Room For Faith Research Articles

Poetry as Spiritual Exercise

Poetry as Spiritual Exercise

TWO RESEARCH PARADIGMS, WITH OR WITHOUT „GOD HYPOTHESIS”: C.S. LEWIS AND RICHARD DAWKINS

In this present paper we try to learn something about how to cope with analytical investigation of reality, by comparing the ideas of two iconic Oxford figures. On the one hand, the renowned atheist Richard Dawkins, and the Christian apologist C.S. Lewis, on the other. It is more than interesting to know how two great thinkers of the 20th century can raise and answer to questions of life, such as Reasoned belief, the so-called „God hypothesis” or concerning our place and purpose in this world. Both Dawkins and Lewis see intellectual reflection on the big questions as natural and significant. Both insist that their beliefs – atheism and Christianity respectively – demand and deserve intellectual seriousness and are capable of being developed into larger systems. Lewis’s apologetic approach generally takes the form of identifying a common human observation or experience, and then showing how it fits, naturally and plausibly, within a Christian way of looking at things. For Dawkins, there is no room for faith in science, precisely because the evidence compels us to draw certain valid conclusions. He proposes an absolute dichotomy between ‘blind faith’ and the ‘overwhelming scientific evidence. Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator, God, almost certainly does not exist, and that belief in a personal god qualifies as a delusion, which he defines as a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence. An inevitable conclusion is that both Dawkins and Lewis are men of faith, in that both hold committed positions that cannot be proved right, but which they clearly regard as justified and reasonable. We must learn to live with a degree of rational uncertainty about our deepest beliefs and values.

Science and Spirituality: Making Room for Faith in the Age of Science

Science and Spirituality: Making Room for Faith in the Age of Science

Kant, Augustine, and Room for Faith

In this paper I argue for a notion of conversion in Kant’s critical philosophy by drawing a connection between the conversions to be found in Kant and the intellectual, moral, and religious conversions of Augustine. I liken Augustine’s Platonic metaphysics of God to Kant’s antinomy of Pure Reason as an intellectual conversion. I link Augustine’s moral conversion with Kant’s meta-maxim to commit to a use of reason that is free from the influence of inclination. I connect Augustine’s religious conversion with Kant’s recognition of God as the postulated condition for the highest good. There are advantages to understanding the conversions in Kant for understanding how his critical philosophy views faith more generally. The conversions in Kant point to the practical necessity of faith as Kant understands it. Such an interpretation also unifies Kant’s contribution to the conversation on the relationship between faith and reason. For Kant faith, much like knowledge, is a form of holding true and as such is reasonable.

Making Room for Faith: Does Science Exclude Religion?

Making Room for Faith: Does Science Exclude Religion?

Kant, Augustine, and Room for Faith

Kant, Augustine, and Room for Faith

Making room for faith in science: the role of metaphors and reason

Making room for faith in science: the role of metaphors and reason

Science and Spirituality: Making Room for Faith in the Age of Science – By Michael Ruse

Science and Spirituality: Making Room for Faith in the Age of Science – By Michael Ruse

Shlomo Pines on Maimonides, Spinoza, and Kant

Abstract In his “Spinoza’s TTP, Maimonides, and Kant” (1968), Pines compared Spinoza’s dogmas of universal faith (TTP, 14) with Kant’s postulates of practical reason (Critique of Practical Reason, part 1). According to him, Spinoza’s dogmas, like Maimonides’ “necessary beliefs” (Guide 3:28), are postulates necessary for political welfare, and do not fall under the jurisdiction of theoretical reason. They define the faith of the common person, not that of the philosopher. Kant, in his remarks about Spinoza as an “upright skeptic,” mistakenly thought his dogmas were true beliefs, not necessary ones; and his notion of postulates of practical reason seems to have been in part influenced by his mistaken view of Spinoza’s dogmas. The transformation of Maimonides’ “necessary beliefs” into Kant’s “postulates of practical reason,” as narrated by Pines, recalls the similar transformation of “Averroism” into “Christian Averroism” in the thirteenth century. In essays written from the late 1970s until his death in 1990, Pines returned to the theme of Maimonides and Kant, and argued convincingly that Maimonides’ epistemology was “critical” in the Kantian sense. However, his related argument that Maimonides’ religious sensibility was similar to Kant’s is less convincing. Unlike Kant, Maimonides did not think that critical epistemology made room for faith, but held that it caused one to tremble in awe. Like Spinoza, he identified true faith with intellectual knowledge, not something beyond it. His distinctiveness as a philosopher is that he was a God-intoxicated Knower like Spinoza, but a critical epistemologist like Kant.

Michael Ruse: Science and Spiritutality: Making Room for Faith in the Age of Science

Michael Ruse: Science and Spiritutality: Making Room for Faith in the Age of Science

Science and Spirituality: Making Room for Faith in the Age of Science. By Michael Ruse.

<i>Science and Spirituality: Making Room for Faith in the Age of Science.</i> By Michael Ruse.

The Satisfaction of Reason: The Mathematical/Dynamical Distinction in the Critique of Pure Reason

In the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant explicitly states that his motivation for writing this work is to make room for faith or the practical employment of reason (Bxxv, xxx). How does Kant accomplish this? The topics of God and the immortality of the soul do not arise until the conclusion of the antinomies. How does Kant get from the desire to make room for faith to its fulfilment in the latter parts of the first Critique? A common response to this question is a discussion of the constitutive and regulative employment of the ideas of reason. It is this distinction that sustains Kant's attempt at reconciling empirical knowledge and moral discourse. The constitutive and regulative analysis, however, has its roots deep within the initial stages of the Critique of Pure Reason. It is, in fact, the mathematical/dynamical distinction, which Kant introduces early in the analytic, that makes possible the constitutive/regulative distinction. Not only has the mathematical/ dynamical distinction itself been disregarded, but the relation between the mathematical/dynamical and the constitutive/ regulative has been almost universally ignored by commentators. If a commentator does mention the mathematical/dynamical distinction, it is usually in a dismissive tone. Walsh, for example, calls the distinction ‘hard to interpret’ and ignores it for the rest of his commentary.

The Ambiguity of Kantian Faith

In a recent article in this journal, Professor Wiebe has attempted to discard the traditional thesis about the relationship between faith and reason in Kant's critical philosophy and substitute a decidedly novel and superficially attractive interpretation. While traditional readings of Kant's theology have taken his denial of knowledge in order to make room for faith at more or less face value and have thus attributed to him a rather different sort of theology, Professor Wiebe rejects this polarity of knowledge and faith. Kant's faith, according to Wiebe, is a ‘cognitive faith — a source of belief that can quite legitimately, even if only in a weak sense, be referred to as religious knowledge’. This claim in turn rests upon the assertion that the traditional distinction between belief and knowledge is untenable, that ‘… “knowledge” and “justified belief” are indistinguishable’. Wiebe would thus recast Kant's claim of denying knowledge to make room for faith to denying theoretical knowledge to make room for practical knowledge. Kantian faith then, ‘is not outside the realm of reason, but is rather one aspect of reason, as is knowledge’. It is in this sense that there is ‘a basic continuity in Kant's thoughts on religion with the theologies of the past’

Room for faith

Room for faith