If you were to ask most people, they would say that there are two different ways of looking at the world, one based on faith and the other based on reason and evidence. Some would say that an individual could embrace both of these systems, using faith to understand the world in religious contexts, but using reason and evidence in scientific contexts. Others would privilege one system or the other, either saying that faith has to take precedence over anything that reason might have to say or vice versa. What is interesting to observe is that Christians and non-Christians, atheists and agnostics and people of all persuasions seem to agree with this assessment. Faith (including the Christian faith) deals with a realm where human reason cannot enter the picture. Meanwhile, the Enlightenment worldview (primarily found in the sciences but not solely there) prides itself as founded on reason alone and eschews anything that might smack of faith.
And yet this is a completely inaccurate assessment. It is true that in the West there are two primary intellectual systems: that of Christianity and that of the Enlightenment. (By the Enlightenment I mean not merely the Aufklärung of the eighteenth century but the various intellectual currents that flow from it; postmodernism, for example, is not a return to a pre-modern worldview but is a continuation as well as a modification and a rejection of the modernism derived from the Aufklärung and is unthinkable without it.) Although they are not the only intellectual systems present in our country and both contain a wide variety of thought not always in perfect harmony, they do represent two rather distinct ways of looking at the universe. But people err when they assume that only one is based on faith and only the other uses reason and evidence.
In truth, both Christianity and the Enlightenment proceed from premises that must be accepted by faith, even as they both believe that there are strong arguments for accepting their own premises. Christianity teaches the existence of God and His intervention in history. It has throughout the centuries made rational arguments as to why this is so, but it has also understood that ultimately one either accepts the premise or one doesn’t. Similarly, the Enlightenment proceeds from the notion that the material universe is all that is knowable and therefore is all that exists. Moreover, it believes that anything we want to learn about this material universe can be learned by empirical observation. And while this may seem a reasonable observation, it is one that cannot be proven empirically. One has to assume by faith that we do not live in a solipsistic world or in a universe where the senses deceive us or where nature is not always consistent. Now we may argue over the axioms upon which we rely, but ultimately they either are accepted by faith or are not.
Those premises, once accepted, determine the way that the system of thought will develop. The Enlightenment, founded on a belief in materialism and empiricism, will then use the evidence found by empirical observation exclusively to determine what will be part of its teaching and what will not. But Christianity too proceeds in an analogous manner. The Christian faith starts with the belief that God exists, that mankind in its current state is tainted by original sin, that God intervened in human history through the death and resurrection of Christ, and that the Scriptures record this revelation. A Christian theologian worthy of the title will try to conserve the data of Scripture, much as an Enlightenment thinker will try to craft an interpretation that best explains all the empirical data. Most of us are familiar with the process used by scientists, but fail to recognize that Christian theologians follow a similar process. They are not crafting ideas out of whole cloth, but are logically following the methodology drawn from their premises and are trying to preserve all of their data. The difference is that their methodology sends them to the Scriptures as the most reliable source of information, while those of the Enlightenment would look at the empirical data of the latest experiment. The Enlightenment might criticize Christians for failing to restrict themselves to material observation, but Christians would argue in reply that the Enlightenment is irrational by limiting itself to only the material realm.
There is much more to say about these two major intellectual systems, but suffice it to say that the Enlightenment view is no less based on faith than Christianity is and that Christianity is no less methodical and rational in the way that it teaches the faith.
© 2010 James A. Kellerman
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