Two Levels of Faith and Reason

Abstract

AITH and are vague terms. Faith in general is trust, and this means, doing our part in the system of things with confidence that the rest of the system will do its part, at least to the extent that we shall not have striven simply in vain. What Santayana calls animal is the confidence of every sentient creature in its environment as favorable to its efforts to live and continue its species. Faith on the human level is trust that the nature of things insures the appropriateness of ideals of generosity, honesty, and aesthetic refinement, or goodness, truth, and beauty, to such an extent that despite all frustrations and vexations, despite disloyalty or crassness in our fellows, despite death itself, it is really and truly better to live, and to live in accord with these ideals, than to give up the struggle in death or in cynicism. Of this human faith there are varieties almost beyond telling: the great religious faiths, and the various attempted philosophical substitutes for these. Reason in general is either a mere tracing of the consequences of ideas, whether true or false, that is, mere deduction, as in mathematics, or an attempt to estimate the truth of ideas by the honest weighing of evidence, the most accurate attainable estimation of pros and cons. This weighing of evidence has two main forms or levels: the inductive reasoning of science and everyday life; and the presumed reasoning, not easy to classify, which is at work in the construction of systems of metaphysics and theology. We can now render our question of the relation of faith to reason somewhat more definite, as follows: how are the processes of deduction, and of weighing of evidence (on the two levels mentioned), related to trust in the environment as an adequate basis for our efforts to live in accordance with certain ideals? At