We’ve all heard the tired line about how faith and reason are opposed to one another, right? You may have heard things like, “Religion is irrational,” have you not? And you may scarcely have wondered about people who say they have faith but do not claim to be religious; or those who are religious but, underneath it all, have no faith whatsoever. I might describe these three things,—faith, religion, and reason,—as the Holy Trinity of western spirituality, though it’s worth noting that they have Eastern expressions as well. But like the Trinity, the apparent paradox or relationship of these things (faith and religion notwithstanding) merits exploration. What is faith? What is religion? What is reason? How do they relate to one another? As partners? Contradictions? Something else? That’s what we’ll explore today.

(I should say from the outset that what follows is inevitably my own opinion.)

I’ll begin with the most obvious term “reason”—what is it? Reason is something often juxtaposed with human passion (viz., emotion). Most would say that reason is our dispassionate faculty of judgment, both deductive and inductive. It is our truth-seeking faculty: our rational self will,—to the best of its ability; and free from fallacy, bias, or prejudice,—execute a series of logical inferences to arrive at a justifiable conclusion, which we assume to be the truth. (Having said that, sometimes we are mistaken about a connexion between propositions or events, and so we err.)

Faith, on the other hand, seems a much more complicated term, although we typically assume that it has something to do with religion—e.g., “Do you have a faith?” I would, however, suggest that there is in fact a very important distinction between the two. In the exemplar question, faith sounds a lot like it’s a belief or a conviction, and perhaps this is a part of having faith, but if we were to examine the etymological roots of “faith”, we shall find that it comes from the Latin “fide”, meaning to “trust”. Trust implies a vulnerability, an insecurity, a surrendering of self. It does not require the absolute justification of reason, or it wouldn’t be faith. As Kierkegaard famously noted in Fear and Trembling, we can see this in the Aqedah story (i.e., the binding of Isaac). Abraham, the “father of faith”, binds his son, Isaac, and is about to sacrifice him as per God’s command until he is stopped by an Angel, who reveals it to be a test of faith (Genesis 22). Now, in this story, Abraham’s faith is placed in God, but you can have faith in all sorts of things, such as your friends, your significant other, or even your intuition. Thus, we can even say that someone who doesn’t believe in God can have a great deal of faith, or vice versa.

What is religion, then? There are a few different ways you can think about it, as indeed scholars have spilled much ink on the question. For one, you can look at it etymologically, which would lead us to the Latin “religare” which meant “to bind” and “religio” which meant “obligation” or “reverence”. In other words, it would lead us to the conclusion that religion is something like guidelines or rules that one is obliged to follow. Having said that, however, it is obvious that the example of faith given by Abraham is diametrically opposed to this conception of religion, unless sacrificing your son isn’t somehow against the rules. In that case, it becomes obvious that religion isn’t always the same thing as faith, just as faith is not the same thing as reason.

So, you might also think of the phenomenon of religion, which might first lead you to conclude that religion has something to do with belief in God or the supernatural, even though not everything that we would consider a religion has to do with either of those things. Buddhism and Taoism, for example, have very little to do with God or the supernatural (at least in some sects), yet we’d still likely categorise them as religions, even though they are in fact so rational that they are said to be philosophies by some looking to avoid the negative connotations of religion in today’s secular world. Confucianism, too, lives at this strange (at least from a Western point-of-view) crossroads between philosophy and religion, since even its love of traditional ritual is justified by reason. Thus, religion and reason are not so dissimilar as reason and faith, I would argue.

Interestingly, this dichotomy between philosophy and religion seems only to have cropped up in the West. In many Eastern universities that I have researched, the department of philosophy and religion is one and the same. On the other hand, in the West, our fusion of Hebraic and Greek heritage has ultimately resulted in this contradiction that has shook the vitality of Western culture to its core, producing the likes of Nietzsche who exclaimed, “God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves?” How, indeed, though perhaps it was not the confrontation of philosophy and religion that did so much damage to our collective psyche. Consider this: that maybe, just maybe, it was instead our own faithless insecurities.