Faith, Reason, and Reality

The usual mantra amongst Christian thinkers is faith and reason, implying that faith should be united to and disciplined by products of the human mind. The problem is that Christians are bound to believe that God was not only free to create or not, but also that — once He chose to create — He could have brought into existence any of an infinity of Creations. Creation itself is contingent and assuming that the reason appropriate to a contingent Creation is itself necessary across all possible Creations is not so good a bet as Plato might have thought. In any case, modern empirical knowledge and the experience of gaining that knowledge indicate strongly that human reason learns even absolute truths by responding properly to human environments. This is one way to make this point:

While the Greeks gave us many truths, we have to remember that their metaphysics was developed in parallel to a Greek mathematics which has proven to be true but only a small part of the mathematics which we now know. This implies that our understanding of human reason should have expanded to a corresponding extent rather than being restricted to what was taught by Plato and Aristotle.

There is a third element which could be usefully added to faith and reason — reality. This is to say that we are made so that we can know Creation but this knowledge, including the rules for gaining that knowledge, aren’t inborn. A human baby has enough inborn inclinations and skills to help her start learning how to see the world properly, enough inborn inclinations and skills to help her start learning how to hear sounds as signifying various things and carrying emotional information. Eventually, as she learns how to think, she’ll also start learning language in its more uniquely human aspects.

As St. Thomas Aquinas realized: our minds form in response to our environments. William James and similar thinkers amongst brain-scientists (such as Gerald Edelman and Walter J. Freeman) have rediscovered this truth. In 2000, Professor Freeman published How Brains Make Up Their Minds. Part of this book was an explanation of Thomistic teachings on human moral nature and a related discussion of how these teachings can be used to deal with the strong evidence that human beings don’t have the sort of free-will we imagine. In many experiments of simple decisions made under lab conditions, the unconscious brain regions associated with ‘mere’ bodily control start to move our bodies before there’s any sign of activity in the regions of the brain associated with consciousness. Our feelings of moral freedom are real and so is some sort of moral freedom, but we need new ways to speak and think about that freedom. You can read how I dealt with the ‘loss’ of free-will in the entries within the category of ‘Brain sciences’ which have the major title of What is Mind?.

The Jamesian pragmatists have a major gap in their understanding of the formation processes for the human mind. Lacking a specific faith in this world and its rational Creator, they think of the formation of the human mind entirely in bottom-up terms. That’s not usually a practical problem in understanding specific aspects of the human mind because our minds first form by this bottom-up bootstrapping process, but there is a further process of development of the mind, one that can be seen in the life-stories of the great philosophers — pagan as well as Christian or Jewish– as well as in the development of the minds of numerous saints, scientists, novelists, musical composers, charitable workers, and many others who are active, physically or mentally, to an unusual extent.

In one way or another, those thinkers and doers come to perceive, however dimly, a world in its unity and coherence and completeness. The top-down process begins with that dim perception and the formation of the corresponding mind moves into a different phase. That thinker or doer begins to perceive a universe and maybe even a world, that is — the universe seen as a morally ordered narrative. His thoughts and actions begin to move along with those purposes. He begins to move with the grain of the world. It’s true that you don’t need to have a detailed understanding of the structure of wood to move with its grain, but you also can’t refuse to see that grain as clearly as possible. Blindness, total or partial, isn’t a desirable condition.

The limited “faith and reason” view of human thought and action can lead us to be blind to our age’s best empirical knowledge and this can deform our reason. Aquinas could be a great empirical thinker without knowing about genes or quarks but a modern empirical thinker has to consider them or else he slips into a sort of intellectual psychosis which leaves him imagining that he inhabits a different world than his more sane contemporaries. (See A Thomistic Take on Madness and Modernism.)

In fact, what has happened in recent centuries is that Christians haven’t enlarged their understanding of God’s Creation to consider an extraordinary enrichening of our understanding of mathematics and the physical foundations of this universe nor have they considered the somewhat darker enrichening of our understanding of human nature which has come from history as much as from the brain-sciences and sociobiology.

Not “faith and reason,” but “faith, reason, and reality.”