Faith and Reason: Is There a Sharp Divide? (Part 1)

We begin our little survey by going back to ancient Greece where the start of western philosophy began. Western philosophy places a great emphasis on rationality, coherence and makes a strident effort to abide by the laws of logic. It claims to frown on beliefs based on feelings alone. Some of the laws of logic would be:

A) The law of non-contradiction- Something cannot be both A and non-A (it’s negation) at the same time and in the same respect.

B) The law of identity- A is A

C) The Law of the excluded middle: A is either A or it is not A, it cannot be both.

Approx. 600 years before the birth of Jesus Christ, a movement arose whose purpose was to develop an understanding of the world that didn’t depend on the ancient pagan religions. The members of this movement sought to interpret what was around them without reference to a Mind that was above and beyond them. They were called “philosophers”; that’s Greek for ‘Lovers of Wisdom’. The early Greek philosophers were quite diverse and held various views but there were common features to their thought. Those features are:

1) The supremacy of human reason (rationality). The human intellect is fully able, under perfect conditions, to construct a true-to-life system that properly interprets and explains all of life (i.e. an all encompassing and fully developed worldview). The chief failing of humankind is not moral (i.e. sin, or something like that), but epistemological and metaphysical (i.e. we’re finite and ignorant)

2) The acceptance of nothing on the sole basis of tradition. This develops are the first point above. Since humans are fit within themselves to understand reality, revelation or tradition isn’t needed in telling us where we came from or where we’re going. Stories can be true or false, but the facts of reality, so it was believed, are just that, facts.