Faith and Reason
Posted by David Corfield
Back last October I mentioned a book – The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution: Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, and the Cultivation of Virtue – which describes
how three key early modern scientists, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, and Gottfried Leibniz, envisioned their new work as useful for cultivating virtue and for pursuing a good life. Their scientific and philosophical innovations stemmed in part from their understanding of mathematics and science as cognitive and spiritual exercises that could create a truer mental and spiritual nobility.
Someone closer to our times who considered the relationship between scientific and spiritual enquiry was the chemist turned philosopher Michael Polanyi. In Faith and Reason, The Journal of Religion, Vol. 41, No. 4 (Oct., 1961), pp. 237-247, Polanyi establishes the central concept of his epistemology:
Understanding, comprehension – this is the cognitive faculty cast aside by a positivistic theory of knowledge, which refuses to acknowledge the existence of comprehensive entities as distinct from their particulars; and this is the faculty which I recognize as the central act of knowing. For comprehension can never be absent from any process of knowing and is indeed the ultimate sanction of any such act. What is not understood cannot be said to be known. (p. 240)
Like many other philosophers I enjoy, Polanyi stresses the movement of a knowing mind rather than any static state of knowledge.
The dynamic impulse by which we acquire understanding is only reduced and never lost when we hold knowledge acquired and established by this impulse. The same impulse sustains our conviction for dwelling in this knowledge and for developing our thoughts within its framework. Live knowledge is a perpetual source of new surmises, an inexhaustible mine of still hidden implications. (p. 244)
Elsewhere he defines his conception of reality as “that which may yet inexhaustibly manifest itself”. This conception informs the next passage.
To hold knowledge is indeed always a commitment to indeterminate implications, for human knowledge is but an intimation of reality, and we can never quite tell in what new way reality may yet manifest itself. It is external to us; it is objective; and so its future manifestations can never be completely under our intellectual control.
So all true knowledge is inherently hazardous, just as all true faith is a leap into the unknown. Knowing includes its own uncertainty as an integral part of it…
The traditional division between faith and reason, or faith and science…, reflects the assumption that reason and science proceed by explicit rules of logical deduction or inductive generalization. But I have shown that these operations are impotent by themselves, and I could add that they cannot even be strictly defined by themselves. To know is to understand, and explicit logical processes are effective only as tools in search of a problem, commitment by which we expand our understanding and continue to hold the result. They have no meaning except within this informal dynamic context. Once this is recognized, the contrast between faith and reason dissolves, and the close similarity of this structure emerges in its place. (p. 244)
This prepares the way for an assertion about the similarity of faith and reason.
The very act of scientific discovery offers a paradigm of this transition. I have described it as a passionate pursuit of a hidden meaning, guided by intensely personal intimations of this unexposed reality. The intrinisic hazards of such efforts are of its essence; discovery is defined as an advancement of knowledge that cannot be achieved by any, however diligent, application of explicit modes of inference. Yet the discoverer must labor night and day. For though no labor can make a discovery, no discovery can be made without intense, absorbing, devoted labor. Here we have a paradigm of the Pauline scheme of faith, works and grace. The discoverer works in the belief that his labors will prepare his mind for receiving a truth from sources over which he has no control. I regard the Pauline scheme therefore as the only adequate conception of scientific discovery. (pp. 246-7)
One might question whether spiritual or moral enquiry approaches a reality which inexhaustibly manifests itself, but, as a description of research in mathematics, Polanyi appears to me to have captured something important. Having learned via John of the n-categories program, and seen his commitment to it over so many years, it would be hard to overlook this aspect of faith.
Re: Faith and Reason
I hope I’m not off-subject here, but your thoughts intrigued me and sent me off on the following tangent…
I think it is important to distinguish between the act of seeking, which is unquestionably a spiritual endeavor, and that of condescending (co-descending, in a positive sense) to popular theory in order to grasp and conform to the discoveries of others.
Much of what occupies our time in science is not the pursuit and acquisition of pure knowledge (which requires no language whatsoever), but rather the deciphering of the knowledge of our peers, and the formatting of our own discoveries for the purpose of presentation. We are trying to hang our ornaments on the same tree, which is understandable and necessary if we are to build upon a corporate foundation. But this is where we must delineate between the carnal and spiritual quest (if I may use such language on this board).
Consuming ourselves disproportionately in popular conformity of pure discovery can be spiritually and creatively draining. We may find it distracting us from fundamental inquiry. There is no spiritual fulfillment in the formatting. It is hidden in simplicity… in the lonely isolation of personal discovery.
“If thou wilt receive profit, read with humility, simplicity and faith, and seek not at any time the fame of being learned.”
- Thomas a Kempis