Concept

Faith and Reason

Intro

Richard Dawkins says faith is "belief without evidence." Peter Boghossian says faith is "pretending to know things you do not know." If that is what faith means, then yes, it is the opposite of reason. The trouble is that no major Christian thinker ever defined faith that way.

In the Christian tradition, faith means trust, the kind of trust you place in a person or in evidence you find compelling. The Latin is fides. When the Bible says Abraham had faith, it does not mean he closed his eyes and guessed. It means he trusted God on the basis of God's promises and previous track record. Faith and trust are the same word in Greek (pistis) and Hebrew (emunah).

Reason (Latin ratio) is the work of weighing evidence, testing claims, following arguments. The classical Christian view is that faith and reason are partners, not enemies. Augustine said "believe so that you may understand," and also "understand so that you may believe." Anselm summed it up as "faith seeking understanding" (fides quaerens intellectum). Aquinas distinguished truths reason can reach on its own (the existence of God, basic morality) from truths that need to be revealed (the Trinity, the Incarnation) and said both are rational, even when one needs help to see.

So faith goes beyond reason in some places, sure, just like trusting a doctor goes beyond what you personally can verify. But faith does not go against reason. The Christian asks for evidence about the resurrection, about prophecy fulfillment, about the moral law written on conscience, about the design in the universe, then commits in trust to the Person behind all of it.

The two errors to avoid are rationalism (only what cold logic can prove counts) and fideism (just believe, do not think). The tradition has always rejected both.

Quick reply line: "Faith means trust, not blind belief. Reason and faith are partners. You weigh the evidence, then commit. That is what every Christian thinker from Augustine to Aquinas to Plantinga has said."

In full

The relationship between faith (fides; trust grounded in evidence and personal commitment) and reason (ratio; the rational evaluation of evidence + arguments) is the central methodological question of Christian intellectual tradition. The dominant view from Augustine through Aquinas to contemporary analytic theology is that faith and reason are complementary, not adversarial, they form a hermeneutical circle in which faith motivates the quest for understanding and reason informs and clarifies what is held by faith. The atheist caricature that faith is "belief without evidence" or "the opposite of reason" (Dawkins, Boghossian) is a 19th-century rationalist construction that does not match the historical-theological tradition. The harmony tradition's classical articulations include Augustine's crede ut intelligas ("believe in order that you may understand") + intellige ut credas ("understand in order that you may believe"); Anselm's fides quaerens intellectum ("faith seeking understanding"); Aquinas's praeambula fidei (preambles of faith demonstrable by natural reason) + articuli fidei (truths above reason but not against it); and Pope John Paul II's encyclical Fides et Ratio (1998), the modern Catholic-magisterial articulation. Contemporary engagement: Reformed Epistemology (Plantinga, Wolterstorff), evidentialism (Swinburne, Craig), and the broader Christian-philosophical-theology tradition.

The harmony thesis

The classical thesis: faith and reason are two complementary cognitive faculties with overlapping but distinct domains:

Reason's domain, truths accessible to natural cognition: logical truths, mathematical truths, basic metaphysical truths, the existence and basic attributes of God (the praeambula fidei per Aquinas), basic moral truths (natural law).
Faith's domain, truths that exceed unaided reason but are revealed by God: the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Resurrection, redemption, sacraments, eschatology.
Overlap, the resurrection is both historically argued (faith on the basis of evidential reasoning per Habermas + Licona + Wright) and believed in trust (the believer's personal commitment to Christ goes beyond historical confidence into trust-of-the-person).

The harmony thesis denies three positions:

Rationalism (only reason; faith is illegitimate or epistemically inferior), late-Enlightenment position; rejected.
Fideism (only faith; reason is corrupt or irrelevant to religious truth), sometimes attributed to Tertullian (credo quia absurdum est; "I believe because it is absurd") and Kierkegaard (the "leap of faith"); usually misread; both classical voices were more nuanced.
Strict separation (reason in one domain, faith in another, no overlap), late-modern Stephen Jay Gould's "non-overlapping magisteria" (NOMA) position; rejected by classical theology.

Compactly: credimus ut intelligamus, intelligimus ut credamus, "we believe in order that we may understand, we understand in order that we may believe."

Patristic foundation

Augustine (354-430)

Augustine's articulation runs through multiple works:

De Trinitate XV.2.2: "Understand in order that you may believe; believe in order that you may understand" (intellige ut credas, crede ut intelligas). The full bidirectional formulation.
Sermon 43.7-9: famous line crede ut intelligas, "believe in order that you may understand."
De Magistro: the role of the Inner Teacher (Christ illuminating the mind from within) in cognitive activity; faith and reason both depend on divine illumination.
De Doctrina Christiana II.40: the "spoiling of the Egyptians", Christians may legitimately use pagan philosophy + classical learning in service of theology, since truth is universally God's.

Augustine's epistemology rejects both pure rationalism (humans cannot reason rightly without divine illumination) and pure fideism (faith without rational engagement is shallow). The mature Augustinian position is that faith and reason cooperate within the broader frame of divine grace + Inner-Teacher illumination.

The medieval consensus

The harmony thesis became the medieval-Christian consensus:

Anselm (1033-1109), Proslogion preface: fides quaerens intellectum ("faith seeking understanding"). Faith is the starting condition for rational investigation, not its substitute. Anselm's Proslogion itself is a work of philosophical proof (the ontological argument), not a fideistic abandonment of reason.
Aquinas (1225-1274), Summa Theologiae I q.1 + q.2; Summa Contra Gentiles I cc.3-9. Aquinas systematized the harmony into:
Praeambula fidei (preambles of faith): truths demonstrable by natural reason (God's existence, basic divine attributes, natural law, immortality of the soul). These are accessible without revelation; reason alone can reach them.
Articuli fidei (articles of faith): truths above natural reason but not against it (Trinity, Incarnation, redemption). Reason cannot prove them; revelation discloses them. But they are not contrary to reason, they exceed but do not contradict it.
Reason serves faith in three ways: (i) demonstrating preambles; (ii) clarifying / explicating revealed truths; (iii) defending revealed truths against objections.
Faith does not violate reason, God being the source of both reason and revelation, the two cannot ultimately conflict.

Reformation and post-Reformation

The Reformers retained the harmony thesis with modifications:

Luther, emphasized the noetic effects of sin (reason is corrupted by the Fall) but never rejected reason as such. The famous "reason is the whore of the devil" remarks were context-specific (rebuking philosophical-rationalist usurpation of revelation in particular cases), not a general fideistic position.
Calvin (1509-1564), Institutes I.5: the sensus divinitatis (sense of divinity) is naturally implanted in all humans; basic divine knowledge is rational + universal. The Fall has corrupted the sensus but not eliminated it; revelation restores and clarifies.
Reformed Orthodoxy (17th c.), Turretin, Owen, Edwards: continued the harmony tradition; the Westminster Confession affirms both natural revelation and special revelation as complementary.
Pascal (1623-1662), Pensées: the most subtle Reformation-era treatment. Reason has its limits; faith transcends without contradicting reason; the Pensées is a sustained argument that evidence on balance favors theism. The Pascal of popular caricature (faith-as-leap) is not the Pascal of the Pensées.

Modern Catholic magisterial articulation

First Vatican Council (1869-1870), Dei Filius (1870): formal Catholic dogmatic affirmation of the harmony thesis. Two orders of knowledge: reason (natural) and faith (supernatural). They are distinct but not contradictory.
Pope John Paul II, Fides et Ratio (1998): the modern magisterial encyclical on the harmony of faith and reason. Famous opening: "Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth." Develops the theme exhaustively in dialogue with modern philosophy.

Contemporary analytic theology

Reformed Epistemology (Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief 2000; Nicholas Wolterstorff; William Alston): basic Christian beliefs (God's existence, the truthfulness of Scripture, the Spirit's witness) are properly basic, warranted directly by the sensus divinitatis + Scripture-encounter without requiring evidential argument. Reformed Epistemology rejects evidentialism's demand that faith be argument-grounded but does not reject the harmony thesis. See Reformed Epistemology.
Classical evidentialism (Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God 1979/2004; William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith 2008): Christian beliefs are warranted by the cumulative balance of historical, philosophical, and experiential evidence. Faith, on the evidentialist account, is trust grounded in evidence, not blind leap.
Combined position (J. P. Moreland; William Lane Craig in some moods): both Reformed-Epistemological warrant and evidentialist arguments contribute; they are complementary rather than competing.

Apologetic deployment

1. Against Dawkins / Boghossian / Harris "faith = belief without evidence"

The atheist polemic (Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion 2006; Peter Boghossian, A Manual for Creating Atheists 2013; Sam Harris, The End of Faith 2004) defines faith as "belief without evidence" or "pretending to know what you don't know." See Faith is Belief Without Evidence Objection Defeater for the systematic refutation.

The faith-and-reason harmony tradition refutes this by demonstrating:

Lexical counter: Greek pistis (G4102) + Hebrew 'emunah (H530) both carry "trust grounded in evidence" as the primary semantic load. Pistis denotes trust based on tekmēria (evidences) per Acts 1:3.
Tradition counter: 2,000 years of Christian intellectual tradition, Augustine + Anselm + Aquinas + Pascal + Locke + Kant + Plantinga + Craig, all hold faith and reason in harmony.
Self-undermining counter: Dawkins's claim "faith is belief without evidence" is itself an empirical claim about the meaning of faith; if the speaker offers no evidence for the claim, the claim self-undermines.

2. Against fideism / "I just believe; don't ask me to defend it"

Some Christian individuals adopt a fideistic posture as a defensive strategy in argumentation. The harmony tradition rejects this, Christians have a positive duty to engage rationally with the truth of their faith (1 Peter 3:15: "always being ready to make a defense (apologia) to anyone who asks you to give an account (logos) of the hope that is in you").

3. Against the "religion vs. science" framing

The popular "religion-vs-science" warfare narrative (John William Draper History of the Conflict between Religion and Science 1874; Andrew Dickson White A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom 1896) has been comprehensively refuted by historians of science (David Lindberg, Edward Grant, Ronald Numbers, James Hannam, Stanley Jaki). Modern scholarship: the harmony of faith and reason in the medieval and early-modern period was the foundation of modern science (the Christian view that nature is intelligible because created by Reason; that human reason can know nature because the Logos underlies both). The conflict-thesis is itself a 19th-century rationalist invention, not historical fact.

4. Engaging "non-resistant non-belief"

Schellenberg's hiddenness argument and related concerns about epistemic-distance can be addressed through the harmony framework: faith is not a leap into the dark but a trust-response that integrates rational evaluation, experiential confirmation, and existential commitment. The holistic character of faith means it cannot be reduced to either pure-evidentialism or pure-fideism. See Divine Hiddenness, Skeptical Theism.

Connection to Scripture

Hebrews 11:1, "Now faith (pistis) is the substance (hypostasis) of things hoped for, the conviction (elenchos) of things not seen." Both hypostasis (substantive grounding / underlying reality) and elenchos (proof, conviction-based-on-evidence) are technical evidential terms. Hebrews 11:1 is the canonical biblical refutation of "faith without evidence."
Acts 1:3, "He showed Himself alive after His suffering by many proofs (tekmēriois)", tekmēria are formal-logical evidential proofs.
Luke 1:1-4, Luke's prologue: "...so that you may know the certainty (asphaleia) concerning the things you have been taught." The Gospel is written for epistemic certainty, not blind belief.
John 20:30-31, "These signs are written so that you may believe...", the Gospel's miraculous signs are presented as evidence for belief.
1 Peter 3:15, "Always being ready to make a defense (apologia) to anyone who asks you to give an account (logos) of the hope that is in you", explicit command to give rational defense.
Romans 1:18-21, natural-revelation evidentialism; humans are without excuse because God's invisible attributes are clearly seen through what is made.
Romans 12:2, "be transformed by the renewing of your mind", transformation through intellectual renewal.
2 Corinthians 10:5, "destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ", apologetic-rational engagement with rival truth-claims.

Patristic / scholarly note

Augustine, De Trinitate XV; Sermon 43; De Doctrina Christiana II; De Magistro, patristic foundation.
Anselm, Proslogion preface, fides quaerens intellectum.
Aquinas, ST I qq. 1-2; Summa Contra Gentiles I cc. 3-9, scholastic systematic articulation.
Pascal, Pensées, Reformation-era subtle treatment.
Pope John Paul II, Fides et Ratio (1998), modern Catholic magisterial articulation.
Reformed-Epistemology contemporary: Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford UP, 2000); Nicholas Wolterstorff, Reason within the Bounds of Religion (Eerdmans, 1976/1984); William Alston, Perceiving God (Cornell UP, 1991).
Evidentialist contemporary: Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God (Oxford UP, 1979/2004); William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith (Crossway, 2008); J. P. Moreland + William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (IVP Academic, 2003/2017).
History-of-science context: David Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science (University of Chicago Press, 1992/2007); James Hannam, God's Philosophers / The Genesis of Science (Icon Books, 2009); Ronald Numbers (ed.), Galileo Goes to Jail (Harvard UP, 2009), twenty-five myths about religion-and-science.