Comprehensively Critical Rationalism and Commitment

Abstract

The theologian’s claim to cognitive significance for his or her religious beliefs is today under sustained attack from philosophical quarters as an outrage against not only reason, but morality as well. Reason, it is claimed, can provide us with an adequate account of knowledge and its growth — an account which needs no recourse to concepts such as ‘faith’, ‘belief’, or ‘commitment’. Religious beliefs, however, as everyone knows and the theologian is quite ready to admit, are often espoused in direct contravention of such ‘rules of reason’— they follow rather from religious experience; from ‘the immediate utterances of faith’. Faith and reason therefore are assumed to be incompatible. Consequently the theologian is forced either to deny cognitive significance to faith (belief statements) or give up the claim to intellectual integrity. To affirm both is therefore to deny the possibility of a ‘morality of knowledge’— a system of rational principles able to account adequately for our knowledge. And such a denial, it is warned, opens ‘the gateways to intellectual and moral irresponsibility’.¹