Faith and Reason: Their Roles in Religious and Secular Life

THREE. FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE

THREE FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE [W]e can voice our ultimate convictions only from within our convictions—from within the whole system of acceptances that are logically prior to any particular assertion of our own, prior to the holding of any particular piece of knowledge. —Michael Polany1 In this chapter I inquire in more detail into the intimate relations of existential faith and knowledge. I take strong issue here, as I have in previous chapters, with the view that faith and knowledge should be viewed as incompatible with or opposed to one another. In that view, to possess knowledge is by implication to have dispensed with faith or any need for faith, and to profess faith is implicitly to admit to an absence of knowledge or even to celebrate this absence in favor of a claimed superiority of faith to knowledge. I argue instead that the two are mutually dependent. Faith has an essential knowledge aspect, and knowledge has an essential faith aspect. We must forthrightly acknowledge and analyze this interdependence of faith and knowledge if we want properly to understand the character of either one. I press this notion with special vigor when I discuss, in the next chapter, the indispensable role of faith in scientific investigations and in claims to scientific knowledge. It is important that I do so because scientific findings and modes of inquiry are often wrongly assumed to stand in sharp contrast with, if not in blatant contradiction to, approaches, attitudes, and outlooks of faith. In this chapter, I first reflect on the knowledge aspect of faith itself. Then I concentrate on the essential role of faith in claims to knowledge in general. THE KNOWLEDGE ASPECT OF FAITH I spoke earlier about the critical importance of nonliteral imaginative symbols as expressions of faith. And I stressed the idea that these symbols 37 38 FAITH AND REASON cannot simply be reduced to or translated into propositions or proposals for belief. The symbols convey the outlooks, attitudes, insights, and convictions of faith in their own special, indispensable manner. The knowledge these symbolic structures provide is not that of straightforward propositions or claims but that of suggestive images, paradoxes, stories, rituals, and the like. The peculiar power they have and the distinctive kind of understanding they make possible are well stated by Wilfred Cantwell Smith in his description of the effect of Shakespeare’s plays. Smith writes that in these plays Shakespeare expressed what he knew not in propositions but in poetic dramas of great power and potential effectiveness. . . . Almost no significant question can be asked about Shakespeare or his plays in terms of what he believed. It is of considerable moment, however, to ask what he saw; what insights his poetry can help us to have; how our understanding of life can be enhanced by our understanding of his understanding of it. (Smith 1987: 148; emphasis added)2 The symbol systems and stratagems of faith evoke something like this level of understanding, and a penetrating, meaningful faith has great need of them as potent means of expression. At their best, they are able to awaken depths of insight and awareness that cannot be plumbed by literal statements. In their own right and in their own manner, they are stimulants to knowledge and pointers to truth. But it is knowledge and truth of a particular sort, a sort that has existential quality and transformative power. In his book Faith in Nature: Environmentalism as a Religious Quest, Thomas R. Dunlap calls attention to the fact that “environmentalists adopted symbols of [their] faith ranging from icons to areas.” They “put up posters with Ansel Adams’s view of Yosemite Valley or Eliot Porter’s pictures of Glen Canyon in the same way that ethnic Catholics put statues of the Virgin on the front lawn—as declarations of faith and reminders of what was important.” Dunlap also writes that “[t]he first pictures of earth from outer space became icons of the unity of life, and calls for international environmental protection relied on that view of earth as a fragile ark of life” (Dunlap 2005: 140, 142). The work of devoted environmentalists, as Dunlap stresses throughout his book, is undergirded by faith. Their faith may take the form of religious naturalism, for example, which regards nature itself as the ultimate source of value and meaning.3 It may be an aspect of a more traditional form of religious faith such as that of Taoism, Hinduism , Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, or Islam.4 Or...