Reassessing Faith and Reason

The view that religious faith is incompatible with human reason did not seem prevalent enough, in the mid-2000s, to land several books espousing it on bestseller lists. Since that time, the number of religious “nones” in America has grown significantly, and the most common reason given for becoming a “none” is the incompatibility of faith and reason. For scholars who disagree with this view, its newfound mainstream status calls for a unique response: refrain from defense and instead reassess the articulation of the relationship between faith and reason in one’s own tradition.

This book reassesses the Roman Catholic articulation, which is found in the First Vatican Council’s Dei Filius. The debate about faith and reason that occasioned Dei Filius is the jumping-off point of the reassessment. The book examines Gerald McCool’s surprising claim that theologians in the opposed camps of fideism and rationalism appropriated the same epistemology, and that the main author of Dei Filius challenged this epistemology before the council. A timeline and review of Dei Filius itself follows. Lastly, the book turns to Bernard Lonergan, who also challenges the epistemology in question, advances an interpretation of Dei Filius, and reflects on reason’s role in the lead-up to faith.