“Faith and Reason”

Cum Laude Address, March 4, 2008

1. Thank you Mrs. Allwood, and congratulations to all the new members of the Cum Laude society!

What I’d like to talk to you about today is not an original thought, but one that I think very often gets lost in the midst of our fast paced and often pressure filled academic lives. I recently read a story about a teacher who once challenged his class to define the word “faith.” One student responded, “Faith is when you believe something which you know ain’t true!” Sounds like a character in a Mark Twain novel, and, in fact, it has been attributed to this great writer. Whether or not the story is true, the same idea could easily be expressed by any student in any modern American classroom.

In the few minutes I have today, let me propose an idea that is not only worthy of consideration, but one that has been promoted by some of the greatest minds of all time. Many of these great thinkers argued that Faith and Reason not only complement one another, but, for much of intellectual history, were considered inseparable.

2. Let me start by running a few names by you. See if any of them are familiar:

Galileo Galilei Sir Isaac Newton Augustine of Hippo

Blasé Pascal Thomas Aquinas John Locke

G. K. Chesterton C. S. Lewis J. R. R. Tolkien

Mark Twain Francis Collins Mary Ann Glendon

Who are, or were these men and women? What do they all have in common? They are, or were, brilliant and original thinkers. They are, or were, leaders in their academic fields - scientists, philosophers, theologians and writers. If you type their names into Google, any of them will produce many pages of links. Hopefully, you won’t complete your education, at Wick or in college, without meeting these great minds and wrestling with some of their ideas. When you do meet them, if you haven’t already, you might find them hard to understand at first, but you won’t be able to deny the contributions they’ve made to our understanding of the world and our place in it. What you’ll also discover is that they ALL found their tireless pursuit of knowledge to be quite compatible, even complementary, with their religious belief.

3. This list is far from complete, and I hope you’ll email me with a few glaring omissions that you can’t believe I didn’t include, but they, and many others reveal that there has been for most of the history of western thought a profound link between Faith and Reason. Let’s take a look at a few of these characters up close and personal.

a. Galileo Galilei & Sir Isaac Newton – You’ve probably all heard the story of the great Italian physicist who almost lost his life at the hands of the Roman Catholic Church for his reluctance to recant his claim that the earth revolves around the sun. If you take a closer look, you’ll learn that much of this story is untrue, even though it has certainly been enhanced in the eyes of Monty Python lovers, who have been given colorful, if inaccurate, images of the “Spanish Inquisition” who interrogated Galileo in the courtroom. He may have felt under pressure before the judges, but he didn’t spend a single day in jail. In fact, during his trial, Galileo was given a luxurious room in the cardinal’s mansion, where he enjoyed all the comforts of a palace guest and was allowed to write whatever he pleased. The whole trial could have been avoided if this Italian scientist hadn’t been so arrogant. In fact, even after Galileo had finally recanted his claim in front of the judges that the earth revolves around the sun, he apparently whispered under his breath, “but it still moves just the same.”

The point of this story, and in fact the point of most of Galileo’s work before and after this famous encounter, was that he never thought scientific discovery was incompatible with his religious faith. His own words say it best. “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”

So what about Newton? I’m not a mathematician or a scientist, so forgive me if I leave out important details, but there were few areas in which this man did not make his mark. His treatise Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy published in 1687, and said to be the greatest single work in the history of science, described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion. In mechanics, Newton laid out the principles of conservation of momentum and angular momentum. In optics, he invented the reflecting telescope and developed a theory of color based on the observation that a prism decomposes white light into a visible spectrum. What many don’t know about this great scientist is that he was also often described as a “religious fanatic” who wanted nothing more than that his science would convince people of the existence of God. One of his most famous remarks sums up Newton’s position on the relationship between “Faith & Reason.” - “The most beautiful system (the universe) could only proceed from the dominion of an intelligent and powerful being.”

b. J. R. R. Tolkein & C. S. Lewis – You’ve all read the Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Chronicles of Narnia, hopefully before you saw the movies, so I’m sure these names are familiar to you. Two of the greatest writers of the 20^th century, Tolkien and Lewis were also Oxford dons and close friends. During my summers in Oxford, one of my favorite spots to meet with friends is the famous “Eagle and Child” pub, not just because they serve the widest variety of British ales and bitters, but because it was the place where these two great thinkers and writers spent many hours together discussing literature and God. Their favorite table is still there, with framed pictures of them and pieces of their writing lining the walls. They would meet at the Eagle and Child and talk for hours about everything, not always agreeing, but always leaving as friends and brothers. One famous disagreement began when Tolkien suggested the Christian messages in Lewis’ “Chronicles of Narnia” were far too strong. Tolkien argued that religious themes presented in literature should be much more subtle so that they would enhance rather than detract from the stories. The irony of this friendly disagreement is that Tolkien was the one most responsible for convincing Lewis that faith in God was quite reasonable, and has been credited, by Lewis himself, as a major influence in his conversion. In his book Mere Christianity, Lewis later expresses a thought that perhaps he came to at the end of a pint in the Eagle and Child with his friend and Mentor. "If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."

c. And lastly, Mary Ann Glendon & Francis Collins – So what do these two have in common? One name I’d be surprised if you’ve heard of, even though she’s probably one of the brightest law professors in the business today. Mary Ann Glendon, the recently appointed U. S. Ambassador to the Vatican, whose resume also includes being appointed by Pope John Paul II to the Pontifical Academy of Social Science in 1994, teaches and writes about Bioethics at Harvard Law School. As a member of President Bush's Council on Bioethics, Glendon has also advised the president on moral and bioethical issues. Although she has come under fire for her criticisms of radical feminism and for defending the Church's position on when life begins, even her detractors have to admit that she is one of the sharpest minds in the academic world today. If she is still on the faculty when some of you make it to Harvard Law School, you’d be foolish not to enroll in one of her classes. So what does Glendon have to say about “Faith and Reason?” In a speech that she gave at the U.N. last May, Glendon spoke about faith and politics. She challenged religious and cultural leaders to motivate, "their followers to meet others on the plane of reason and mutual respect, while remaining true to themselves and their own beliefs."

Francis Collins, a name probably recognized only by my philosophy students, has also been in the news quite a bit lately on the subject of Bioethics. Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute since 1993, he headed a multinational 2,400-scientist team that helped map the 3 billion biochemical letters of our genetic blueprint, a milestone that then President Bill Clinton honored in a 2000 White House ceremony, where he compared the genome chart to Meriwether Lewis' map of his fateful exploration of our continent. Collins continues to lead his institute in studying the genome and mining it for medical breakthroughs. Collins is also a devout Christian, who, like Newton before him, has found his scientific discoveries to not only complement his faith, but to enhance it. In a recent TIME magazine article where Dr. Collins went head to head with Oxford professor Charles Dawkins, the two were discussing, among other things, evolution. Collins responded to Dawkins’ challenge that faith and Darwin’s theory of evolution were incompatible by saying, “Being outside of nature, God is also outside of space and time. Hence, at the moment of the creation of the universe, God could also have activated evolution, with full knowledge of how it would turn out, perhaps even including our having this conversation. The idea that he could both foresee the future and also give us spirit and free will to carry out our own desires becomes entirely acceptable.”

4. This brief look at a few great minds is obviously incomplete. There have been scores of Hindu, Muslim, Jewish and Eastern scholars who have promoted equally convincing arguments that “Faith and Reason” are not only compatible, but complimentary. In fairness, I’m sure you can all name many of the world’s most brilliant thinkers who would argue with equal passion the other side of this debate. The truth we can’t ignore is that for all of modern history, there has been a lively, passionate and reasoned discussion about whether there is a God, which has included some of the most reasonable and clear thinking minds of all time. If you haven’t been brought up with some sort of faith, as you continue your intellectual journey at Brunswick and beyond, prepare to be challenged by some fairly convincing arguments that might make faith seem more reasonable. If you have been brought up in a family that has taught you a thing or two about religion, you owe it to yourself to honestly question what you believe, and then turn to the great thinkers, who came up with some pretty good reasons to conclude that there must be more to our lives than what our senses alone reveal. Or, as John Locke, another great mind whose thoughts inspired our own Declaration of Independence, once said, 'God, when he makes the prophet, does not unmake the man. . . God leaves all Man’s faculties in their natural state, to enable him to judge of his aspirations, whether they be of divine origin or not. When he illuminates the mind with supernatural light, he does not extinguish that which is natural. . . . Reason must be our last judge and guide in everything.'

Thank You!