The Infirmity of Reason versus the Certitude of Faith

Reason is infirm in that it cannot establish anything definitively as regards the ultimate questions that most concern us. It cannot even prove that doubting is the way to truth, "that it is certain that we ought to be in doubt." (Pyrrho entry, Bayle's Dictionary, tr. Popkin, p. 205) But, pace Pierre Bayle, the merely subjective certitude of faith is no solution either! Recoiling from the labyrinth into which unaided human reason loses itself, Bayle writes:

It seems therefore that this unfortunate state [the one brought about by the infirmity of reason] is the most proper one of all for convincing us that our reason is a path that leads us astray since, when it displays itself with the greatest subtlety, it plunges us into such an abyss. The natural conclusion of this ought to be to renounce this guide and to implore the cause of all things to give us a better one. This is a great step toward the Christian religion; for it requires that we look to God for knowledge of what we ought to believe and what we ought to do, and that we enslave our understanding to the obeisance of faith. If a man is convinced that nothing good is to be expected from his philosophical inquiries, he will be more disposed to pray to God to persuade him of the truths that ought to be believed than if he flatters himself that he might succeed by reasoning and disputing. A man is therefore happily disposed toward faith when he knows how defective reason is. (206, emphasis added)

Now how is this a solution to the alleged infirmity of reason? A Christian fideist, acquiescing in pure blind (purblind?) faith, accepts the Trinity while a Muslim fideist, equally subjectively certain of his faith, rejects the Trinity while intoning that God is one. Blind conviction butts up against blind conviction of the opposite kind, and all too often strife and bloodshed is the upshot.  I hope you agree with me that there is something utterly mad about torturing and murdering people over such an abstruse matter, one so far removed from any conceivable method of rational settlement.  I say this as a hard-core, life-long committed student of metaphysics who has a healthy contempt for such benighted neo-positivist 'philosophistines'  as David Stove. But even if it doesn't come  to bloodshed, the threats of 'cancellation' and dhimmitude for the heterodox are intolerable.  

Admittedly, reason is weak and inconclusive. But fideistic faith is blind: the certitude it provides is merely subjective. For if the Christian's subjective certitude of the Trinity were also objective, then the same would hold for the Muslim's subjective certitude of the opposite, with the result that one and the same proposition would be both objectively true and objectively not true. To avoid this result one would have to throw out the Law of Non-Contradiction. But then one would have taken one step too far.  But what I just wrote is slightly tendentious. To put the point with the proper caution: the jettisoning of LNC is to be avoided if at all possible.  For LNC is the supreme law and norm of the discursive intellect. 

The dogmatic Christian will claim that his subjective certainty that God is triune is also objective; but the dogmatic Muslim will do the same with respect to the negation of the characteristic (orthodox) Christian claim.  Obviously, they can't both be right.  So one must be wrong.  Each will call the other wrong.  But neither will be justified in so doing.

Although there is scholarly debate as to what exactly Pierre Bayle's ultimate philosophical position is, the following argument can be attributed to him (cf. Richard H. Popkin, "Pierre Bayle's Place in 17th Century Scepticism" in Paul Dibon, ed. Pierre Bayle: Le Philosophe De Rotterdam, Elsevier, 1959, pp. 1-19):

1. Reason is too weak and confused to discover the truth about the world and how we should live in it.

Therefore

2. One must rely on faith as the guide to, and divine revelation as the measure of, the truth about the world and how we should live in it.

This is a non sequitur  for a couple of reasons. First, one response to the supposed truth of (1) might be a universal epoché (εποχη) of all contention-inspiring beliefs and a resolve to stick to the mundane and follow the customs of one's time and place, and in the relaxed manner in which worldly people do this: one goes along to get along without getting too worked up over anything. Among meat-eaters one eats meat, among vegetarians vegetables only. Among church-goers, one goes to church. And this without dogmatizing about the evils of factory farms, the supposed health dangers of red meat, etc., and in the case of the church-goers without taking seriously the talk of "turning the other cheek," etc.  In the teeth of (1), one abandons the search for the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters. One sticks to the classical Pyrrhonian  path of Sextus Empiricus & Co., a path that leads not upwards to the  object sof religion, downwards to a tranquil re-insertion into the quotidian.

Second, the above argument gives one no reason to accept the Christian faith and the Christian revelation as opposed to, say, the Muslim faith and revelation. (See the Bayle quotation above.) Given that we need divine revelation, which of the competing putative revelations should we accept? From the fact that we need revelation to set us straight, it does not follow that the Christian revelation will satisfy our need. Besides, there is reasonable dispute about what exactly the Christian revelation is. On both fronts we are thrown back upon our fail and exigent reason.

My tentative conclusion, then, is that the infirmity of reason, though a fact, does not straightaway license any embrace of fideism which, for present purposes, can be characterized roughly as reliance on pure blind faith in matters of religion. (Kierkegaard (1813-1855) is a good 19th century example of a fideist.) Fideism comes in different varieties. There is Wittgensteinian fideism, to mention just one variety. I have something to say about it over at Substack.

What are our options? Perhaps only these:

A. Rationalism: Put your trust in reason to deliver truths about ultimates and ignore the considerations of Sextus Empiricus, Nagarjuna, Bayle, Kant, and a host of others who, in different ways and to different degrees,  develop the theme of the infirmity of reason.

B. Fideism: Put your trust in blind faith. Submit, obey, enslave your reason to what purports to be revealed truth while ignoring the fact that what counts as revealed truth varies from religion to religion, and within a religion from sect to sect.

C. Skepticism: Suspend belief on all issues that transcend the mundane, if not on all beliefs, period. Don't trouble your head over whether God is or is not tri-personal. Stick to what appears. And don't say, 'The tea is sweet'; say, 'The tea appears sweet to me.' (If you say that the tea is sweet, you invite contradiction by an irascible table-mate.)

D. Reasoned Faith: Avoiding each of the foregoing options, one formulates one's beliefs carefully and holds them tentatively. One does not abandon them lightly, but neither does one fail to revisit and revise them. Doxastic examination is ongoing at least for the length of one's tenure here below. One exploits the fruitful tension of Athens and Jerusalem, philosophy and religion, reason and faith, playing them off against each other and using each to chasten the other.

I recommend and practice (D). Or are there other options?

Reason is infirm in that it cannot establish anything definitively as regards the ultimate questions that most concern us. It cannot even prove that doubting is the way to truth, "that it is certain that we ought to be in doubt." (Pyrrho entry, Bayle's Dictionary, tr. Popkin, p. 205) But, pace Pierre Bayle, the merely subjective certitude of faith is no solution either! Recoiling from the labyrinth into which unaided human reason loses itself, Bayle writes:

It seems therefore that this unfortunate state [the one brought about by the infirmity of reason] is the most proper one of all for convincing us that our reason is a path that leads us astray since, when it displays itself with the greatest subtlety, it plunges us into such an abyss. The natural conclusion of this ought to be to renounce this guide and to implore the cause of all things to give us a better one. This is a great step toward the Christian religion; for it requires that we look to God for knowledge of what we ought to believe and what we ought to do, and that we enslave our understanding to the obeisance of faith. If a man is convinced that nothing good is to be expected from his philosophical inquiries, he will be more disposed to pray to God to persuade him of the truths that ought to be believed than if he flatters himself that he might succeed by reasoning and disputing. A man is therefore happily disposed toward faith when he knows how defective reason is. (206, emphasis added)

Now how is this a solution to the alleged infirmity of reason? A Christian fideist, acquiescing in pure blind (purblind?) faith, accepts the Trinity while a Muslim fideist, equally subjectively certain of his faith, rejects the Trinity while intoning that God is one. Blind conviction butts up against blind conviction of the opposite kind, and all too often strife and bloodshed is the upshot.  I hope you agree with me that there is something utterly mad about torturing and murdering people over such an abstruse matter, one so far removed from any conceivable method of rational settlement.  I say this as a hard-core, life-long committed student of metaphysics who has a healthy contempt for such benighted neo-positivist 'philosophistines'  as David Stove. But even if it doesn't come  to bloodshed, the threats of 'cancellation' and dhimmitude for the heterodox are intolerable.  

Admittedly, reason is weak and inconclusive. But fideistic faith is blind: the certitude it provides is merely subjective. For if the Christian's subjective certitude of the Trinity were also objective, then the same would hold for the Muslim's subjective certitude of the opposite, with the result that one and the same proposition would be both objectively true and objectively not true. To avoid this result one would have to throw out the Law of Non-Contradiction. But then one would have taken one step too far.  But what I just wrote is slightly tendentious. To put the point with the proper caution: the jettisoning of LNC is to be avoided if at all possible.  For LNC is the supreme law and norm of the discursive intellect. 

The dogmatic Christian will claim that his subjective certainty that God is triune is also objective; but the dogmatic Muslim will do the same with respect to the negation of the characteristic (orthodox) Christian claim.  Obviously, they can't both be right.  So one must be wrong.  Each will call the other wrong.  But neither will be justified in so doing.

Although there is scholarly debate as to what exactly Pierre Bayle's ultimate philosophical position is, the following argument can be attributed to him (cf. Richard H. Popkin, "Pierre Bayle's Place in 17th Century Scepticism" in Paul Dibon, ed. Pierre Bayle: Le Philosophe De Rotterdam, Elsevier, 1959, pp. 1-19):

1. Reason is too weak and confused to discover the truth about the world and how we should live in it.

Therefore

2. One must rely on faith as the guide to, and divine revelation as the measure of, the truth about the world and how we should live in it.

This is a non sequitur  for a couple of reasons. First, one response to the supposed truth of (1) might be a universal epoché (εποχη) of all contention-inspiring beliefs and a resolve to stick to the mundane and follow the customs of one's time and place, and in the relaxed manner in which worldly people do this: one goes along to get along without getting too worked up over anything. Among meat-eaters one eats meat, among vegetarians vegetables only. Among church-goers, one goes to church. And this without dogmatizing about the evils of factory farms, the supposed health dangers of red meat, etc., and in the case of the church-goers without taking seriously the talk of "turning the other cheek," etc.  In the teeth of (1), one abandons the search for the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters. One sticks to the classical Pyrrhonian  path of Sextus Empiricus & Co., a path that leads not upwards to the  object sof religion, downwards to a tranquil re-insertion into the quotidian.

Second, the above argument gives one no reason to accept the Christian faith and the Christian revelation as opposed to, say, the Muslim faith and revelation. (See the Bayle quotation above.) Given that we need divine revelation, which of the competing putative revelations should we accept? From the fact that we need revelation to set us straight, it does not follow that the Christian revelation will satisfy our need. Besides, there is reasonable dispute about what exactly the Christian revelation is. On both fronts we are thrown back upon our fail and exigent reason.

My tentative conclusion, then, is that the infirmity of reason, though a fact, does not straightaway license any embrace of fideism which, for present purposes, can be characterized roughly as reliance on pure blind faith in matters of religion. (Kierkegaard (1813-1855) is a good 19th century example of a fideist.) Fideism comes in different varieties. There is Wittgensteinian fideism, to mention just one variety. I have something to say about it over at Substack.

What are our options? Perhaps only these:

A. Rationalism: Put your trust in reason to deliver truths about ultimates and ignore the considerations of Sextus Empiricus, Nagarjuna, Bayle, Kant, and a host of others who, in different ways and to different degrees,  develop the theme of the infirmity of reason.

B. Fideism: Put your trust in blind faith. Submit, obey, enslave your reason to what purports to be revealed truth while ignoring the fact that what counts as revealed truth varies from religion to religion, and within a religion from sect to sect.

C. Skepticism: Suspend belief on all issues that transcend the mundane, if not on all beliefs, period. Don't trouble your head over whether God is or is not tri-personal. Stick to what appears. And don't say, 'The tea is sweet'; say, 'The tea appears sweet to me.' (If you say that the tea is sweet, you invite contradiction by an irascible table-mate.)

D. Reasoned Faith: Avoiding each of the foregoing options, one formulates one's beliefs carefully and holds them tentatively. One does not abandon them lightly, but neither does one fail to revisit and revise them. Doxastic examination is ongoing at least for the length of one's tenure here below. One exploits the fruitful tension of Athens and Jerusalem, philosophy and religion, reason and faith, playing them off against each other and using each to chasten the other.

I recommend and practice (D). Or are there other options?

Comments

[avraham]

Faith and reason together was the Middle Ages approach. And that each informs the other. They are not separate evaluations. But when there is conflict then there are different approaches as to which one to go after.

[Johannes]

The issue here is not the infirmity but the intrinsic limits of reason regarding the knowlegde of God and of His designs for us. It is just impossible to know, by using only the natural light of reason, the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and the divinization (theosis) of man.

We can see that the only valid option is D by starting from the definition of faith by the Ecumenical Council Vatican I in its Dogmatic Constitution "Dei Filius", ch. 3 "On faith":

"The Catholic Church professes that this faith, which is the beginning of human salvation, is a supernatural virtue, by means of which, with the inspiration and assistance of the grace of God, we believe that the things revealed by Him are true, not because the intrinsic truth of the things has been perceived by the natural light of reason, but because of the authority of God Himself who reveals them, who can neither deceive nor be deceived."

In order to believe the things revealed by God you must first know what those things are, and for that you must first know the medium through which God has revealed. But the above definition of faith (which can be more precisely named "explicit propositional faith") cannot apply to the identification of the medium of divine Revelation lest the epistemic position be circular, as a person should have to identify M as the medium through which God revealed by assenting to the truth that "God revealed through M" based on the authority of God who revealed (through M) said truth (i.e. that He revealed through M)! Therefore, we must identify rationally the medium of divine Revelation, based on rationally apprehensible motives of credibility.

Even less could the above definition of faith apply to the belief in the existence and attributes of God, to which we must arrive by using reason, on the basis of rationally apprehensible praeambula fidei.

FWIW, I have an article on the 4 steps (3 epistemic and 1 vital) to explicit propositional faith and another examining in greater detail one of the epistemic steps, the identification of the medium of divine Revelation:
https://www.academia.edu/14862704
https://www.academia.edu/39982502