Faith in God requires belief without reason-based thought. — DifferentiatingEgg

Rubbish.

Another translation of this sentence could be "You have to be crazy to believe God exists." Because I don't really know what "belief without reason-based thought" means. — Fire Ologist

Crazy is a deep end of that, from Foucault's Madness and Civilization pg 78/79:

"Christian unreason was relegated by Christians themselves into the margins of a reason that had become identical with the wisdom of God incarnate. After Port-Royal, men would have to wait two centuries-until Dostoievsky and Nietzsche-for Christ to regain the glory of his madness, for scandal to recover its power as revelation, for unreason to cease being merely the public shame of reason... Further: Christ did not merely choose to be surrounded by lunatics; he himself chose to pass in their eyes for a mad-man, thus experiencing, in his incarnation, all the sufferings of human misfortune. Madness thus became the ultimate form, the final degree of God in man's image."

Faith in God requires belief without reason-based thought.
— DifferentiatingEgg

Rubbish. — Leontiskos

No, this is the Pauline doctrine. You're saved through faith by the grace of God. You Catholics need to read the Bible. :razz:

This one:

Faith in God requires belief without reason-based thought.
— DifferentiatingEgg — T Clark

That's (maybe) a definition but not a "religious doctrine".

Nah, I just have a stricter identity to my understanding of the word faith.

Argument, discourse, proof—these are all means of understanding. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Understanding is knowing. It's why all great leaders are natural psychologist.

Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth

Exactly the human spirit is the rope between two opposites faith and reason...

Though I suppose I could have clarified "absolute" faith. The more you require reason and knowledge for God the less faith you have.

A mighty perhaps, what is more religious than a binding to ones own evaluations? How else should one evaluate?

What he expressed was Pauline doctrine. — frank

My brief look into what Pauline doctrine is doesn’t indicate it is primarily related to reason versus faith. Clearly, my understanding of this entire issue is not substantive, but to be fair to myself, I don’t think @DifferentiatingEgg’s is either. He should be able to clarify whether or not I am correct in that understanding.

That's (maybe) a definition but not a "religious doctrine". — 180 Proof

Christians have been arguing about this among themselves for 2000 years. I doubt you and @DifferentiatingEgg Have much to offer.

How do we determine the validity of one faith against another? — Tom Storm

You don’t. It’s not your job. Many Christians don’t consider it their job either.

Faith in God requires belief without reason-based thought.
— DifferentiatingEgg

Rubbish. — Leontiskos

Wise choice of word.

There is no mental act without “reason based thought”, without intellect, in the mix. So it is rubbish to talk of a mental act like “faith” or believing “without reason based thought”.

I think the confusion here is thinking knowledge is more powerful than belief. For example, we can believe the car is in the driveway, but once we look and see it, we don’t have to merely believe it, we can know it more certainly and don’t need faith or belief. But that’s also rubbish.

It is belief that is the more powerful of the two. It is belief that moves us to act, that empowers us to stop deliberating or reasoning among the things we know, and actually act. We consider what we know using reason and just before we act upon that reason and knowledge, we make a judgement, and that judgment is a choice, namely, that we’ve seen enough, we’ve done all the logical calculations necessary, we’ve judged between what we know and what we do not, and now we finally believe enough we can cease that whole merely mental process, and act.

Knowledge is what minds think about, what they know; believing is what minds are actually doing, judging, finished thinking, and understanding. Faith, knowledge, understanding are different moments in all of our chosen acts, and what we believe is behind everything we knowingly do.

We don’t know something strong enough to act on it; we know something well enough that we can make arguments about it and syllogisms about it, but when we believe something, when we judge the argument concluded, and just say “therefore x” we are pointing to what we believe, as now demonstrated in the syllogism we merely know. When the syllogism is sound, we still say we believe there is nothing more that needs to be said. Once we have the conclusion, once we have the belief, we’ve already judged and don’t need any more arguments.

And we can strip knowledge from our actions, or act with little knowledge, and no certainty of what is behind the action nor where it will lead; but at the moment of acting, regardless of any knowledge, always our actions follow the moment of belief. We take the plunge based on our deepest convictions. We must believe what we do, what we say we know before there could ne anything we would testify to as what “I know.”

Belief is more essential to our lives than knowing. Belief is like our testament to knowledge.

So to tell a person who believes in God they might be jeopardizing their faith-based belief by seeking logical proof, or that logical proof replaces and usurps this belief, is like telling me the fact that I trust my wife must mean I don’t really know her (or. I know her “without reason based thought” or something), and if I really knew my wife, there would be no place or need for trust anymore.

One more point here - we don’t prove existence. Anselm and Aquinas, God bless them, didn’t make the proof they hoped for. We take existing objects and we prove things about them. The substance of the proof is in the motion from premises to function/relation, to conclusions. The conclusion, like the premise, is all based on “if there exists…”. All first premises that start with “There exists…” start from belief. If starting from what we merely know, we need to start “If there exists…”. So a conclusion like “therefore x exists” has forgotten it was based on “if”.

I probably needed to spend a lot more time on this but you should see my two or three points here.

If you chop down my reasoning, I might still believe my conclusion anyway. But if you also show a better reasoning, and new object for me to understand, to adjudge “there I see it”, I might actually change what I believe.

I think the confusion here is thinking knowledge is more powerful than belief. — Fire Ologist

Nah one end of the spectrum is Faith, the other is Rationalism. I believe the mis understanding is on your end. It's a sliding scale. The more of one you need the less of the other you require.

Everything is on a scale for you. Very rigid, linear thinking.

Nah

You don’t. It’s not your job. Many Christians don’t consider it their job either. — T Clark

If I say slavery is right because I have it on faith and you say, no, I have it on faith it’s wrong - we arrive at space where we uncover the shortcomings of using faith as a justification. Faith isn’t a reliable justification.

As for it not being my job. It sometimes is.

If I’m in a country where people are voting on positions that are socially awful based on faith as a justification, then I believe I have a modest role, where possible, to explore how reliable this approach is. In fact I have done just this with a couple of Christians at work and to their credit, they gradually came around to a different view.

:up:

Faith in God requires belief without reason-based thought.
— DifferentiatingEgg — T Clark

Which "Christians" have been "arguing about" which "this"?

fyi – A dozen years of Catholic schooling and an honor student in religious studies and church history throughout high school, I'm sure I haven't forgotten all of (the) catechism(s) or even some Patristic & Scholastic "doctrines" yet. :halo:

So what are you talking about, TC?

It is traditionally held that Paul believed that faith is a gift from God. This scripture is interpreted as saying that:

Which is not to say "faith is irrational" and "faith does not involve understanding," even from the standpoint of Evangelicals. St. Paul, like St. Luke, doesn't think we do anything entirely on our own; it is God in whom we "live and move and have our being" (Acts 17). Hence, Paul often describes people doing things, and then God doing the same thing to them, in reciprocal pairs.

The traditional reading of that passage is that "being saved" is "not your doing," not necessarily "having faith" (some have faith in the Gospels through signs and wonders, yet "blessed are those who have believed and not seen" John 29:29).

What you are putting forth is a common Evangelical reading, but it isn't a common thread until 1,500+ years later, and is obviously a minority view today. The "faith" in question is also often taken to be the faith of God/Christ as well (e.g., in Orthodox readings). Even if one accepts Sola Fide, this does not necessitate that faith is the result of a sort of supernatural, arational autopilot. Such a view shows up only in the Reformation (since it only makes sense given a modern nature/supernatural distinction) and has always been a minority view.

The OP has a view of faith that is only consistent with an austere sort of fideism. This has been far from the norm in Church history, although it has always been a minor thread. It's certainly far from the norm in the largest denominations both historically and today. It might be the norm in the most vocal set of Anglo Protestants, but even there I think this is probably not actually the case.

I will put it this way, apologetics, the reasoned defense of the faith, has been part of Church History and among the main works of many of its great saints and doctors pretty much from the Apostolic Fathers on. If "Pauline Theology" means abandoning a reasoned defense of the faith, then "Pauline Theology" was largely lost to the world for thousands of years until recovered by people who spoke Paul's Greek as a second, dead language, who apparently understood what he meant much better than native speakers who were learning from people taught directly by him or his close successors.

Exactly the human spirit is the rope between two opposites faith and reason...

Though I suppose I could have clarified "absolute" faith. The more you require reason and knowledge for God the less faith you have.

The more I know/understand that my wife won't cheat on me the less faith I have in her? This seems bizarre to me.

This would imply that I have more faith in friends I have just met and less in those who have stood by me through thick and thin.

This has been far from the norm in Church history — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is the official Catholic view:

"Again, it is evident that this "light of faith" is a supernatural gift and is not the necessary outcome of assent to the motives of credibility. No amount of study will win it, no intellectual conviction as to the credibility of revealed religion nor even of the claims of the Church to be our infallible guide in matters of faith, will produce this light in a man's mind. It is the free gift of God. Hence the Vatican Council (III, iii;) teaches that "faith is a supernatural virtue by which we with the inspiration and assistance of God's grace, believe those things to be true which He has revealed" Catholic Encyclopedia

"Faith is a gift of grace. God not only speaks to us, he also gives us the grace to respond. To believe in Revelation we need the gift of faith." Archdiocese of Minneapolis

"Faith is a gift of God which enables us to know and love him". (ibid)

The above is also Pauline doctrine.

Yes, that is not the same thing as what OP is saying at all. The Catechism has an entire section on the role of apologetics. To claim the Catholic Church thinks doing apologetics is a sign of lack of faith is frankly absurd and demonstrates a total ignorance of the topic.

The Church runs a number of discount philosophy programs precisely because they see this as important to spreading and defending the faith.

My brief look into what Pauline doctrine is doesn’t indicate it is primarily related to reason versus faith. — T Clark

The main issue Paul dealt with in his religious work was the salvation of the Gentiles. He believed Jesus offered the way for Gentiles to become beneficiaries of the Covenant. He basically established Christianity outside the Jewish community. His thoughts about faith and works were related to that.

Btw, this is my favorite Pauline scripture. When I was young, this was all of Christianity to me:

"If I speak with the eloquence of men and of angels, but have no love, I become no more than blaring brass or crashing cymbal.

"If I have the gift of foretelling the future and hold in my mind not only all human knowledge but the very secrets of God, and if I also have that absolute faith which can move mountains, but have no love, I amount to nothing at all.

"If I dispose of all that I possess, yes, even if I give my own body to be burned, but have no love, I achieve precisely nothing." 1 Corinthians 13:2

Yes, that is not the same thing as what OP is saying at all. — Count Timothy von Icarus

So you're admitting that the Pauline doctrine, along with the official Catholic view is that faith is not through reason, but by the grace of God?

The OP has a view of faith that is only consistent with an austere sort of fideism — Count Timothy von Icarus

Faith is relaint on faith alone... Faith = Faith. When was Faith equated to Knowing? I don't know of any meaning of the word that suggests knowing.

Just because people here are used to their two to three quarters faith acting as absolute faith doesn't mean they're correct about Faith... Most "Christians" today aren't even 3/4ths Christian...

"Faith" there is the theological virtue of faith, which does not seem in line with OP's usage.

This is the section on faith in the Catechism:

Faith

1814 Faith is the theological virtue by which we believe in God and believe all that he has said and revealed to us, and that Holy Church proposes for our belief, because he is truth itself. By faith "man freely commits his entire self to God."78 For this reason the believer seeks to know and do God's will. "The righteous shall live by faith." Living faith "work(s) through charity."79

It depends on what you mean by "through reason." Reason in contemporary thought is often restricted to nothing more than demonstration and computation, the means by which man moves from premises to conclusions. However, reason is sometimes still used for the intellect, i.e., the rational part of the soul or nous. Faith is not achieved through reason, but neither is it unrelated to it.

The "light of faith," illumination, involves the nous, and the regeneration of the nous. The attainment of understanding and spiritual knowledge (gnosis) is a key element of the spiritual life. However, illumination is not an "achievement" of the nous, but something that happens to the nous, although the cooperation of man is often deeply intertwined in this. Progress towards theosis is generally seen as involving ever greater degrees of understanding, certainly not its absence. As man is deified there is a greater and greater coincidence of the divine will and man's will, joined in love, but this could hardly be a free, self-determining movement if the intellect remained ever blind to the Good sought by the will. Love/Beauty was generally related to both will and intellect (Goodness and Truth), which is why the great text of Orthodox spirituality is titled "The Love of Beauty" (Philokalia).

Apologetic arguments were generally seen as removing barriers to faith, not instilling it. St. Thomas is, of course, not the official philosopher of the Catholic Church, being one doctor among many, but he is as close as you can get. In the Summa Contra Gentiles he has a chapter titled "Why man's happiness does not consist in the knowledge of God had by demonstrations." Nonetheless, he spent an immense amount of time on such demonstrations because they are not without their purposes and merits.

Perhaps a disconnect here is the modern tendency in Anglo-American thought to consider knowledge as a type of belief, that which is justified and true. This would imply that all knowledge is had through justification via demonstration and inference, moving from premises to conclusions. Yet the Patristics and most theologians following them see noesis as superior to discursive reasoning (although the latter may sometimes "set the ground" for the former). Illumination involves knowledge, but not that had through discursive argument.

Even St. Augustine, Calvin's main inspiration, dedicated significant efforts to apologetics and philosophy as well. Faith here is not will as uniformed by intellect. Hence, the credo "I believe that I might understand."

It depends on what you mean by "through reason." Reason in contemporary thought is often restricted to nothing more than demonstration and computation, the means by which man moves from premises to conclusions. However, reason is sometimes still used for the intellect, i.e., the rational part of the soul or nous. — Count Timothy von Icarus

One of things in your previous post that gave me pause was this:

Which is not to say "faith is irrational" and "faith does not involve understanding," even from the standpoint of Evangelicals. — Count Timothy von Icarus

If by "Evangelicals", you mean Protestants who support missionary work, that's exactly the population you'd look toward to find a real, full-bodied Christian rationalist. This is where the ridiculous "clock-maker" thought experiment comes from. This view is in direct contradiction to the views of Paul, which was that faith is a divine gift. This is the view of the Catholic Church. They see reason as compatible with faith, but it is by no means the source of it.

It depends on what you mean by "through reason." Reason in contemporary thought is often restricted to nothing more than demonstration and computation, the means by which man moves from premises to conclusions. However, reason is sometimes still used for the intellect, i.e., the rational part of the soul or nous. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The human intellect is supposed to be a reflection of the second emanation of the One. This supports the Pauline view that faith does not arise from any work exerted by the mind. It's just part of the functioning of the mind.

Progress towards theosis is generally seen as involving ever greater degrees of understanding, certainly not its absence. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The understanding involved here would be mystical in character. The One becomes the Two. The Two becomes the Three. The Three becomes the Four, which is the One. In comparison with this, logical arguments only offer half-truths. But we are here a long way from the concerns of Paul, which was my point.

Even St. Augustine, Calvin's main inspiration, dedicated significant efforts to apologetics and philosophy as well. Faith here is not will as uniformed by intellect — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes. Reason is considered to be compatible with faith, but not its source. It appears you're going to hold fast to the wrong impression about the Pauline doctrine and the official teaching of the Church. I'm disappointed in you, but you're certainly welcome to your view.

If I say slavery is right because I have it on faith and you say, no, I have it on faith it’s wrong - we arrive at space where we uncover the shortcomings of using faith as a justification. Faith isn’t a reliable justification. — Tom Storm

This is not the issue at hand. The OP claims that making religious arguments based on reason is inconsistent with making them based on faith - as he wrote "...all of you who do require reason-based thought, have a severe lack of faith in God." In my response I suggested that if he understands relevant Christian positions on the subject, he should provide more detail. If he can't do that, he should keep his trap shut.

As for it not being my job. It sometimes is.

If I’m in a country where people are voting on positions that are socially awful based on faith as a justification, then I believe I have a modest role, where possible, to explore how reliable this approach is. In fact I have done just this with a couple of Christians at work and to their credit, they gradually came around to a different view. — Tom Storm

Your approach seems like a useful one. Do you think your coworker's willingness to have reasonable discussions about their religious beliefs is a sign of lack of faith? When I said it's not your job, I meant you don't have to judge their actions and beliefs by their standards, you can hold them responsible for what they do based on your own understanding. To your credit, you've chosen to go beyond that.

Thanks for the explanation. I asked my question because I don't see how the positions you describe are relevant to the issue at hand - to quote the OP, "...using reason-based thought for God is necessarily a showing of a lack of faith in God."

Which "Christians" have been "arguing about" which "this"? — 180 Proof

Here are some early Christian examples. First - anti-reason, from the Bible:

Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21 For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. 22 Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, 23 but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, — From 1 Corinthians 1:20

Then pro-reason, from 415 ad:

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking non-sense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although “they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.” — St. Augustine, Vol. 1: The Literal Meaning of Genesis

Let's not take this any farther. I'm clearly not a Biblical scholar. Just as clearly, you aren't either.

Thanks for the explanation. I asked my question because I don't see how the positions you describe are relevant to the issue at hand - to quote the OP, "...using reason-based thought for God is necessarily a showing of a lack of faith in God." — T Clark

If someone refused to believe until they had a good argument, that would demonstrate a lack of faith, pretty much by definition. Just indulging in argumentation doesn't show a lack of faith. So you're right.

Nothing I've said is at odds with the official doctrines of the Church. I certainly didn't assert that "reason is the source of faith." I said explicitly that "faith is not achieved through reason." However, it involves the intellect and understanding, and faith is not contrary to work on external proofs.

This is right in line with the Catechism:

155In faith, the human intellect and will co-operate with divine grace: "Believing is an act of the intellect assenting to the divine truth by command of the will moved by God through grace."27

Faith and understanding

156 What moves us to believe is not the fact that revealed truths appear as true and intelligible in the light of our natural reason: we believe "because of the authority of God himself who reveals them, who can neither deceive nor be deceived".28 So "that the submission of our faith might nevertheless be in accordance with reason, God willed that external proofs of his Revelation should be joined to the internal helps of the Holy Spirit."29 Thus the miracles of Christ and the saints, prophecies, the Church's growth and holiness, and her fruitfulness and stability "are the most certain signs of divine Revelation, adapted to the intelligence of all"; they are "motives of credibility" (motiva credibilitatis), which show that the assent of faith is "by no means a blind impulse of the mind".30

157 Faith is certain. It is more certain than all human knowledge because it is founded on the very word of God who cannot lie. To be sure, revealed truths can seem obscure to human reason and experience, but "the certainty that the divine light gives is greater than that which the light of natural reason gives."31 "Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt."32

158 "Faith seeks understanding":33 it is intrinsic to faith that a believer desires to know better the One in whom he has put his faith, and to understand better what He has revealed; a more penetrating knowledge will in turn call forth a greater faith, increasingly set afire by love. the grace of faith opens "the eyes of your hearts"34 to a lively understanding of the contents of Revelation: that is, of the totality of God's plan and the mysteries of faith, of their connection with each other and with Christ, the centre of the revealed mystery. "The same Holy Spirit constantly perfects faith by his gifts, so that Revelation may be more and more profoundly understood."35 In the words of St. Augustine, "I believe, in order to understand; and I understand, the better to believe."36

159 Faith and science: "Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason. Since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind, God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth."37 "Consequently, methodical research in all branches of knowledge, provided it is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of the world and the things of faith derive from the same God. the humble and persevering investigator of the secrets of nature is being led, as it were, by the hand of God in spite of himself, for it is God, the conserver of all things, who made them what they are."38

This seems clearly at odds with:

Faith in God requires belief without reason-based thought.

Particularly if "reason-based thought" is taken to mean understanding tout court, and not merely demonstration. To say that "x is not y" is not to say "x requires the absence of y."

Let's revisit the OP.

But know this... all of you who do require reason-based thought, have a severe lack of faith in God. — DifferentiatingEgg

And you've affirmed that

... faith is above reason,

Faith is above reason. Those who require reason in order to believe are demonstrating a lack of faith. The OP is expressing the Pauline doctrine along with the official teaching of the Church.