David Bentley Hart: evaluation

Transcript context

…Reason? Reason is the bottom line? It has to be, because even if you choose faith, you’re choosing to believe something for a reason. Even if you’re not able to name those reasons yourself, some compelling rational intuition has worked upon you to say, “Well, I believe I can trust this source more than that source. ” You may say that, “Oh, I’m having faith in what it’s telling me,” but you’re having faith in that rather than something else, because at some level — maybe a tacit level that you have a hard time laying out — you’ve somehow reached the judgment. It would have to be a rational judgment if your faith is of any meaning, that you trust this rather than that. But what is faith? When you create a division between faith and reason, you’re assuming that faith is taking things simply on the authority of another blindly. That’s never actually been the definition that any religion — whether you’re talking in the West, or when you’re talking about Pistis in Greek, or śraddhā in Sanskrit, or any number of other words for faith, it usually means a rational commitment to a certain path for which you have reasons. Those reasons in themselves don’t necessarily arrive at a QED. But as you advance on this path, you’re hoping, at least, things become clearer and clearer, and you’ll understand better whether you really believe it or not. You have to commit yourself to the path in order to find a way. The American philosopher William James spoke of the will to believe, and he’s often misunderstood as if all he was saying was it’s okay to choose arbitrarily to believe something. That’s not what he said. What he said was, if you’re in the fog, say, and you encounter two paths, and you have a sense that one is more likely to lead to safety and the other to the edge of a cliff, you take that path. But you don’t take it so credulously that you’ll walk off the edge of a cliff if you come to the cliff. The act of faith is a way of engaging the mind, engaging reason so it can explore. If you don’t start with some trust of the possibility of discovering the truth, then you never will seek the truth to begin with. That search requires a combination of a degree of rational judgment and a degree of trust, and you hope that the two prove to be in harmony. If they’re not, though, if you reach a point where your faith and your reason come into conflict, then trust your reason. Always trust your reason because otherwise, faith is just epistemic nihilism. It’s meaningless. It’s just a brute exertion of the will, at which point it’s subrational and becomes contemptible. Always trust reason, but make sure that reason is tempered. It’s not petty rationalism, but it’s a reason that really can see things in broad perspective and understand in a variety of modalities. Don’t treat reason as if it’s a math equation. Given that perspective, does it ever make sense to think about the deity in probabilistic or Bayesian terms? Because it’s sounding almost Bayesian to me. “Well, the chance that God exists is 73 percent.”…

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