Re: Dialogue about Jesus Christ
- From: tedgrahamster@xxxxxxxxx
- Date: 29 Mar 2006 20:05:52 -0800
Faith & Reason: Alvin Plantinga
July 1, 1999
The last years have seen a remarkable series of letters and encyclicals
from Pope John Paul II. The most remarkable, in my opinion, is
Salvifici Doloris ("The Christian Meaning of Human Suffering"),
published in 1984?surely one of the finest documents (outside the
Bible) ever written on this topic, and surely required reading for
anyone interested in the so-called problem of evil, or the problems
that suffering can pose for the Christian spiritual life or, more
generally, the place of suffering in the life of the Christian. Last
fall the pope issued another in the series: Fides et Ratio ("Faith and
Reason"). This one doesn't strike me as having the sheer depth and
power of Salvifici; and perhaps its message is also a little blurred,
hard to get completely in focus. Nevertheless, from any seriously
Christian point of view?Protestant as well as Catholic?it contains a
great deal of solid good sense; and it also provides a wonderful
occasion for rethinking its topic. I don't know how much of this
document the pope himself wrote; given his philosophical proclivities
and background, though, his own personal contribution could be
extensive. For present purposes, I'll assume that he substantially
wrote the document, an assumption that is encouraged by the use of the
first person singular through out. While the letter is officially
addressed "to the bishops of the Catholic Church," it seems, in fact,
to be addressed much more broadly: to Catholic theologians and
philosophers certainly, but also to Catholics and perhaps Christians
generally and, in deed, to philosophers generally, whether Christian or
not. The letter is divided into seven chapters (plus an in troduction
and conclusion) and into 108 sections; I'll refer to specific passages
by section.
I: THE MESSAGE
The central topic is the age-old and never-finished discussion of the
relation between faith and reason.1 In any event, it is an ancient
topic that goes all the way back to the very beginnings of the
Christian religion. But while it is an ancient topic, it is also a
crucial current topic; there is no topic, it seems to me, more
important for the present-day Christian community than this, and none
that warrants more of our best thought and attention.
What the pope proposes here is very much in line with a traditional
Catholic answer to the relevant questions, an answer that one
attributes to Thomas Aquinas (subject to contradiction by scholars,
such being the penalty for attributions to Aquinas, to adapt a phrase
of Willard Van Orman Quine). The basic idea is that faith and reason
are two separate sources of justified or warranted belief: "there
exists a knowledge which is peculiar to faith, surpassing the knowledge
proper to human reason, which nevertheless by its nature can discover
the Creator" (8); "There exists a twofold order of knowledge, distinct
not only as regards their source, but also as regards their object"
(9). Reason, as you might expect, is just the human faculty whereby we
know what we know in science and everyday life; and faith is a
supernatural gift that essentially involves trusting God and believing
his Revelation to us through the Bible and the (Roman Catholic) Church.
The basic idea is that faith and reason are in harmony. The pope
mentions several times what he calls "the unity of truth," the idea
that no truth of reason can contradict a truth of faith. That much is
truistic: no truth of any kind can contradict any truth of any kind.
What is not truistic is the pope's further claim: since God is the
author both of faith and of our reason, God would not bring it about or
permit it to be that faith and reason were in conflict. "It is the one
and the same God who establishes and guarantees the intelligibility and
reasonableness of the natural order of things upon which scientists
confidently depend, and who reveals himself as the Father of our Lord
Jesus Christ" (34). "Both the light of reason and the light of faith
come from God ? ; hence there can be no contradiction between them"
(43). The thought is that God would not permit any deliverance of faith
to be inconsistent with any deliverance of reason.
The two are in harmony, therefore, but each has its own sphere:
"Philosophy and the sciences function within the order of natural
reason; while faith, enlightened and guided by the Spirit, recognizes
in the message of salvation the 'fullness of grace and truth'" (9). It
is the province of reason and philosophy, says the pope, to ask the
great questions associated with the meaning of life: what is our place
in the universe? how shall we think about human suffering? in what does
shalom or human flourishing consist? In older terminology, what is the
chief end of man? It is also the province of philosophy to try to
answer these questions, but to do so without adverting to the content
of faith.
Philosophy is a purely rational subject. That is not merely to deny
that it is irrational (a denial those acquainted mainly with
contemporary French philosophy may be pardoned for viewing with a bit
of skepticism); it is rather to say that in philosophy one properly
relies on reason alone, not employing any of the deliverances of faith.
In philosophy, you abstract from what you know or think you know by
faith; if you employ what you know by faith (e.g., some of the specific
teachings of Christianity) in addressing a problem, the result of the
inquiry will not be philosophy but theology.
The pope doesn't say so here, but the Thomistic reason for observing
this distinction is that (so the thought goes) to know or believe
something by way of faith is to know or believe it on the basis of
someone else's say-so, testimony; but what you learn for yourself, by
way of reason, is something you "know better," something that has more
epistemic clout, a higher kind of epistemic status, for you than what
you believe on the authority of someone else (even God). For example,
if I believe the Fundamental Theorem of the Calculus on the authority
of my mathematician friend Paul, I don't know it as well as if I learn
the appropriate bit of mathematics and come myself to see how the proof
goes. (But isn't this doubtful? Given my mathematical limitations and
my dubious grasp of the proof, perhaps I'd be better off believing on
Paul's authority.)
Furthermore, according to John Paul, reason can go a considerable
distance toward answering these questions: for example, it can prove
the existence of God. Perhaps it can't prove the central claims of
Christianity?for Sin, In carnation, Atonement, Redemption we need
faith?but it can prove the existence of God, and that's no mean feat.
And while we need faith for Incarnation and Atonement, this faith in no
way contradicts reason. In fact, says John Paul, faith fulfills reason;
I think he means that a person who didn't know about the gospel but
thought very hard and responsibly about those topics (some of the
ancient philosophers, say) and then came to hear the gospel, could or
would see that what the gospel proposes is what he was really looking
for all along. The Church Fathers, he says, "succeeded in disclosing
completely all that remained implicit and preliminary in the thinking
of the great philosophers of antiquity" (41). "Illumined by faith,"
furthermore, "reason is set free from the fragility and limitations
deriving from the disobedience of sin and finds the strength required
to rise to the knowledge of the Triune God" (43). Faith and reason,
then, though two quite different sources of warranted belief, are
wholly harmonious. Faith fulfills reason, and reason is the organon by
which faith comes to understand itself.
This is the basic teaching on the topic of faith and reason, and, as I
say, it is clearly continuous with traditional Catholic thought. Why
then does the Pope take up these topics at present; why does he feel
compelled or called to write this letter now? Because, of course, he
sees a present need for the reiteration of these teachings; and the
need arises because at present these teachings are widely flouted, or
ignored, or contradicted. Perhaps the most pressing problem, from the
pope's point of view, is a loss of confidence in reason, a stance in
which he sees a kind of false modesty, a vice masquerading as a virtue.
This deplorable line of thought manifests itself in many different
ways, and in theology, history, literary studies, and Western culture
generally, not just in philosophy.
Here the pope quite properly notes a distressing tendency, on the part
of many so-called postmodern thinkers. They often seem to leap lightly
from the thought that human beings cannot easily arrive at the truth,
that there are no methods or algorithms that can guarantee reason that
she will arrive at the truth, to the vastly different and vastly more
portentous (and pretentious) claim that there simply isn't any such
thing as truth. Much of the letter is taken up with advice to
philosophers: accept the help offered by divine revelation, and don't
lose faith in reason. There is also advice to theologians: again, don't
lose faith in reason; don't be blown about by every philosophical wind
of doctrine; don't uncritically run after the latest philosophical fad;
but be very serious about philosophy ("I cannot fail to note with
surprise and displeasure that this lack of interest in the study of
philosophy is shared by not a few theologians" [61]). The rest of us
Christians can only applaud the pope's strictures on the postmodern
irrationalism running (or, to avoid exaggeration, jogging) riot through
the humanities. His advice to theologians also seems to me particularly
apposite; but then, as a philosopher, I could be expected to think
that.
II: A REFORMED COMMENT OR TWO
This is a long letter, and of course there is a lot more to it than the
bare bones summary I have given. The bare bones summary will have to
suffice, however; and in what follows I would like to make a couple of
comments on the pope's suggestions.
A. Non-Christian philosophy: First, a fairly standard Reformed comment
on what the pope apparently sees as the relation between philosophy and
the Christian faith. As we saw above, he thinks of natural reason as an
ensemble of powers or capacities we have just by virtue of the way we
were created by God. With the Fall, certain supernatural gifts were
lost; but natural reason was substantially unaffected. These powers,
furthermore, can take us a good way with respect to answering those
great questions of the meaning of life. The ancient
philosophers?perhaps, in particular, Plato and Aristotle?were able by
virtue of reason to move some significant distance toward the whole
Christian truth. Furthermore, divine revelation, which is, of course,
necessary for the final steps, can be seen to fulfill reason in the
sense that it is in continuity with their thought, and actually
provides what they were groping for.
Now, perhaps it is not unreasonable to think of the matter this way in
connection with ancient philosophy (but even here, aren't there
Democritus and Lucretius as well as Plato and Aristotle, and isn't the
Cross "foolishness to the Greeks"?). Once we come to modern philosophy,
however, with post-Kantian and post-Humean turning away from Christian
or even theistic belief, doesn't it look as if much of philosophy is
less an incomplete approach to Christian belief than arrogant apostasy?
One branch of this apostasy culminates in the philosophical naturalism
dominating most of the most important con temporary American philosophy
departments, a naturalism that explicitly rejects not just Christian
truth but theism generally. The other branch perhaps culminates in
Friedrich Nietzsche's subtle and modulated observations that God is
dead, and that Christian belief both fosters and arises from a sort of
sniveling, servile, cowardly, evasive, duplicitous, and all-around
contemptible sort of character that is at the same time envious,
self-righteous, and full of hate disguised as charitable kindness. (Not
a pretty picture.) Neither group is best seen as making an approach to
Christian truth but just falling a bit short.
What the Catholic view neglects here, according to this Reformed
rejoinder, is the fact that non-Christian philosophy is not merely
handicapped by the "inherent weakness of human reason" (75); it is
rather that philosophers, like humanity generally, are fallen, and in
need of conversion. Much of philosophy is a categorical renunciation of
Christian belief, and an attempt to work out a view of the world wholly
incompatible with that of Christian theism. Contemporary philosophy
doesn't look at all like an incomplete approximation to Christian
truth; nor is it the case that contemporary philosophers, if they heard
the gospel, would see that this is really what they were looking for
all along. Instead (so it seems to me), much contemporary philosophy is
a development and elaboration of a view of the world (and indeed, a
view of the world that is at bottom religious) that is antithetical to
Christianity. Thus it is less a deliverance of reason than the
articulation of a rival faith.
Permit me to elaborate. Contemporary philosophy is a vast and
variegated affair, but perhaps it is possible to introduce some order
by noting that there are really three basic kinds of world-views on
offer at present and in the West. (Of course, there are also various
combinations of them.) First, there is Christian theism together with
various approximations to it. Second, there is naturalism, where the
basic idea is that there is no such person as God,2 and human beings
must be understood, not in terms of their being image bearers of God,
but in terms of their evolutionary origin. Naturalism is extremely
popular at the moment; just about every other issue of the New York
Review of Books carries a review of another book intended to interpret
ourselves to ourselves along these lines. A recent high point is a book
in which a new understanding of religion is proposed: at a certain
point in our evolutionary history we human beings made the transition
from being prey to being predators, and religion arose as a celebration
of that happy moment! (But wouldn't you think we would have needed
religion even more when we were still prey?) Prime contemporary
examples of naturalists among philosophers would be W. V. O. Quine and
Daniel Dennett,3 and, at a much deeper and more subtle level, David
Lewis.
Third, there is what the pope calls Nihilism, or antirealism with
respect to truth, or relativism, which at bottom is the idea that there
really isn't any such thing as truth. While naturalism dominates
philosophy in America, antirealism is rampant in various areas of the
humanities, such as literary studies, film studies, studies in
continental philosophy, and to some degree, in history. This popular
but lamentable way of thinking begins in Immanuel Kant's idea that (not
God, but) we human beings are somehow responsible for the basic
structure of the world we live in; it progresses through the thought
that we all make our own worlds, to the culminating conclusion that
there really isn't any such thing as the way things are. There is only
my version, your version, and so on?my interpretation, your
interpretation, but no reality that these interpretations are
interpretations of. (It's interpretation all the way down.) Those who
accept this view usually capitalize the initial t of truth, claiming
that what they reject is Truth with a capital T (whatever that is);
they then offer pale and ghostly and sometimes silly substitutes for
truth.
A paradigm would be Richard Rorty (although his voice is only one among
many), with his suggestion that truth is really something like what
your peers will let you get away with saying. (Then, just as sophomore
students tell us, a proposition might be true for me but false for you;
disagreeable fellow that I am, my peers won't let me get away with
saying things your peers don't mind your saying.) We might note
ambulando that this way of thinking has interesting moral
possibilities: if you have done something wrong, lie about it; try to
get your peers to let you get away with saying you didn't do it. If you
succeed, then it will be true that you didn't do it, in which case you
won't have done it; furthermore, as an added bonus, you won't even have
lied about it! No doubt you can see further interesting possibilities
for dealing with war, poverty, disease, and the other ills our flesh is
heir to. Antirealism with respect to truth is carrying to its illogical
conclusion the modern insistence upon human autonomy. In deed, the
trouble with truth, says Rorty, is that it limits one's possibilities
for self-redefinition. After all, it is only my allegiance to truth
that prevents me from redefining myself as a Nobel Prize-winning
chemist, or a world-class tenor, or a premier NFL running back.
Now, in this connection it seems as if the pope sometimes addresses
philosophers generally (not just Catholic or Christian philosophers) as
if they were something like confused Catholics, Catholics who have
overlooked or forgotten about the proper relation between faith and
reason. But naturalists and relativists, philosophers like Quine or
Dennett or Derrida or Rorty, are not confused Catholics. They are
unlikely to be swayed by the pope's appeal; they have no allegiance to
Catholic, or Christian, or theistic belief, and will not be at all
likely to accept advice based on a Christian view of faith and reason.
Nor is it the case that if they heard the gospel, they would see it as
the fulfillment of what they were looking for all along. In deed,
nearly all of them have heard the gospel?most, I suppose, were brought
up as Christians of one sort or another?and have rejected it. Instead,
they are working out the implications of a way of looking at the world,
a way wholly incompatible with Christian theism.
So one sort of comment on the document: it underestimates the place of
sin, apostasy, rejection of Christian truth in non-Christian
philosophy. It isn't that the result of sin, with respect to our
intellectual capacities, is just that we lost a supernatural addition
to our natural faculties, those natural faculties themselves
functioning more or less as be fore. It is rather that (a) our natural
faculties them selves suffered substantially from the results of sin,
so that our ability to know ourselves, others, and God has been
damaged, and that (b) by virtue of our corruption, we are inclined to
set ourselves against God. Part of the latter is working out views of
the world in explicit opposition to Christian truth.
B. Christian philosophy: A second Reformed comment addresses the nature
of Christian philosophy. The pope is a doughty defender of philosophy,
being himself a philosopher, and he mentions a large number of
important and impressive Catholic philosophers of the last decades. (He
doesn't mention the remarkable work in Christian philosophy done by
Protestants over the last generation or so, partly because of the
geographical distance between Rome and North America, where most of it
has been going on, and partly, no doubt, because of the theological
distance between Rome and Geneva.) But what, according to John Paul, is
Christian philosophy? We have already seen the main point: whatever
precisely it is, philosophy?including Christian philosophy?is a
purely ration al discipline with no input from faith: "We see here
philosophy's valid aspiration to be an autonomous enterprise, obeying
its own rules and employing the powers of reason alone" (75). But then
what distinguishes Christian philosophy from just any old kind of
philosophy?
Following Etienne Gilson and others, the pope suggests that Christian
philosophy is philosophy that receives a certain help from faith, help
of two kinds. First, faith functions as a sort of error detector: the
Christian philosopher knows she's gone wrong, in following out a line
of thought or an argument, if she encounters a proposition that is
incompatible with Christian faith. Then she knows she's made a mistake
somewhere and must go back and check her work. And second, faith can
suggest topics for philosophical work to the philosopher: perhaps among
the things that she believes by faith, there are some that she can
prove by reason; the result of such effort would be Christian
philosophy. "Revelation clearly proposes certain truths which might
never have been discovered by reason unaided, al though they are not of
themselves inaccessible to reason" (76).
Now Gilson calls the view just outlined the Thomist view and notes that
"Augustinians," as he calls them (and many Protestants would be among
these Augustinians), see matters a bit differently. First, they might
be doubtful that everything one proves for oneself has more epistemic
clout than anything one believes on the basis of testimony. It is only
by testimony that I so much as know my name (my birth certificate is
just more testimony); but don't I know this "better," so to speak, than
some complex theorem of mathematics for which I can produce what is at
best a shaky proof?
More important, the Augustinian would think it perfectly appropriate,
in philosophy, to appeal to what she knows by way of faith. Philosophy
is a matter of faith seeking understanding, sure enough: but this need
not proceed by trying to offer a proof of the item of faith in question
from purely rational premises. Another way to seek understanding is to
ascertain the relation of the proposition in question to other items of
the faith, and to what one knows by way of reason; and still another
way to increase understanding here is to see what the faith implies or
entails with respect to the sorts of questions philosophers ask and
answer. So the Augustinian (and Protestant) philosopher might ask such
questions as this: what does Christian faith imply with respect to the
nature of human beings, of knowledge, of the good, of causation, of
natural laws, or morality, of universals, propositions, sets, possible
worlds, and a thousand other topics? Suppose I come to hold a certain
philosophical view by virtue of some argument one essential premise of
which comes from faith: that doesn't mean, says the Augustinian, that
my conclusion is theology rather than philosophy. It is properly
thought of as philosophy because it is an answer to one of the
questions philosophers ask and answer, even if my answer is essentially
dependent upon faith.
The Thomist, as we have seen, will regard my answer as theology rather
than philosophy just because it wasn't reached on the basis of reason
alone but depended upon a premise from faith. But maybe here we can
propose an irenic compromise. Let's agree that the Thomist is right:
any proposition I believe, even on specifically philosophical topics,
which is such that my reasons for holding it include propositions from
the faith, is for me not philosophy but theology. But now consider the
project of figuring out the best way to think about a given topic?the
nature of causality, say, or any other of the above topics?given the
truth of Christian faith. We could put the project like this: you say
to yourself, "Suppose Christian faith were true?I'm not saying for
present purposes whether it is or isn't?but suppose it were: then what
would be the right way to think about causality?" The result of your
inquiry would be conditional: If Christian faith is true, then this is
the right or best or anyway a good way to think about causality. You
don't, in pursuing this inquiry, assert that the Christian faith is
true; you only explore its consequences. And in this exploration (in
figuring out that conditional), you would, of course, use just reason,
not faith; you don't employ as premises anything you know by faith.
conditionals will be philosophy rather than theology; for you don't atFrom the Thomist point of view, therefore, working at those
any point accept as a premise any of the deliverances of the faith; all
your premises come from reason alone.
Now both Augustinian and Thomist will as Christians assert the
antecedent (the Christian faith is true) and hence also the consequent
(the right way to think about causality is thus and so); but the
Thomist will hold that in asserting that consequent, he and the
Augustinian are really doing theology and not philosophy. Well, OK,
says the Augustinian; let's concede that; the important thing is that
philosophers should think about those conditionals that relate the
Christian faith to the various areas of philosophy. There is little
need to argue about whether asserting their consequents is philosophy
or theology. Call it what you like; what counts is that philosophers,
and others, work out those conditionals. This irenic proposal should
give the Thomist all he wants: Christian philosophy is working at those
conditionals, and doing so is strictly a rational procedure. But it
also gives the Augustinian all, or almost all (enough, anyway), of what
she wants: it is the philosopher's job to figure out what the bearing
of faith is on these great questions of philosophy.
So Protestants?at any rate, those with Reformed proclivities?will
find some things in this encyclical with which they may be in less than
enthusiastic agreement. Overall, however, they will (or should) regard
both the pope and Catholics generally as brothers and sisters in
Christ?and as wonderful allies in precisely these areas of responding
to contemporary non-Christian philosophy, and working out Christian
answers to the questions philosophers ask. We Catholic and Protestant
and Orthodox Christians now, as opposed, perhaps, to 400 years ago,
have real enemies in the world, and common enemies; we do not need to
fight each other. We must make common cause with these fellow
Christians, and perhaps especially common cause in the world of
philosophy and the intellectual life in general.4
Alvin Plantinga is John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy and director
of the Center of Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre
Dame. An anthology of his work, The Analytic Theist: An Alvin Plantinga
Reader, edited by James F. Sennett, has recently been published by
Eerdmans, and the concluding volume of his trilogy on warrant is
forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
The encyclical is also to some extent aimed at a quite distinct topic:
the relation between Christ and culture. I believe it is crucial to see
that these two questions are distinct questions. In my opinion, they
are insufficiently distinguished in this document. (Perhaps some will
see here a Catholic/Protestant difference.)
This is ontological naturalism; another variant is epistemic
naturalism, where the idea is that science really tells us all there is
to know (and one thing science definitely does not tell us is that
there is such a person as God).
See his Darwin's Dangerous Idea, and see my "Dennett's Dangerous Idea:
Darwin, Mind and Meaning," BOOKS & CULTURE May/June 1996.
My thanks to the members of the Notre Dame Center for Philosophy of
Religion colloquium.
.
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