FAITH AND REASON
FAITH:
1. complete trust or confidence in someone or something.
2. strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual
apprehension rather than proof.
REASON:
1. a cause, explanation, or justification for an action or event.
2. the power of the mind to think, understand, and form judgments by a
process of logic.
Faith and Reason
Traditionally, faith and reason have each been considered to be sources of
justification for religious belief. Because both can purportedly serve this same
epistemic function, it has been a matter of much interest to philosophers and
theologians how the two are related and thus how the rational agent should treat
claims derived from either source. Some have held that there can be no conflict
between the two—that reason properly employed and faith properly understood
will never produce contradictory or competing claims—whereas others have
maintained that faith and reason can (or even must) be in genuine contention over
certain propositions or methodologies. Other thinkers have theorized that faith and
reason each govern their own separate domains, such that cases of apparent conflict
are resolved on the side of faith when the claim in question is, say, a religious or
theological claim, but resolved on the side of reason when the disputed claim is, for
example, empirical or logical.
Some relatively recent philosophers, most notably the logical positivists, have
denied that there is a domain of thought or human existence rightly governed by
faith, asserting instead that all meaningful statements and ideas are accessible to
thorough rational examination. This has presented a challenge to religious thinkers
to explain how an admittedly nonrational or transrational form of language can hold
meaningful cognitive content.