I love to teach a course called “The God of Faith and Reason.” It is always a pleasure to speak with college students about some of the most significant questions people can ask. What can we know? Does God exist? How do faith and reason relate? I teach an ideologically diverse group of students, ranging from Catholics who attend Mass every day to atheists with blue hair. Ninety percent of my students are in neither category. But almost all my students think that faith and reason are opposed to each other. They think we must choose either faith or reason. Questioning this dogma is a central theme of the course. Because my classroom only holds twenty-eight seats, I’ve written a new book called Is Belief Believable?: Reasoning About God from Plato and Aquinas to C. S. Lewis and Jordan Peterson to share what we talk about with a wider audience.
This book considers various impediments to thinking about faith, such as the radical skepticism that we cannot know anything about anything. Kant thought we could know the truths of mathematics and of morality but that we could not know anything about the divine. Was he right? I also consider the claim that religion is the opium of the masses (Marx) and the claim that faith is just wishful thinking (Freud).
In the middle section of Is Belief Believable?, I look at Thomas Aquinas’s famous “Five Ways” to argue for God’s existence. After looking at why Aquinas thinks God exists, I then tackle challenges to this view. Even if Aquinas is right that there must be an uncaused cause, could there maybe be more than one uncaused cause? Even if there is an unmoved mover, an uncaused cause, a necessary being, a highest good, and an intelligence ordering the universe, maybe these are five different “gods,” so Aquinas has proved polytheism. Even if we could know that the five ways pointed to only one God, why should we think this God knows anything? Or wills anything? Or loves anyone? Isn’t the God of the philosophers very unlike the God of Abraham, Mary, and Jesus?
This view that faith and reason work together encounters other challenges considered in the last part of my new book. If we accept the Bible as the Word of God, then it seems we should reject the teaching of Aquinas that God cannot change. Moreover, Aquinas appears to contradict himself: He holds that Scripture is the Word of God, and yet Scripture in a number of places suggests that God does change (see Jeremiah 26:3; Jonah 3:10). So, it would seem we cannot consistently accept both Thomas’s understanding of God and understanding of Scripture. If this view is right, then Thomas’s account of faith and reason is self-contradictory by holding both that Scripture is God’s Word and also that God cannot change.
Another example I pose to my students and in the book has to do with intercessory prayer. At this point in the semester, the students have learned about Aquinas’s idea that God knows everything that to us is past, present, and future. They have learned God has a will and so can do something about prayer, and they have learned God is unchanging, lacking all potency. So, given those views, where does that leave prayers of intercession? If God is omniscient, he doesn’t need to be informed of what we need. If God is unchanging, then our prayers cannot sway God’s mind or will. So intercessory prayer is a practice that makes about as much sense as trying to high jump over yourself. But Jesus teaches that we should pray for our daily bread, so is Jesus telling us to do something nonsensical?
Why do I teach as I do? The students who attend daily Mass often need to be jarred out of a complacent fideism. They believe what they believe, but they seldom think hard about what they believe or the objections that others can raise against their belief. The blue-haired students often need to be stirred out of a different complacency. They believe faith is inherently irrational, implausible, and unintellectual. (I haven’t yet met students who attend daily Mass and also have blue hair.) Most of my students “in the middle” have an anti-intellectual understanding of faith.
I hope students leave my class with these takeaways:
1) understanding the view that faith and reason are not opposed
2) seeing how having questions is not the end of the journey of intellectual growth but just the beginning
3) realizing that even if they don’t see the answers at a particular time, it hardly follows that no satisfactory answer can ever be found
4) appreciating and hopefully even loving the great synthesis of faith and reason
Some people think we must choose either faith or reason, either a spiritual life or an intellectual life. But my new book advocates for a reasonable faith and a faithful reason.