On Faith and Reason

I have many a time contemplated the fundamental difference between faith and reason. As if this were that simple, Faith is described by the King James Version of the Christian bible as believing in something you cannot see and to which you have no evidence for it. As for Reason, however, I find hard to say, since the notion of Reason can be further sectioned into two categorizes, that being illogical reasoning and logical reasoning – and faith would thus come under the heading of illogical reasoning. However, I have come to a conclusion, one to which I do not think other philosophers or theologians have yet thought of, of the fundamental difference between faith and reason.

This is my methodology. Because I am unable to better characterize the nature between faith and reason, I applied examples to both sides – examples being granted by all. Faith includes religion and pseudoscience, while reason includes science. Pseudoscience includes homeopathy, magnetic therapy, reflexology, clothes that are claimed to be able to cure Parkinson's etc. Upon looking at the examples for both sides of the dichotomy, a few aspects stand out to characterize the two. One is of having the support of compliments from the academic journals, wherein such scientific and academic journals often condemn such strange theories of pseudoscience and religion due to a lack of empirical credibility and academic scholarship. The other, which is the revolutionary one, is of the presence of applied mathematics to scientifically granted empirical facts. That is, no other type of abstract reasoning other than mathematics has brought about such rigorous reasoning in any field of inquiry such that causes and effects are limited rather than all being granted as plausible. That is, reason is ingrained into mathematics. Without applied mathematics, in the form I said above, only faith can be found. Therefore, I have come to believe that on the side of faith, either symbols or tradition are only used to make seemingly valid to the lay. That even if some form of mathematics is used in their theories, and of the use of some scientifically granted facts, they nevertheless remain ignorant of the large body of scientific knowledge and refrain from empirical research and calculations, and instead, simply conduct studies pertaining only to the field of statistics, and appeal to symbols and tradition.

In total, it seems as if the notion of faith relies on the placebo effect, of subjective validation, while reason relies solely on mathematics, on objective reasoning. Perhaps, however, on the general use of reason by the non-religious, the ability to self-scrutinize and critically evaluate and re-assess theories, laws, principles, or hypotheses is the best thing faith could never have. In faith, religion simply holds that all of the holy book is infallible, and thus only seeks to re-interpret ideas contained within it rather than simply remove of those that are outright ludicrous.