"And no one came to say that your life belongs to you, and the good is to live it."

Disclaimer:

I don't really know what the heck I'm talking about (Okay, Miriam?).

Introduction:

I have been reading a lot lately concerning the moralities of Christianity, Libertarian capitalism, and most recently Objectivism. These three philosophies stand on the common premise that man, as a rational being, is deserving and entitled to life and liberty while never justified in initiating force. However, there are also contradictions between them. Since I agree with Ayn Rand that "No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge", I believe that I owe it to myself to try to sort out those contradictions. I've decided that writing this post is the best way to do that.

The Relationship between Faith & Reason

To start off, why do all of the following quotes make sense to me?

I used to ask how on earth [faith] can be a virtue—what is there moral or immoral about believing or not believing a set of statements? ...a sane man accepts or rejects any statement, not because he wants or does not want to, but because the evidence seems to him good or bad. If he were mistaken about the goodness or badness of the evidence that would not mean he was a bad man, but only that he was not very clever. And if he thought the evidence bad but tried to force himself to believe in spite of it, that would be merely stupid.

Well, I think I still take that view. But what I did not see then—and a good many people do not see still—was this. I was assuming that if the human mind once accepts a thing as true it will automatically go on regarding it as true, until some real reason for reconsidering it turns up. In fact, I was assuming that the human mind is completely ruled by reason. But that is not so. For example, my reason is perfectly convinced by good evidence that anaesthetics do not smother me... But that does not alter the fact that when they have me down on the table ...I start thinking I am going to choke, and I am afraid they will start cutting me up before I am properly under. In other words, I lose my faith in anaesthetics. It is not reason that is taking away my faith: on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other.

...I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it. That is not the point at which Faith comes in. But supposing a man’s reason once decides that the weight of the evidence is for it. I can tell that man what is going to happen to him in the next few weeks. There will come a moment ...at which it would be very convenient if Christianity were not true. And once again his wishes and desires will carry out a blitz. I am not talking of moments at which any real new reasons against Christianity turn up. Those have to be faced and that is a different matter. I am talking about moments where a mere mood rises up against it.

Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason ’has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods “where they get off,” you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of Faith.

-CS Lewis, Mere Christianity

Rationality is the recognition of the fact that existence exists, that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it, which is thinking - that the mind is one's only judge of values and one's only guide of action - that reason is an absolute that permits no compromise - that a concession to the irrational invalidates one's consciousness and turns it from the task of perceiving to the task of faking reality - that the alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind - that the acceptance of a mystical invention is a wish for annihilation of existence and, properly, annihilates one's consciousness.

-Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

Sometimes described as "the science of faith," theology consists of formal reasoning about God. The emphasis is on discovering God's nature, intentions, and demands, and on understanding how these define the relationship between human beings and God. The gods of polytheism cannot sustain theology because they are far too inconsequential. Theology necessitates an image of God as a conscious, rational, supernatural being of unlimited power and scope who cares about humans and imposes moral codes and responsibilities upon them, thereby generating serious intellectual questions such as: Why does God allow us to sin? Does the Sixth Commandment prohibit war? When does an infant acquire a soul?

...The East lacks theologians because those who might otherwise take up such an intellectual pursuit reject its first premise: the existence of a conscious, all-powerful God.

...Leading Christian theologians such as Augustine and Aquinas were not what today might be called strict constructionists. Rather, they celebrated reason as the means to gain greater insight into divine intentions. As Quintus Tertullian instructed in the second century: "Reason is a thing of God, inasmuch as there is nothing which God the Maker of all has not provided, disposed, ordained by reason--nothing which He has not willed should be handled and understood by reason." In the same spirit, Clement of Alexandria warned in the third century: "Do not think that we say that these things are only to be received by faith, but also that they are to be asserted by reason. For indeed it is not safe to commit these things to bare faith without reason, since assuredly truth cannot be without reason."

Hence, Augustine merely expressed the prevailing wisdom when he held that reason was indispensable to faith: "Heaven forbid that God should hate in us that by which he made us superior to the animals! Heaven forbid that we should believe in such a way as not to accept or seek reasons, since we could not even believe if we did not possess rational souls." Augustine acknowledged that "faith must precede reason and purify the heart and make it fit to receive and endure the great light of reason." Then he added that although it is necessary "for faith to precede reason in certain matters of great moment that cannot yet be grasped, surely the very small portion of reason that persuades us of this must precede faith." Scholastic theologians placed far greater faith in reason than most philosophers are willing to do today.

-Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity led to freedom, capitalism, and western success

Each of those three selections make utter sense to me, therefore they must not be contradictory. They only appeared contradictory because Rand uses a different definition of faith than does CS Lewis. What Rand describes as faith is the act of accepting a piece of information as truth without bothering or caring enough to think it through. CS Lewis does not call such an act faith; he calls it imagination and stupidity. The virtue of faith to CS Lewis is basically the same as Rand's virtue of rationality. It means holding true to what you concluded by reason. By the virtues of faith and rationality, there is no compromising the truth as perceived by the mind. In this, as Stark makes clear in the third selection above, Clement of Alexandria and Augustine also agreed.

Where Rand disagrees with the Christians, then, isn't on how one should come upon truth. They all agree on the supremacy of reason. Where I believe they disagree is on the very first premise of Christianity that Stark refers to: "the existence of a conscious, all-powerful God." Rand sees no evidence for the existence of such a God, while CS Lewis, Clement of Alexandria, Augustine, Aquinas, and all the rest, do. The question is, what is that evidence that they see?

I think a general answer is that they see Creation, and it logically follows that there must be a Creator, a first cause. Next, if they look at this Creation in its entirety and determine that it is inherently Good(whatever that means), comparing that conclusion with the fact that we ourselves create good things on purpose, then it logically follows that this Goodness that is Creation was Intended by something, on purpose. And then, there you have it: the existence of something powerful, purposeful, conscious, full of goodwill - God.

Clearly, Rand doesn't agree with that line of reasoning. The evidence isn't convincing enough for her. She doesn't perceive God, so therefore God doesn't exist. The laws, she says, are derived from the nature of existence; there can be no existence derived from the nature of the laws. She says that life is good, that the good morality consists of those virtues that man reasons are necessary for obtaining what is valuable, which is life itself. Most essentially, then, she equates life with goodness: "your life belongs to you, and the good is to live it."

Can there be moral action that exists outside of action intended to validate one's own existence? It seems that her answer would be no, which is why her philosophy falls apart for me when it comes to love. Her definition of goodness doesn't explain why it would be good to have a child. Why bring into existence another life when the highest goodness comes from living your own? If goodness is living one's own life, then there is no reason to do anything purely for goodness' sake if it lies outside the boundaries of one's experience. But it seems to me that we do things all the time purely for goodness' sake. And so does God.

I believe God called us into being for the sake of the propagation of goodness itself. He gave us the gift of reason so that we are able to recognize goodness for ourselves, and so that, in choosing to do what is good, we can share in the joy of building the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.

To be continued...