Faith and reason Quotes

“...faith must recognize the autonomy of reason and its ability to produce a rational, secular ethics. By the same criterion, reason must accept that it is legitimate for the heart, consciousness and faith to believe in an order and ends thar exist prior to its observation, discoveries and hypotheses. Once the distinction between the realms of faith and reason, and religion and science, has been accepted, it is therefore futile to debate, and still less to dispute, the hierarchy of first truths or the nature of the authority granted to their methods and their references.”

“I don't understand how can people hold faith and reasoning in the same head. To my understanding, faith, like love, is blind.”

“By failing to live by the letter of the texts, while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally.”

“Faith and Reason are like two wings of the human spirit by which is soars to the truth.”

“The battle for the lead between faith and reason can be settled by accepting the guiding hand of an experienced navigator.”

“In asking for a relic of Descartes, the chevalier de Terlon was standing at the crossroads of the ancient and modern. He was applying to a modern thinker - the inventor of analytic geometry, no less - a primitive tradition that extends back not only to the institutionalization of Christianity in the fourth century, when Christians first broke into the tombs of saints to gather relics, but farther still, beyond the horizon of recorded history. The request is all the stranger for the fact that the man whose remains were treated in this quasisaintlike way would go down in history as the progenitor of materialism, rationalism, and a whole tradition that looked on such veneration as nonsense.”

“Faith and reason are indeed complementary faculties that we use to think about the truth. When any winged creature (or mechanism) tries to fly on just one wing, it falls to the ground. In a similar way, when we human beings try to wing it with just one faculty, we crash.”

“It must not be forgotten that reason too needs to be sustained in all its searching by trusting dialogue and sincere friendship. A climate of suspicion and distrust, which can beset speculative research, ignores the teaching of the ancient philosophers who proposed friendship as one of the most appropriate contexts for sound philosophical enquiry.”

“Life is a battle between faith and reason in which each feeds upon the other, drawing sustenance from it and destroying it.”