a fact and we decide emotionally whether we believe it or not, and then seek evidence to justify our emotional responses. Any evidence that is counter to our emotional response is dismissed, distorted or ridiculed to strengthen our own beliefs.

People of faith have an extremely emotional and powerful conviction that God is real. Of course, we don’t know that God is real, until you have been in a room with God and shaken his hand, so it all about how you feel. Your brain, your mind is the source of your feelings. I would hazard a guess that from time to time all of us have had feelings that were not reasonable, that were not to be trusted. We all tell ourselves stories about the world, based on our emotions. After all the brain is a story generating organism rather than a fact generating organism. Of course, logically, we know that if you cannot provide evidence to back up your belief structure it remains just a theory, a maybe. But if you have faith does this matter? Pope John Paul II said ‘Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth’.

How does reason fit into faith? Or can it? Martin Luther stated that reason was the biggest enemy that Christianity faced and that Christians should ‘pluck out the eye’ of reason. Surely the point about reason is that it encourages you to advance hypothesis, to test them rigorously, to reach conclusions and consequently to test those conclusions. Seemingly faith, a person’s belief structure, does the complete reverse of this – it begins with the conclusion and rejects evidence that does not fit with it? Religion starts with a conclusion and reason starts with a premise, so surely that means that religion and reason are diametrically opposed? One could suggest however that if we accept that people start from a position of faith, then people can reason within the scope of that belief structure. Is that reasonable?

Dawkins has said that faith is the great cop out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. St Augustine, arguably the founding father of Christian theology, believed that understanding was the reward of faith - ‘seek not to understand that you many believe, but believe that you may understand’

Is faith compatible with reason? Maybe the question should be does it matter if faith is not compatible with reason? After all taking something on faith is a very human emotion, is it not?