UNREASONABLE?

Let me begin with a few quotations.

“Faith…protects reason from any temptation to distrust its own abilities, stimulates it to be open to ever broader horizons, keeps alive in it the search for foundations and, when reason itself is applied to the supernatural sphere of the relationship between God and man, faith enriches its work.” But reason can also help faith. As St Thomas Aquinas put it, it does so by “demonstrating those truths that are preambles of the faith; giving a clearer notion, by certain similitudes, of the truths of the faith; resisting those who speak against the faith, either by showing that their statements are false, or by showing that they are not necessarily true.” And hence the whole history of theology is that of the mind showing “the intelligibility of faith, its articulation and inner harmony, its reasonableness and its ability to further human good.” (Benedict XVI, The Doctors of the Church, s.v. St Thomas Aquinas)

I have been rereading and pondering this passage for several days, and believe it to reflect something that is both crucial and too often neglected. Many years ago I used to visit a deeply devout and very charming charismatic community in Canada. But my relationship with them came to an end when it dawned upon me that, as I ended up telling them, they behaved as if God had created every part of them except their brain. It is true that, as a Carthusian put it in a letter to a friend, love is more important to faith than knowledge; but God did create our brain, our mind, and our capacity to reason, and to see that (however implicitly) as functioning only outside the faith is to underestimate the Creator and to lend credibility to simplistic atheism.

(My only justification for writing this as one who has read little of Aquinas and less of most other Church Fathers is my conviction that in this I am not alone; and that the thinness of my own arguments may stimulate others, as it is stimulating me, to do something about that ignorance.)

On this last day of the Church’s year, on the verge of an Advent that for many is a frantic period of shopping between the Thanksgiving turkey and the Christmas one, it may be useful to slow down and think about the “reasonableness of faith” – if only because so many around us deny it. They may be quite kindly about our condition, but they tend to regard it as a strictly private hobby, like collecting stamps or a passion for baseball; and our basic position they consider nonsense, i.e. un-reasonable.

It is, therefore, crucial for us to consider wherein our faith is reasonable. In the first place, it is no less reasonable today than in other times to be led by contemplating the universe to supposing the existence of a Creator. After the Creation myths, science came to believe that the universe had always existed and would always do so. Now science believes in the Big Bang, i.e. in a point where the universe began and where time and space were born. In other words, in a moment of creation. So why is it then reasonable to insist that there cannot have been a creator?

Secondly, most humans, over history, have believed in some kind of existence after death. Most humans, when hot and tired, long for drink; water exists (so does beer, but that’s another story). The fact that a hypothesis corresponds to a desire does not invalidate it, any more than, as Oscar Wilde said, the fact that a man dies for an idea makes it true. The fact that no ordinary human has returned from death does not invalidate it either: no butterfly (as far as we know) returns to inform caterpillars what it is they will turn into.

Thirdly, the existence of evil is not proof of the non-existence of God. This is the story of free will, which I’ve already mentioned on this blog. Love is limited – even God’s love is limited – by the necessity of leaving the beloved free to return it or not. If man chooses to live in what he fondly believes to be heroic (or simply comfortable) independence of faith, superstition and anything beyond his five senses, his family and his bank account, he not only closes the door on the Person who loves him most, he leaves himself horribly vulnerable to evil. Evil can make use of idleness, it can employ godlessness, and it can pervert faith. Most of us who know some history can think of examples: using these exploits of evil to “prove” that there can be no loving God is proof only of naiveté, dimwittedness or bad faith.

Fourthly, the existence of natural catastrophes does not necessarily invalidate the concept of a loving God. We humans are born, we live and we die: this we have in common with all other living creatures. If God loves us, He wants the best for us (subject to our free will, which is the law of Love itself). Why should we know better than He what is best for us? Perhaps the existence of tsunamis and typhoons is a warning to us that we can’t count on having all the time in the world to become what we (you or I) are meant to become. Moreover, most of us die in some sort of pain: the earthquake that spares us may deliver us over to a cancer of the throat. In other words, perhaps what we die of, and when, is not the point. Perhaps the point – God’s point – is how we die: in what relation to His love.

Perhaps enough for today. This has not been a demonstration that our faith is reasonable; rather one that it is not unreasonable. It’s a beginning. And once again, this has all been said before, often, for many centuries, and far better. As Eliot put it:

. . . . And what there is to conquer

By strength and submission, has already been discovered

Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope

To emulate – but there is no competition –

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost

And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions

That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.