PHILOSOPHY AS MAKING ROOM FOR FAITH
LECTURE 3 FOR PHILOSOPHY OF THEOLOGY
I.
Agnosticism in the service of fideism
A.
B.
C.
If we allow philosophy a foothold in religion, religion will
be reduced to philosophy
1.
It will consist in universal and objective truths but
lack inwardness and subjectivity.
2.
The God of the philosophers is not the God of
Christianity.
Some try to deduce an attitude of antiintellectualism at the
heart of Christianity.
1.
Paul says that philosophy is “vain deceipt” (speaking
against Gnosticism).
2.
Jesus says that the kingdom of heaven is hidden from
the wise.
3.
Those, like Tertullian, who believe that Christianity is
intellectually self sufficient, ask with him what Athens
has to do with Jerusalem (philosophy with religion).
Nonetheless, suspicion of the benefit of philosophy for the
Christian faith did not actually evidence true rejection of
the benefit of the clear and analytic thinking that is associated
with philosophy.
1.
Paul believes the existence of God can be known by
reason.
2.
Tertullian uses reason to show the limitations of reason
for explicating the Christian faith.
3.
Medieval theologians such as Peter Damian and St.
Bernard, strong in their condemnation of reason’s
intrusion upon the proper realm of theological
thought, still use reason to show the limits of
reason.
4.
D.
E.
Ockham holds that reason can be useful in saying that
God exists, but cannot determine that He is one, or a
Trinity of persons. These things must be revealed. Nor
can one prove the immortality of the soul
a.
God can do anything that is not self-contradictory
b.
We are, thus, dependent upon the principle of noncontradiction.
c.
All else is purely contingent, relying upon God’s free
choice. There can be no a priori knowledge of what
God does.
d.
In respect to religion, Ockham is a philosophical agnostic: we cannot know most matters concerning
the Christian faith through philosophical thought.
According to Ockham, all truths are contingent, meaning that they
depend upon God’s sovereign choice and cannot be deduced from
his nature, which is only revealed and not known through reason.
1.
The world, e.g., is created by contingent choice, each
individual thing owing its existence to God. Things do
participate in a “class” of similar things that itself has
existential standing (no universals).
2.
Thus, the things of the world do not arise from “seeds”
(Augustine) or universal generalities (Aquinas) that allow
for individual variation.
3.
We cannot, therefore, conclude general truths about God
from the natural order. We must rely on God’s own
communication to us in order to understand something
about Him. That communication is scripture.
4.
The Aristotelian world view now becomes untenable,
since science no longer consists in reasoning from
particular objects to generalizations (universals).
5.
Science requires actual mathematical measurement of
of change in the world and the development of mathematical formulas to describe physical dynamics (Galileo).
Another consequence of nominalism (Ockham’s doctrine that
general terms are just names and not things in themselves) is
that the nature of God cannot be deduced from the science
of nature. Only God’s self revelation (scripture) reveals God.
F.
Luther relies on Ockham’s idea that creation is wholly a
matter of God’s choice and that God does not create under
the authority of a plan or logic that He must obey. His selfrevelation is also gratuitous, and his choice to save is pure
grace.
G.
Luther believes that reason, as God created man, was capable
of knowing some truths about God and the moral law, but sin
has so corrupted man that such truth cannot now be known.
Only God can correct man’s Pelagian tendency.
H.
1.
Only scripture reveals God (through Christ)
2.
Only God can give the grace to understand the gospel
and receive Christ in faith. Reason cannot achieve the
truth of faith that saves.
3.
But, while philosophy cannot grasp God, neither can it
create knowledge that is inconsistent with Christian faith.
4.
Luther, like Calvin, begins from a theological point of view
and considers philosophy as a discipline that can only make
room for theology.
Calvin believes that man has a natural, inborn knowledge of God that
he ruins through pride and his desire to see himself as the creator of
his world and of the God he worships, a thin philosophical God.
1.
We are capable of knowing God, but we fail to do this. Our
philosophical knowledge does not make a contribution of
natural theology, because our sinfulness ruins our thinking.
2.
Calvin, too, claims we can know God only through scripture.
Even the rational preambles of faith are revealed as well as
the positive doctrines of faith.
3.
Both Luther and Calvin, then, do not allow philosophy to enter
into the realm of theological truth in order to establish it by
proof and clear rational grounds. Only if we must rely on the
revelation of Christ in scripture is salvation by faith and not by
our own means (Pelagianism).
4.
Nonetheless, reason apart from revelation certainly seems to
function within the theologies of both men.
II.
a.
Luther rejects Roman Catholic transubstantianism on the basis of Okhamist nominalism.
b.
Luther rejects Calvin’s double predestinationism.
c.
Calvin rejects Luther’s “real presence” of Christ
in the communion.
d.
Luther rejects a continuity between Law and
Gospel, O.T. and N.T.; Calvin asserts a positive
function of the Moral Law for Christians and
a positive for the O.T.
5.
Philosophy for both of these men plays the role of making
room for theological thought. Both begin with theology and
view philosophy as exploring areas of natural thought that
promote and accept theological truth when their own
limitations (due to our sin) are recognized. This position
is asserted in important enlightenment philosophers such as
Kant, Hume, and Kierkegaard.
6.
In this kind of philosophy of religion, it is philosophy itself that
defines its scope and its inadequacy for comporting us to true
religious life and theological thought. It must function separately from theology and yet in such a way as to “make room”
for or support theological understanding.
Al Ghazzali: The Inconsistency of the Philosophers
A.
Al Ghazzali (1058-1111) attempts to show the necessary agnosticism
of philosophy by showing the limitations of philosophy for theological
thought from within philosophy itself. “The intellect should be used
to destroy trust in itself.”
B.
He anticipates Hume and Kant in his denial of a logical or rational
connection between cause and effect. All we have is the observation
that A is followed by B, not that A causes B. God can bring any effect
from any event, being contrained only by the law of contradiction.
C.
Philosophy, then, leaves a space for religion, a space filled by direct
and immediate religious experience, aligning himself with Sufi mysticism. Philosophy cannot grasp the meaning and content of this
experience. Religious knowledge is not about something in an
objective sense but is nonetheless a form of knowledge.
III.
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662): The Reasons of the Heart
A.
He asserts the value and validity of reason and philosophy and
that religion cannot be irrational, otherwise it would be absurd
and ridiculous.
B.
The main tenets of his position:
1.
Man is finite and nothing in comparison with the infinite.
Thus, he is unable to understand or grasp the infinite, or
God. We can grasp neither God in his actuality or even the
possibility of the supernatural knowledge.
2.
There is no affinity between the natural and supernatural
orders, though we can imagine the possibility of the
supernatural order. We simply have to decide whether to
believe in God or not (the wager argument).
3.
The human mind is, therefore, agnostic in regard to knowledge
of the supernatural order. Indeed, Pascal holds that we can
prove that it is impossible to understand the divine. If we can
always be mistaken about knowledge of things of the natural
order, then certainly we cannot know anything about the
supernatural order.
4.
We also suffer from the effects of the fall, our ability to grasp
truth impeded by sin. We invent our own understanding of
God (e.g., Deism, which Pascal abhors).
5.
Even any proof of God’s existence can only provide a cold,
abstract, and impersonal notion of God. Only the heart can
grasp God in His reality: The heart has its reasons which
reason cannot know. We cannot refuse assent to rational
truth, but the assent of faith is always a free choice.
6.
a.
What is the relation between this knowledge of the
heart and objective, philosophical knowledge of God?
b.
What is knowledge of the heart, and how does it differ
from rational knowledge? How does it give us knowledge of the God of Christian faith?
Pascal, then, demonstrates the agnosticism of reason in
regard to religious knowledge, thus allowing for revelation
and faith as a separate order of knowledge. He asserts a
“knowledge of the heart” that stands over against a remote
and abstract philosophical religion. Moreover, religious faith
is always grounded in freedom and does not suffer from the
philosophically logical necessity that forces the mind’s assent
to rational truth.
IV.
David Hume (1711-1776): Scepticism and Faith
A.
Hume’s epistemology follows the development of empiricism in the
British Isles. Empiricists opposed the rationalists on the continent of
Europe.
1.
Rationalists believed in a priori knowledge and the possibility
of developing a rational system in which all elements are
logically connected. Descartes, Spinoza, and Liebniz all believed that God could be proved and that knowledge of the
world involves necessary knowledge.
2.
Empiricists (Locke, Berkely, and Hume) denied the possibility
of a priori knowledge, claiming that all knowledge derives from
experience.
a.
Hume is the last and most radical thinker of the empiricists. All knowledge begins with “impressions”, and
objects are products of the “fictive imagination”.
b.
No factual knowledge is necessary knowledge. All
necessary knowledge (truths of relations) are only
mathematical or logical and import no knowledge of
the world.
c.
Thus, no one can prove the existence of God, the soul,
the world, or any so-called causal relation (there is no
impression of these and no logical proof of them).
B.
None of the arguments for God’s existence have final validity. Hume is
an agnostic is respect to religious belief, and he shows how reason
fails to achieve any ground for faith. But he does not proceed, as did
Pascal, to exercise “reasons of the heart” as an act of faith.
C.
But for those who practice Christianity, he asserts that the only
ground of faith is faith itself.