Faith and reason are often held to be diametrically opposed to each other. The argument advanced for this opinion is that reason is applicable to the material world and, as God belongs to the world of spirit (or energy or pure consciousness according to the particular belief or world view), reason would not and should not be applicable to Him and to anything that concerns Him.
Pantheism categorises knowledge itself into two levels - the 'Para' or higher form of knowledge which is completely intuitive and pertains to Brahman and which does not follow the norms of logic and, the 'Apara' or lower form which applies to the material world to which logic is applicable. On the other hand, there are rationalists who hold that all of reality can be comprehended by science and reason and faith is superfluous as a faculty in the pursuit of knowledge. My endeavour, in this article, is to establish a realistic relationship between these two faculties.
In the previous article, we had concluded that the existence of God can be established with a high degree of probability. It is pertinent in this context to recognise the fact that a scientific law is also at best, a high probability conclusion. Why is it so? It is primarily because any scientific law makes preliminary assumptions which have no 'scientific' proof. I use the term 'proof' both in the sense of objective sensory proof (as in the case of a precipitate in a chemical experiment) as well that of a deductive logical conclusion. (I trust you remember the nature of the conclusions arrived at by deductive and inductive arguments; the former yields a certain conclusion and the latter a probable conclusion). For example, a scientist makes the assumption that we live in a rational universe as the conclusion of an inductive argument on the basis of observations made up to this point. One isolated observation which goes against a rational universe would put all our scientific laws in serious jeopardy. Similarly, the law of uniformity of cause and effect - the same cause would produce the same effect under the same conditions - is also a 'non-scientific' assumption (again on the basis of inductive logic) which lies behind all scientific laws. Any honest scientist would agree with this point of philosophy related to scientific discoveries. Thus scientific laws require a step of faith which bridges the gape between high probability (reached by scientific experiments and inductive conclusions) and certainty.

Now I would like you to imagine in your mind the extreme positions of faith and reason in a horizontal scale. On the left extreme, you have a point of pure faith, on the right extreme a point of pure reason. By pure faith, I mean a belief which has no rational or evidential basis. (The moment you allow for such bases, it would no longer be 'pure' faith). Pure faith is gullible and it results in credulity. It simply believes what is placed before it. I would like to give an example. A few years ago there was an unfortunate air crash of the Indian Airlines flight from Bombay to Ahmedabad. When it was approaching the Ahmedabad airport, the pilot saw some lights on the ground and mistook them for the lights on the runway. (This could be surmised on the basis of the evidence gathered from the cockpit voice recorder). Later it was established that the lights the pilot saw were those on a nearby power plant. Now the pilot sincerely believed those lights to be lights on the runway. But this unfounded belief resulted in this terrible disaster. We notice therefore that the sincere faith of the pilot was not able to avoid this awful consequence. Our common sense would tell us that this 'belief' had no factual basis. Very often people say, 'It does not matter what you believe as long as you sincerely believe it'. Now that is a position which really cannot be held with any degree of intellectual integrity. A person who sincerely believes what is not true is sincerely wrong! Reason and evidence provide the basis for faith to be reasonable.
Reason is also important (and useful) in eliminating superstition. You might have come across people who believe that if a cat crosses your path, you would meet with a mishap. You will notice that this belief has no basis at all in reason and that is what we call a superstition. If I sincerely believed such a kind of an entity without applying my mind to it to see whether there is any basis for this belief, I would be guilty of credulity. This is why pure faith (fideism) fails as an adequate test for truth. Unfortunately, there are many Christians who take a fideistic position (that faith alone is the criterion for truth) and therefore conclude that reason can have no place in the life of the Christians, at least where his 'spiritual' life is concerned.

At the other extreme, we have people who worship reason. It should be readily admitted that pure reason does provide certitude in conceptual matters, e.g., 2 + 2 = 4. But rationalism has other problems. Its first problem is that it has no empirical relatability. (Pure reason will tell me that 2 + 2 = 4 with absolute certainty, but will be helpless in commenting on the truth claim of the equation 2 horned rabbits + 2 horned rabbits = 4 horned rabbits. The moment reason attempts to analyse this equation, it goes beyond its own limits into the realm of empirical fact - whether horned rabbits exist or not - an area which is outside the purview of pure reason. Secondly, rationalists tell us, 'We can believe only what you can scientifically prove', or in other words, only what can be scientifically proved is true. But that very statement is in need of proof. They are guilty of committing the fallacy of petitio principii, more commonly known as 'begging the question'. Science, as already illustrated, depends upon certain assumptions in order to be able to propound any law. These assumptions are not (and cannot be) arrived at on the basis of reason alone. Without these assumptions - the reasonableness of the universe, the uniformity of cause and effect etc. - there can be no scientific enterprise. We also notice that these assumptions are in need of proof themselves which reason is not in a position to supply. This is why pure reason (rationalism) fails as an adequate test for truth. So we see that at either end of the scale, whether we hold to a position of pure faith or that of pure reason, we stand in need of the other faculty. Faith stands in need of reason in order to eliminate superstition. Reason stands in need of faith in order to achieve certainty.
Now I want to suggest five intermediate stages between these two extremes on our imaginary scale. The first stage after pure faith ('credulity') is what you may call 'impossibility'. Myths belong to the category of impossibilities. In all our various vultures we have many mythologies. Some have been written by mixing fact with fiction and history with non-history. Very often, a mythology is a laudable effort to enshrine a good moral principle in a quasi-historical setting for posterity to remember and to practice. But they are actually impossible and, because of this mixture of fact and fiction, we do not take them into the category of possibilities.

Next in our scale is what you may call 'possibility'. A possibility is actually an idea. As an example, let us consider the suggestion of some that Jesus Christ did not actually die on the cross but had only swooned. Now that is surely a possibility. But we have to see whether this possibility is probable. The usefulness of the probability criterion is best appreciated in the context of a court of law. It is the court which decides whether there is preponderance of probability for a certain event to have taken place by consideration of the available evidence. If we take this particular view of the resurrection of Jesus and analyse it to see whether it can stand scrutiny in a court of law, you will discover that it would be hard put to establish itself as a probability. The evidences would be as follows (it must be remembered that evidence plays a vital role in deciding the probability or otherwise of an event): When Jesus died on the cross, He was wrapped in linen strips from top to toe according to Jewish practice and then He was placed in a tomb. Spices weighing about 35 kilograms were placed on His body. A two-tonne stone was rolled across the mouth of the grave. He had a platoon of 16 well-armed Roman soldiers guarding the grave. Now if Jesus had not died, He had
1. to regain consciousness although He was drained of blood.
2. to shake loose the heavy weight of spices
3. to unwind the linen strips
4. to push the two tonne stone away from the tomb and then
5. fight 16 armed soldiers before He came and appeared to His disciples.
If you put all those evidences together, you come to this conclusion that what could be a possibility is actually an improbability. That is why it is difficult to hold to the swoon theory of Jesus's death and resurrection. Next in our scale we come to 'low probability'. Now low probability is called in scientific circles as a hypothesis. When a scientist observes certain phenomena in nature, he tries to relate them to probable causes. At the preliminary stages of scientific investigation, this relationship of effects to causes is called a hypothesis. But this hypothesis is to be tested further by various rigorous observations. When this test is cleared we reach a stage of 'moderate probability'. You may now say that you are dealing with a scientific theory. From here we proceed further towards establishing scientific laws by conducting more experiments and comparing the results with the predictions of the theory. A scientific law, in our scale, can be said to belong to the level of 'high probability'.

When we dealt with the question of the existence of God in the previous article, the arguments put forth belonged to the same status as that of a scientific law. We have already seen how scientific laws themselves are based on certain assumptions which are accepted 'by faith' in the scientific community. In the same way, Christians accept 'by faith' the existence of God, on the basis of evidences which strongly point in that direction. It is this step of faith which provides certainty to the scientist (as to the correctness of his law) and to the Christian (as to the existence of God).
We therefore recognise that reason and faith can and should be part of one continuum, the only difference being that faith takes you beyond the realm of reason. I should clarify the use of 'beyond'. When, as Christians, we are called upon to believe that the God of love Whom we worship is Triune, we exercise faith which is not unreasonable. Let me explain. God, as the Absolute, has to be a Unity. Logic (reason) requires it. you cannot have a multiplicity of Absolutes. At the same time, we also recognise that God, in order to have love as His attribute, has to be a plurality. Love requires a subject who loves, an object who is loved and a medium through whom that love is communicated. Christian theology teaches us that God the Father is the Subject Who loves, God the Son, the Object Who is loved (John 17:24) and God the Holy Spirit is the Medium through Whom love is commended (Romans 5:5).

We are thus driven by logic to the inescapable conclusion that God, in some mysterious way, must incorporate both unity and plurality. To avoid a logical contradiction He has to be a unity in one sense and a plurality in a different sense. (Christians would be guilty of violating the basic law of non-contradiction if they insist that God is both a unity and plurality in the same sense). Biblical revelation states that god is a unity in His Essence and has a plurality in Personality. How these two requirements combine is a mystery which we take by faith but that they should combine is a logical necessity and not an absurdity. A mystery is best defined as a logical necessity which cannot be unravelled by reason alone. It is not so with superstition. Superstition is believing against the requirement of reason. Faith is believing along the line of reason and beyond it, but never against it. We can therefore legitimately conclude that reason and faith belong in the same continuum.

Let me conclude by considering Scripture. When God is described as the Faithful one in the Old Testament, it is in the context of an inherent to appeal to reason and evidence. God does not contradict Himself (and is therefore the Fount of all logic and reason) and He has manifested Himself in history (and has thus provided objective verifiable proof). In the New Testament we have this statement: "Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see". Please note that the writer to the Hebrews (11:1) is expressing the same thoughts in these inspired words. By inductive reasoning from available evidence, we can see the pointer towards God ("what we do not see") and eternity ("what we hope for"). Faith is that step which bridges the gap between the high probability of God's existence (as reasonably deduced from the objective evidence of nature) and the inward certitude of the believer. But this is not just to satisfy our intellectual curiosity. Faith has a moral dimension as well. The writer to the Hebrews goes on to say that without faith it is impossible to please God because any one who comes to Him must believe that He is and He rewards those who earnestly seek Him (11:6). And again in Romans 1:19,20, Paul makes this powerful statement about the existence of God - "What may be known about God is plain to them for since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities, His eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made so that men are without excuse". On careful consideration of the evidence provided by nature, our reason is persuaded that the existence of God is highly probable. We are now called upon to make a moral submission by exercising faith in God which incidentally would result in an inward certitude. If we refuse to exercise that faith after applying reason to all the evidence that is available to us, we shall be without excuse before God on the day of judgement. It is the God of reason (Isaiah 1:18) Who calls us to make the submission of our wills to Him by taking the right step of faith.

"God has put enough into the world to make faith in Him a most reasonable thing, and He has left enough out to make it impossible to live by sheer reason or observation alone" - Ravi Zacharias.
"There is a difficulty about disagreeing with God. He is the source from which all your reasoning power comes: you could not be right and He wrong any more than a stream can rise higher than its own source. When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on" - C.S. Lewis.
"There are many real things outside the scope of verification by the scientific method. The scientific method is useful only with measurable things. No one has ever seen three feet of love or two pounds of justice, but one would be foolish indeed to deny their reality. To insist that God be proved by the scientific method is like insisting that a telephone be used to measure radioactivity" - Paul Little.