Query:  I am an 11th grader and a Protestant Christian, and have been learning about philosophy of religion on my own.  The deeper I delve into it, the more tension I feel between faith and reason.  You’ve written that they are compatible, quoting John Paul II that they are like two wings – a bird needs both to fly.  But doesn’t Jesus call us to have a child-like faith?

Reply:  Thanks for your letter!  Jesus does teach us to be like children in one respect.  We should be like them in trusting God completely, just as they trust their parents.  But He doesn’t teach us to be like children in every way, because He wants us to strive for maturity, including the full use of the mind.  Christ commands us to love the Lord our God will all our soul, all our strength, and with all our mind.  St. Paul urges us, “do not be children in your thinking; be babes in evil, but in thinking be mature.”  The book of Proverbs protests,

Wisdom cries aloud in the street; in the markets she raises her voice; on the top of the walls she cries out; at the entrance of the city gates she speaks:  “How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple?  How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing and fools hate knowledge?  Give heed to my reproof; behold, I will pour out my thoughts to you; I will make my words known to you.”

So you see, a childlike faith does not mean having a juvenile mind devoid of wisdom!

But in John 20, when Thomas only believes after demanding more evidence, doesn’t Jesus say “blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed”?

As St. Paul warns in 1 Thessalonians 5, “test everything.”  Otherwise we would believe all sorts of foolish nonsense that isn’t really from God.  It seems, then, that Thomas wasn’t foolish because he wanted evidence, but because he wouldn’t accept the evidence he had already been given -- he wanted “more, more, more!”

Hadn’t Jesus authenticated who He was with many miracles in the sight of the disciples?  Shouldn’t Thomas have believed Him, when He told the disciplines that He would be put to death and rise again after three days?  Hadn’t the other disciples, including several of the women, told Thomas that they had already seen the resurrected Christ?  After spending years with them, shouldn’t Thomas have known that they weren’t the sort of people who lied, hallucinated, or imagined things?  So why wasn’t that evidence enough for him?

Those who have not seen and yet have believed are us.  We haven’t seen with our eyes what the disciples saw, but we don’t believe without evidence either.  Our evidence is the testimony of many trustworthy witnesses, the correspondence of what they witnessed with what was prophesied, and the experience of grace in our lives.  Part of our evidence is the story of Thomas itself.

Couldn’t someone argue it better to embrace a “blind” faith rather than one built from reason?

Argument is the presentation of reasons.  If you suggest that someone can “argue it better” to embrace one kind of faith than another, then aren’t you assuming reason after all? 

But you are right about one thing, for there is no such thing as a faith “built from” reason.  Yes, we need good reasons to distinguish true faith from false -- as Jesus warns, “Take heed that no one leads you astray” -- but this doesn’t make faith and reason the same thing.  We can’t prove faith like a theorem in calculus.

The fact that we can’t prove faith like a theorem in calculus doesn’t make it unreasonable.  Suppose I am in on the fourth floor of a burning building.  I hear the firemen calling from below, “Jump!  Jump!  We have a net to catch you!”  Is it reasonable to believe that they are really firemen and that they really have a net for catching me?  Of course it is.  But does that mean I have no need to trust them?  No, it doesn’t mean that at all.  I am blind in the sense that I cannot see the firemen; that’s why I need faith that they are telling me the truth.  But I am not blind in the sense that I have no reason to think that they are.

If believing without good reason were a virtue, then I ought to believe everything that anyone ever tells me.  “The weatherman says the sky is falling!”  “The color green is really red on Wednesdays and Fridays!”  “Nothing matters, because we don’t exist!”  That would be absurd.

I’ve studied some of the arguments for God’s existence, but I am wondering.  Is it better to treat them as secondary to faith, or even something not to study it at all, since faith without evidence seems to be praised?  Or is your view that faith without reason is, well, unreasonable?

Although true faith goes beyond sound reason, it can’t contradict sound reason, because these are both gifts of the same all-wise God.  Suppose someone told you “As Christians we must accept that what is, isn’t, and what isn’t, is.”  The question of whether to accept his claim on faith wouldn’t even arise, because it doesn’t even make sense.  As the Apostle Paul tells the Corinthians, God is not the author of confusion.  

Not only does reason come to the aid of faith, but faith comes to the aid of reason.  Because I believe, and because what I believe is true, certain possibilities of experience are opened up to me that would otherwise be closed -- and these possibilities give my intellect new data to work with.

This is true even in everyday life.  I trust my wife for good reason:  I have found her worthy of trust.  But just because we do trust each other, we can now know each other even better.  Moreover, we can practice married life with confidence – always trusting in God, too, who makes us able to keep our vows.

But how does one reconcile harmony of faith and reason with Scripture and religious tradition?

There is no need to reconcile them unless there is a conflict, but I don’t see any.

As to Scripture, are you familiar with the first chapter of the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans?  You might think that he would complain that the pagans refuse to believe in God just because there is no evidence for His reality.  Actually, though, he says there is evidence:  God’s reality and power have been “known from the beginning” because of “what has been made.”  They aren’t really ignorant, but in denial.  Therefore, they are “without excuse.”

As to Tradition, the partnership of faith and reason actually is the classical Christian view.  A naïve sort of Christian might say, “Faith alone!  I reject all reasoning!”  But doesn’t he need to reason even to understand the content of his faith?  A naïve sort of anti-Christian might say, “Reason alone!  I reject all faith!”  But doesn’t he need to have some kind of faith even to be confident that reasoning works?  Harmony of faith and reason may be new to those two kinds of people -- but it isn’t new.

At your website, I find your story of apostasy and reconversion particularly fascinating.  Do you find you have more insight having gone through that faith journey than those who haven’t? 

Well, sin itself certainly isn’t a path to wisdom, and lots of people who never sinned in the particular ways that I did have much greater wisdom than I do.  But nothing can defeat God.  If we are too stubborn to learn in any other way, then He can even use our experience of having fallen flat on our faces to teach us – provided that we finally submit to His grace and get up!

He has certainly used my experience of being forgiven and healed to teach me something of just how deep His grace is.  He has also used my healed memories of my former self-deception to give me some insight into the power of a sinful soul to deceive itself, and how this works.

Especially, do you think your conversion to Catholicism was at all shaped by your period of apostasy?

I will always be grateful to the Protestant teachers of my childhood, from whom I first heard the Gospel.  As a Protestant, though, I wasn’t taught much about the deep intellectual traditions of the Faith, which the Catholic Church has carefully preserved.  There were a lot of other reasons for becoming Catholic too -- but yes, my recovery from apostasy led me to cherish those traditions long before I was actually converted.  I first read Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Dante Alighieri while I was still a rebel against God, and despite my rebellion, I couldn’t help but think “This is good stuff.”

Whatever merit there may have been in some of Martin Luther’s other teachings, I am afraid that he did the Protestant movement a disservice in this respect.  His intention may have been to uphold the use of reason in service to God, while condemning its use in sinful defiance of Him.  However, he was notoriously careless about the distinction.  It wasn’t helpful when he called reason a “whore” and said we should throw dirt in her face.

Don’t get me wrong!  Martin Luther didn’t have the last word, and I am glad to say that in many parts of the Protestant world, believers have labored to recover the resources of faithful intellect which Luther himself seemed to mock.  I hope you will be one of them.