Uneasy Grace

The great crisis of faith for me came—as it does for somany—when I was in college. I arrived at the University of Virginia in 2001 asa bored atheist. I neither believed in God nor particularly cared about religion.I was, however, a very enthusiastic pre-law student, certain that I would majorin political science, attend a great law school, and presumably get rich suingpeople.

Two events early in college changed the course of my life.First, I accidentally took an ethics course in my freshman year. It was love atfirst argument. I took some more classes, and soon found out that otherbranches of philosophy were even more interesting. By my sophomore year, I had declareda second major in philosophy. After a particularly awful pre-law summerprogram, I switched to philosophy as my primary major. Then my academic advisortold me that if I really liked philosophy, I could go to graduate school andeventually make a living writing and teaching it. That settled it. I neverlooked back.

That was the first big decision; then came the second. Whilein college, I became Catholic. I went to church for the first time on the firstanniversary of the September 11 attacks. I didn’t have much of an idea what aweekday Catholic Mass entailed, but there was a church near my dorm, and forsome reason I had it in my head that since it was the anniversary of theattacks, they would do some kind of special memorial. I was feeling very downthinking about all of the senseless death at the World Trade Center, and Iwanted to talk to someone with moral gravitas about it. Church seemed liked aplace where this would happen.

So I went to Mass, and it was very much an ordinary weekdayMass—no speeches, or 9/11 memorials, or anything. Instead it was me, thepriest, four old ladies, one short reading, a lot of prayers I didn’tunderstand, and a Communion that I happily had the inner wherewithal not toparticipate in. When I left, I remember thinking, “Well, that wasn’twhat I expected.” But something about the experience felt absolutely right. Istarted going back during the week. Then I started going on Sundays. I began topray. During my third year of college, I was received into the Church. At eachstep it felt exactly right—like God was leading me, like I could trust thepeople sharing the faith with me, like worshipping God was something I wasmeant to do.

At the time, the decisions to become a philosopher and tobecome Catholic had absolutely nothing to do with each other, other than thefact that they were major life decisions I was making behind my parents’ backs.But as time passed, the two parts of my life—the philosophical part and thefaith part—began to conflict. While I was in the process of joining the Church,I was very secretive about my Catholicism. I was a philosopher, to be sure, andI loved to argue. But I was very worried about having to defend my newfoundfaith to others.

And you have to admit, there are some hard questions forChristianity. You really believe that there is a being in heaven who knows allof our innermost thoughts and sees the future? You think his son (who happensalso to be him) came to earth, turned water into wine, died, and thencame back from the dead—and somehow his death and coming back is centrallyimportant to repairing all of the evils in the world? If you take a step back,some of this sounds a little crazy. It gets much worse when you consider theproblem of evil: If God really exists, and he is really all powerful, andreally morally perfect, then why do so many horrible, senseless things happen?The magnitude of evil in the world seems like excellent evidence against God’sexistence. Matters get still more difficult when you add in some of the morestriking Catholic elements of the Christian faith—transubstantiation,Mariology, papal infallibility . . . Faith just did not seem philosophicallyrespectable to me. So I treated it like my bad Sunday habit and worried that,when it came to what mattered most in my life, I was in fact a veryunreasonable person.

I think this was the wrong conclusion to draw, and I want totalk about why. First we should ask: Why does there seem to be a strugglebetween faith and reason? Here is where I think the struggle originates. Manyfaiths are thick; that is, having the faith means not only loving andtrusting in God but also believing a complex and rich set of historical,theological, philosophical, and moral claims. Catholics like myself believehistorical claims, such as that Jesus died and was resurrected. We believetheological claims, such as that Jesus is God and so is the Holy Spirit. Webelieve philosophical claims, such as that it is possible for God to be threepersons but just one God. And we believe moral claims, such as that we oweextraordinary allegiance to God.

Thick faiths like Catholicism are in tension with reasonbecause of their complexity; other evidence might conflict with claims from thefaith. For example, we might have a difficult time finding appropriatehistorical evidence for claims about Jesus’s life. Our best logic might seem toshow that doctrines like the Trinity are contradictory, because nothing can beboth one and three simultaneously. Our best moral theories might seem to entailthat nothing could justify God’s having created a world with so much evil init.

Suppose you find yourself with such a thick faith. Whatshould you do when an important teaching of your faith conflicts with ahistorical, philosophical, or moral fact that you also feel very confident in?That’s the struggle. And it is a struggle anyone with a sufficiently thickfaith must be prepared for.

There are at least four approaches you might take to resolvesuch struggles when they arise. First, you might take what I call the Way ofDilution and give up those parts of your faith that conflict with the otherevidence. Second, you might take the Way of Fundamentalism and give up beliefin any facts that conflict with components of your faith. Third, you might takethe Way of Separation and insist that faith and reason are fundamentallydifferent kinds of belief with different roles in our lives. They do not needto agree, and in fact we should keep them separate. Finally, you might takewhat I call the Way of Aporia, that is, insist that there is a tension betweensome claims of faith and reason, that the two cannot be separated, but thatnevertheless there is not enough reason to give up beliefs on either end.

According to the Way of Dilution, when reason conflicts withsomething you took to be an article of faith, you should rethink the supposedarticle of faith. And sometimes this is advisable. We make mistakes. Wemisunderstand. There is evidence of this in the stories of Jesus’s earlydisciples. At the Ascension, they thought Christ would return quickly. Itturned out they were wrong. The early Church struggled to understand what Godmeant when he said he would return, and over time they were forced to adjusttheir assumptions. This kind of thinking is surely appropriate, and we shouldall be open-minded and scrupulous about the best way to interpret difficultparts of our faith in light of new evidence.

But it is also very easy to take this strategy too far. Acolleague of mine, Gary Gutting, published an article in the New York Times this past Easter arguing that the core of the Catholic faith is a commitment toan ethics of love, and that the historical teachings of the faith are besttaken as useful parables. Gutting does not think it incumbent on a Catholic tobelieve anything in particular about history or metaphysics. He writes:

The ethics of love I revere as the inspiration for so many(Catholics and others) who have led exemplary moral lives. . . . As to thetheistic metaphysics, I’m agnostic about it taken literally, but see it as asuperb intellectual construction that provides a fruitful context forunderstanding how our religious and moral experiences are tied to the ethics oflove. The historical stories, I maintain, are best taken as parablesillustrating moral and metaphysical teachings.

But if Catholicism is nothing more than one manifestation ofan “ethics of love,” then there is no non-arbitrary reason to be Catholic(rather than, say, a secular humanist). It is also not obvious that we canpreserve the Christian sense of love while kicking away the metaphysical andtheological ladder. Love, in the Christian faith at least, is not just love forone’s fellow man. It is, most centrally, about love for God. But how can youlove someone unless you know about him? And how could you possibly love Godwithout having beliefs about what he is like, what he has done in history, andwhy he is worthy of love?

John Updike has a beautiful poem called “Seven Stanzas atEaster” where he chides Christians who want to treat Jesus’s death andResurrection mostly as a moral parable rather than as an actual historicalevent. He writes:

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
     grinding of
     time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day. . . .
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
     embarrassed
     by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

Truly grasping the uncontroversial parts of our faith (suchas God’s love) often means struggling to grip the more complicated andcontroversial parts (like the historical Resurrection). Dilute too much, andyou are likely to find you’ve also lost the core of the teachings youoriginally valued.

So much for the Way of Dilution. Another option is to go theWay of Fundamentalism—if important doctrines of your faith conflict withreason, dismiss or radically reinterpret the evidence from reason. This, I submit,is a horrible idea. The main problem with the Way of Fundamentalism is that ifyou decide carte blanche that there are doctrines of faith that cannot bescrutinized by reason, you risk making huge mistakes about your faith.

Venerable systems of belief tell us that reason is a verygood faculty. St. Paul gives us deeply moving arguments in defense of our needfor reason in the life of faith. In the first chapter of Romans, he diagnoseswhy so many of his contemporaries had fallen into the grip of myths and cults.Their trouble, he says, is that God gave them reason to guide them to thecomplex truths of faith, but they abused and disregarded this gift. In hischaracteristically poetic style, he tells us, “Although they claimed to bewise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for imagesmade to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.”Cults ask you to accept their teachings either without reason or despitereason. And Paul reminds us that cultic faith, like diluted faith, is just notfaith worth having. Indeed, the same faculty that enables us to distinguishbetween good and bad science helps us in the complicated task of distinguishingbetween trustworthy and dubious religious teachings.

So as we have seen, when faith and reason struggle, it is abad policy always to favor one side over the other. What else, then, should wedo? A third option—one I call the Way of Separation—insists that matters offaith and matters of reason should be kept separate. According to thisstrategy, evidence from history, moral philosophy, logic, and so on simply hasnothing to do with whether or not certain doctrines of faith are true. Faithand reason are separate magisteria, any apparent contradiction is merelyapparent, and we shouldn’t feel pressure to resolve our views one way or theother. For example, logic can show that the doctrine of the Trinity isinconsistent, while it remains a central teaching of our faith. The Way ofSeparation advises us to accept both while maintaining that the two beliefs arenot genuinely contradictory. On the Way of Separation, we treat faith andreason the same way that parents treat warring siblings on long road trips: Yousit on this side, and you sit on that side, and please— for the love of God—trynot to hit each other!

Teaching philosophy at Notre Dame, I often hear from mystudents that they favor this approach. And perhaps in some sense it is betterthan the Ways of Dilution or Fundamentalism, because at least it tries topreserve the core commitments of a thick faith alongside our best evidence fromhistory, logic, ethics, and so on. Still, I think the Way of Separation fails.

For one thing, as we saw in the case of the early disciples,it is important that reason and faith communicate so we don’t make gravemistakes when it comes to understanding the requirements of our faith. Foranother, the Way of Separation assumes we can sharply distinguish the reasonsfor our religious faith from other, more ordinary sorts of reasons. But it isn’tat all clear that we can. According to one way of understanding faith, it isjust belief in something without any evidence. If this is what faith is,then obviously faith is distinct from reason. The New Atheists, thinkers likeRichard Dawkins, insist that this is how we should define faith. Dawkins usesthis definition to argue that a Christian worldview is inherently unscientific,since the core of a scientific worldview is an insistence on reasons.

But as someone with a thick faith, I think this is wrong.For every complex religious, scientific, moral, or philosophical belief that Ihave, there seems to be some reason or other that partially supports it. Andthese reasons come from a variety of sources. I believe that the sun will risein the east tomorrow, because, given all the data about previous sunrises, itis the prediction with the most inductive support. I believe that kickingpuppies for fun is morally wrong because I believe that puppies feel pain andthat it is wrong to cause sentient creatures pain for fun. I believe Godexists, because I think he is one part of the best explanation for the order inthe universe, because I have considered and trust the testimony of otherbelievers, and because I think there are times in my life when I have perceivedGod’s presence.

These are all reasons, if not perfectly decisive ones. Areall of the reasons purely “from faith”? It is hard to say—some come fromperception, some come from philosophical and scientific observation, some comejust from believing observations others have made. Even the mysteries of faithare mysteries not because they are believed with no reason whatsoever, butrather because we depend on God to reveal the evidence of these mysteries tous. In other words, there is reason for mysteries, just not the kind of reasonswe can get to under our own epistemic steam. Religious faith, like every otherpart of our cognitive lives, always looks for reasons, and reasons come frommany sources. Doubt can be so crippling because we are ruthless reasonseekers.

If, as I would argue, the above three ways of resolvingstruggles between faith and reason are dead ends, is there any other option? Ithink there is, and I will call it, borrowing the term from Aristotle, the Wayof Aporia. Aporia is an intractable philosophical puzzle—a puzzle inwhich you believe every premise of an argument, but there is no way they couldall be true. Aporia is also a state that you get yourself into when you face aseeming paradox. Aristotle and many philosophers since have been deeplyinterested in the question of what you should rationally do if you findyourself facing such a puzzle.

Aporetic problems come up in mathematics and physics. Forexample, currently our best formal logic (the foundation for our best mathematics)is provably incomplete. In short, this means that we know we will never be ableto make several components of our best mathematical logic agree with eachother. This was one of the earth-shattering discoveries in philosophy of thelast century, arrived at primarily by a logician named Kurt Gödel. But thoughwe know our logic is incomplete, we don’t know which assumption is causing theproblem. All of the assumptions appear to be truths of logic—individually theylook impeccable.

So what should we do? It would be crazy to stop using logicand mathematics just because we discovered this deep bug. And it would also beirrational just to arbitrarily pick one assumption in our logic and reject it.Rather, the rational thing to do is to admit that some part of ourunderstanding of logic is flawed, keep looking for a good reason to reinterpretone or another part of the system, remain worried (deeply worried!) about theconflict, but also—and here is the crucial part—keep using logic. After all,logic and mathematics are very good. We need them. And we still don’t have anyclue as to what a better system would be. The only way to repair logic is fromthe inside—to keep expanding our understanding until we find the source ofconflict.

And we see a similar case in physics. Our best theory ofspace and time—general relativity—seems inconsistent with quantum mechanics. Itwould be deeply foolish at this juncture to declare one branch of physicscorrect and the other mistaken. Both are well supported. The only way out ofthe puzzle is to do more physics.

The Way of Aporia in faith is, I suggest, very similar. Afaithful person finds himself in a situation where some part of his thick faithseems to conflict with other evidence. He really believes the core teachings ofhis faith are true, and with good reason: Perhaps he trusts authoritativetexts, the teachings are the best explanation of his religious experience, orthe teachings help him to make sense of some important aspect of the world. Healso really believes some conflicting claim from history, ethics, science, orlogic. Something has gone wrong. He should not just arbitrarily pick whichclaim to believe and which one to reject. The best thing to do is admit thatsome part of his understanding is flawed (he doesn’t know which), that he needsto keep working to resolve the conflict, and that it is rationally acceptableto go on believing both until he finds a way to break the stalemate.

Sometimes we do figure out where we made a wrong turn. Andthere are some conflicts that we never get to resolve in this life. At theheart of the Way of Aporia is a conviction that you shouldn’t ignore conflictsbetween faith and reason. They are bound to happen, especially if you have avaluable, thick faith. But you also should not give up important beliefs tooquickly or too flippantly in the face of conflict. This is a perfectlyrespectable stance in other branches of inquiry. And it is perfectlyrespectable for Christians to assume.

We get a strong suggestion from the Gospel about the rightway to handle struggles between faith and reason. Just think about Mary. WhenMary was told she would give birth to Jesus, she thought it made no sense givenher circumstances. Luke reports that even after Jesus was born and theshepherds came to worship him, Mary was astonished at what was happening. Butrather than rashly conclude that either her understanding of biology was wrongor her understanding of theology was wrong, the Bible tells us that she“treasured up all of these things and pondered them in her heart.” That is tosay, she didn’t back away from her astonishment, and she didn’t rashly settleon one conclusion or another; she held them all together and ponderedthem. For this reason she is rightly called the Seat of Wisdom. I think wecould do worse than emulate Mary when we try to tackle the very real conflictsbetween faith and reason in our own lives.

Meghan Sullivan is the Rev. John A. O’Brien AssistantProfessor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. 

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