When you get to the heart of religious and spiritual discourse, it’s impossible not to address the conflict between faith and reason. When Paul wrote many of his epistles, he confronted the logical issues that are posited in a solely rational mind. While many might think the discussion is somewhat foolish, it’s almost a necessary foolishness to address. The most durable things in this world require faith, more so than anything that reason provides.
Reason by definition is “a cause, explanation, or justification for an action or event” or “the power of the mind to think, understand, and form judgments by a process of logic.” While this seems like the most legitimate form of process thought, it is also the most constrained form of thinking. Doing things solely by reason doesn’t lend itself to experimentation, learning, or true creativity, but rather through a form of logical reasoning. By nature, this often results in a set of premises and arguments that lend themselves to absolute conclusions. Unfortunately, absolute conclusions lend themselves to death or homogeneity, as there is nothing to sustain the conclusion other than a similar set of facts that lead to the same eventual conclusion. Living solely by reason is a boring and unfulfilling way to live life when you really think about it. Nothing lends itself to doing something outside of the norm and there will always be limitations to the preset boundaries generated by logical thought.
Faith, hope and love, as Paul points to, are actually the perceptive universals that generate eternal life. Besides Christ providing the path to eternal life, he was the only leader of the past who led purely by those principles, while other leaders led by power, fear, and love. It’s interesting to consider the reasons why, and the first fundamental is faith. Jesus Christ had faith solely in God the Father and his plan for eternal life. It began the pursuit of perceptive universals on our behalf not only physically, but mentally and spiritually as well. His faith anchored primarily on the ontological basis (God) to form reality and pursued the best of all absolute principles in practice. His ideal followers provided him no material gain or pleasures, rather were humble and loving, showing that in order for faith and eternal life to prosper, the ideas of ownership, pride, and self had to be abandoned. His teachings confirm that throughout the Gospels.
Faith is ironically more common to your daily walk than you would imagine. When you go throughout your days, you have faith that the sun and order of days will continue. You assume the taste of foods and the pleasures experienced by physical means will remain consistent with prior experiences. You assume that people who believe the same principles as you will maintain the same perceptive reality. You assume that what you remember about your past is accurate to the future and that things like movies, stories, etc., will remain as you remember them. The truth is that you have faith in all sorts of things that truly don’t mean anything if they aren’t anchored in some sort of ontological truth. Otherwise, they are merely observations that can be cast in a logical trap or perceptive shift.
Faith is also a critical variable to growth. How would you have ever learned anything in your life if you didn’t believe a teacher? How would you ever have experienced anything had you never taken a risk or assumed that things would follow some historical pattern? How would you build any relationships with anyone if you could never develop love or trust? All of these items require faith, which is inherently a risky thing. But logic is also a risky game, as you lock everything you know into a simple mathematical equation. It would likely entail that most stereotypes become truth and that broader paint strokes will speak for any and all circumstances. Interestingly enough, most people put faith in science and technological growth, yet they call it “logic.” In life, everything entails a degree of risk, the same is true with faith and reason. Reason and logic are not necessarily trustworthy and true, ask any computer programmer and think about the need for software patches. If things were simply logical, computer bugs and glitches shouldn’t really exist. But they do, because life requires a degree of faith to exist.
You should think about how many things you take for granted (assume will remain similar to your past experiences) and whether you live in the constraints of logic or the posits of faith. Chances are if you walk more by faith and simplicity, you are living a much happier life than one who walks by reason and complexity (though the world prides the latter).
