Reason and faith: Thoughts about trust and knowledge of reality

[on the epistemology of religion and other epistemologies]

Photo by Dodji Djibom on Unsplash

Question from a young Catholic correspondent:

What’s the difference between faith and reason, if we reasonably believe in the Faith? Or what’s the relationship? Like, why do we need faith if we’re reasoning though what we believe?

Which is a question, on one level, for a book, or even a library section, rather than a short essay! Still, how can we at least begin to answer such a question?

I’m inclined to begin here: It seems to me that some kind of faith or trust is involved in knowing almost anything at all. We are fallible, finite knowers, and our senses and our intellect offer, at best, a narrow window onto reality. Using this window entails some level of trust regarding both the knowability of reality itself and the access to reality afforded by our cognitive toolset.

Most of us—particularly if we ever took a philosophy class, or stayed up late enough at night chatting with friends (perhaps in high school or college), or read books of a certain type, or possibly even if we’ve done none of these things—have at some point entertained questions like these:

• How do I know that my sense experiences can be trusted?

• How do I know, for instance, that I am not a brain in a vat (a Matrix scenario), or a mind in the grip of an illusion created by a powerful evil genius or demonic spirit (Descartes’ scenario)?

• How do I know that how other people act bears any resemblance to what they are actually thinking and feeling? How do I know that everyone else isn’t pretending and I’m the only one who’s not in on it (a Truman Show scenario)?

• How do I know that other minds exist at all? How do I know that everyone other than me isn’t a simulation?

• How do I know that the universe didn’t come into existence this morning when I woke up, complete with false memories of prior events?

Few of us lose sleep over such questions, which are easily ignored or dismissed as ridiculous—though plenty of things that would have seemed absurd in the past are now accepted truths, and the prima facie absurdity of these scenarios is no evidence against them. Some scientists do take seriously, for example, the idea that our universe is a simulation; it’s even been seriously argued that the simulation hypothesis is more likely than not. Other scientists have dismissed the simulation hypothesis as pseudoscience—not, however, in the sense that it’s contrary to any known evidence (as we might describe, say, astrology or young-Earth creationism as pseudoscientific claims contrary to known evidence), but rather in the same sense that multiverse theory can be called non-scientific, i.e., because it’s non-falsifiable and thus can’t be scientifically investigated. This, of course, is more a way of defining and delimiting “science” than determining what is or isn’t real.

Others try to triage these questions, or many of them, by appealing to Occam’s razor, the methodological principle that advocates preferring the simplest adequate explanation. In the first place, though, Occam’s razor is just a rule of thumb, a strategy for avoiding spiraling off into ever more gratuitous speculation. Preferring the simplest adequate explanation has methodological advantages, but there’s no guarantee that the simplest adequate explanation is the right one.¹

We have all had the experience of being misled by our senses, so we know that our senses can be misled. What looked like a cat on the bed was actually a shirt; what sounded like the hum of an electronic device was actually tinnitus. We suppose that such misinterpretations are more the exception than the rule, or at least that critical inquiry can help us distinguish reliable impressions of the world from unreliable ones. This assumption depends, of course, on the premise that we are not in some kind of epistemically perverse situation: that the universe, or whatever reality in which our minds exist, is not impenetrable to our cognitive faculties; that valid knowledge of the world is achievable through methodical interpretation of sense information.

We have had dreams that seemed to us, while in their throes, as real as what we call the waking world—and we have seen the early stages of computer-simulated reality, enough to imagine more advanced versions of such technology presenting us with simulations indistinguishable from reality as we know it. Large language model neural networks have leapfrogged the Turing test, and what philosophers call the problem of other minds is no longer confined to speculative philosophy. We know, too, that the misrepresentation of intentions is far from uncommon, and that even seemingly clear memories of past events may be misleading or false. The proposition that our memories and the behavior of other people may be far more radically unreliable than we suppose is not incoherent.

Strictly speaking, then, it seems fair to say that the answer to these “How do I know?” questions is “Ultimately, you don’t know. At least, you can’t prove what the truth is, or even what is more likely.”

And yet, of course, few of us go through the day troubled by radical skepticism about the world as it presents itself to our senses and our intellect. We don’t open our eyes in the morning and wonder, “Am I really opening my eyes, or is a computer telling my brain that I’m opening my eyes?” We don’t look into the eyes of our family members or friends or strangers on the street and second-guess their personhood, or think about what happened yesterday and wonder if those memories are artificial. Rightly so! We couldn’t live our lives if we allowed ourselves to be paralyzed by uncertainty over whether anything we sense or remember is real.

Equally, we can’t lead fulfilling, fully human lives if we are unwilling or unable to trust other people, especially people we love or care about and whom we have reason to believe love or care about us. “Reason to believe” means of course evidence based on experience; trust is built over time—and it can be eroded over time as well. Yet the building of trust depends on a disposition toward trust, and trust that has been built over time tends to instill levels of subjective confidence in other people in excess of the demonstrative power of the evidence. We don’t run calculations on the trustworthiness of people we love when we trust them, any more than we wonder if there is a mind behind the eyes at all. We trust in excess of what we can prove.

Which means, of course, that we are vulnerable to duplicity and injury by untrustworthy actors who impress us as honest and sincere.² People who are abusive, manipulative, narcissistic, or prone to gaslighting exploit the human propensity to trust, and even generally trustworthy people sometimes let us down. It’s important to be realistic about these dynamics and maintain some capacity for critical realism even in our most trusting relationships. As lovers, no less than as knowers, we are fallible and finite. There is no love without risk. C.S. Lewis writes insightfully in The Four Loves:

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

The need for trust, for a leap of faith, meets us also in our experience of nonempirical categories like meaning and good and evil. Is conscience an index of something real or an irrational set of preferences programmed by evolution? Do moral obligations exist? These, too, are questions where we may have some reason or evidence for our beliefs: The movements of conscience may be considered a kind of evidence, but only on an epistemology of trust in human nature.

Reason embraces both trust and questioning, faith and doubt. But how do you calibrate that? How much skepticism, and how much trust? Reason as such offers no final answer. I think it’s safe to say that too much trust makes us credulous and easily exploited, while too much skepticism alienates us from the world and our fellow human beings. Both extremes tend, I think, to undermine our ability to make meaningful choices, and neither extreme is conducive to knowledge of reality and the ability to lead a healthy and productive life. Still, people do make what seem to me unhealthy choices in both directions, and they don’t necessarily violate some canon of logic in doing so. Do we choose what is most beneficial? Even that isn’t a question of pure logic. How do we define what is beneficial?

Can the universe be trusted? Can our moral instincts be trusted? Can God be trusted? I think we can reasonably argue that “Yes” answers make sense, but reason alone takes us only so far. At every stage we have to choose between the way of faith or the way of skepticism. I believe reason has something to say here—I believe there are good arguments for God—but I also think that how we evaluate those arguments depends in part on our larger relationship to faith and doubt. (For example, moral arguments for God have weight only if we are not moral nihilists.)

There is also the question of our disposition toward the God we may or may not be sure exists. If something like the God proposed by Christian theology exists—if what we apprehend as goodness, truth, and beauty are rays of God; if God is love, and has created the universe in wisdom and benevolence, and is somehow at work for our ultimate good and happiness—is that a God we are willing to trust? The problem of evil is a powerful counterpoint to arguments for God. There are many things I believe can be said in response to the problem of evil, but the argument against God and against faith can never be decisively, finally refuted once and for all. As we interrogate these arguments, on some level we are the ones being interrogated.

So far we have been talking about faith in a human sense. Christian theology tells us of a faith that is a gift of God, a theological virtue divinely infused into the soul. We can cooperate with this gift or not, but we cannot produce it on our own. This faith is not simply intellectual acknowledgement of God’s existence and goodness; it is trust in God. The question is not simply “Does God exist? Is he truly all-good and all-powerful?” The deeper question is: “Do I trust in God, entrust myself to him, cling to him, rely on him? Is he my personal alpha and omega, the center and the love of my life, my be-all and end-all, my North Star, the utter end that I seek and the one I trust completely to get me there?”

Reason cannot begin to answer this question—and, according to Christian belief, no one can answer this question with the full and final “Yes” of true faith unless God gives us this gift. In this ultimate sense, believers find that faith, hope, and love are the same thing, just as goodness, truth, and beauty converge in God himself.

1. That’s before getting to questions about the proper application of Occam’s razor: What counts as the “simplest adequate explanation” can be in the eye of the beholder.

2. “Sincerity: if you can fake that, you’ve got it made,” as George Burns reportedly said. Or perhaps it was Groucho Marx. Or perhaps it wasn’t.