I've already made a posy on why Without Theology there is no reason HERE
Paul Tyson HERE explains why reason must have faith :
"If one does not start from this position of faith in reason, one cannot reason meaningfully at all. Without faith in reason, all perception and all language must seem to be meaningless self-generated chimeras.
From here, however, the belief that language, perception and reason are chimeras cannot be held to as being true.
For if one does not assume a knowable Meaning metaphysically prior to the flux and contingency of temporal natural existence in which human thought and language is situated, there is no true and there is no false.
Reason as sophistic manipulation cannot be true.....
There is now no viable belief possible in any equation of a true knowledge of the real with our secular epistemological modern heritage.
At the logical end point of that philosophical tradition, truth can no longer be believably grounded in anything more substantive than the inherent uncertainties of appearance, and meaning can no longer be grounded in anything more significant than the solipsistic, semantic constructions of speculative imagination.
Such a stance makes reason itself unbelievable; but who can reasonably believe that reason is unbelievable? Surely this is a perverse inversion of Anselm; dogmatically dis-believing in order to not understand?
Without the knowledge of transcendence, philosophy falls into meaninglessness and language, reason and science have only an arbitrary and pragmatic coherence that can reveal no true knowledge of the real.....
Attempts to construct non-metaphysical philosophy, independent of theological premises, are unable to make coherent negative statements about transcendent truth, and are unable to make coherent positive statements about non-transcendent "truth" either. As such they become Sophistic systems of constructed meanings that do not even aspire to truth, and they collapse into the nihilism and irrationality of their inherent metaphysical vacuity. Philosophy that is not grounded in theology is not even philosophy; it is little other than meaningless noise,
…non-religiously premised, non- metaphysical philosophy must abandon the notion of truth that our Western religious and metaphysical traditions have given to us. Where truth is openly abandoned, or where "truth" no longer means the state of belief where our minds are aligned with or inhere in the Mind who gives reality its intrinsic, qualitative and teleological meaning, then there is no intrinsic, qualitative or teleological reality beyond what we fictitiously construct. When this happens, nothing can ground our knowledge of the contingent, quantitative and purposeless "reality" we are left with in any fixed meaning. When all becomes constructivist and non-intrinsic, even the belief that all is constructed and non-intrinsic cannot be taken as anything other than an assertion of faith in meaninglessness. And faith in meaninglessness is a self contradiction of the first order if this faith is meant to be taken as a meaningful assertion.
Transcendent truth is knowable - though such knowledge is always a very personal gamble - yet, as it is the only grounds of what we can truly know, transcendent truth is not demonstrable via perception or any other 'natural' means.
If one does not start from this position of faith in reason, one cannot reason meaningfully at all. Without faith in reason, all perception and all language must seem to be meaningless self generated chimeras. From here, however, the belief that language, perception and reason are chimeras cannot be held to as being true. For if one does not assume a knowable Meaning above the flux and contingency of temporal natural existence in which human thought and language is situated, there is no true and no false, there is only sophistic manipulation. "Reason" is then intrinsically purposeless instrumentality, solipsistic illusion and a mere front for meaningless power contests, if there is no meaning in which reality itself is grounded.
Consider these three beliefs:
1. If reason and meaning are true, one must have faith in them to reason meaningfully at all. (Hence, no philosopher is serious who uses reason and meaning to argue against reason, meaning and truth.)
2. For reason and meaning to be true, they must transcend the flux and contingency that is characteristic of what is apparent to a merely natural perspective (ie, naturalism is a perspective that cannot sustain faith in reason).
3. For us to know reason and meaning the essence of our mind must be embedded in transcendent reason in a manner that transcends the merely natural.
These three beliefs underlie Plato's theological and ontological epistemology. This is an approach to knowing transcendent truth that, though not demonstrable, is the only way to have reason at all. As such it does not finally disintegrate into non-meaning.
Tyson continues,
"If a commitment to reason as a pathway to true knowing is an act of faith in the divine gifting of truth to the human knower then all knowledge that participates to some extent in truth is theologically premised.
Truth seeking that is not explicitly embedded in an outlook of religious faith suffers from trying to justify its basic epistemological assumptions as if unmediated perception and logic gave us some sort of sure and immediate access to Reality.
On the other hand, explicitly theologically premised approaches to knowledge escape the counter-Enlightenment critiques of modern epistemological foundationalism, for unlike naturalistic modernism, the warrants of truth are not produced by the perceptive, linguistic and rational powers of the human knower, rather the powers of the human knower participate in a limited manner in transcendence....
Whenever the divine becomes unknowable, truth itself loses any traction on the real, unless of course the real is understood in entirely transitory, meaningless and contingent terms. But then reason itself implodes, for if arbitrary contingency is indeed the real then the very idea of “the real” (as distinct from the arbitrarily apparent) becomes meaningless.
For any attempt to ground justified true belief in empiricism/rationalism alone (i.e., secular reason) is to set reason against itself.
Rational and empirical evidentialism is a type of reason premised on *faith* in human intellectual and epistemological powers naturalistically understood, whereas rationality and observation seen as natural revelation is a type of reason premised on faith in God’s self-revelation through every truth.”
As David Bentley Hart says,
"What, after all, warrants our belief in the power of rational consciousness to give us a true knowledge of reality?
It is tempting sometimes to read the whole history of modern continental philosophy as a cautionary fable regarding this divorce of reason from faith.
....[that] the world is not really known, it does not truly disclose itself as thought, because it has no ontological disposition to do so.
The philosopher does not start from a faith in being’s intelligible disclosure of itself—in fact, he starts by explicitly abjuring such faith—but rather vests his trust in the power of the self to posit reality from its own unshakeable position.
Every attempt of the rational mind to find the truth of things involves an implicit metaphysical presupposition: that there is some transcendent coincidence of world and soul, some original fullness of reality where they are always already one, which allows for their openness one to the other here below.
Only this permits us to believe that being is already manifestation, that it is by nature intelligible and comes to fruition as it discloses itself in soul: There is a reciprocal transparency of mind and world, an essential belonging of each to the other, because in their transcendent source they are one.
Without that original trust, that spiritual commitment, reason is not reason at all, but the purest irrationality, a game of the will. When faith and reason are truly separated from one another, neither can stand upon its own.
...in its very essence, all reasoning involves a venture of trust in an original orientation of truth to the mind and of the mind to truth, and in the ultimate unity of the two; and that, therefore, any attempt to argue from rational premises to rational conclusions that resolutely refuses to invoke what is and has always been revealed—in the mind’s most primordial encounter with reality—is not really a process of reasoning at all, but a journey toward absurdity.
To put the matter in a vaguely Platonic fashion, we must enjoy a vision of the truth before we can reason our way to it: That is, we are always striving to remember something we in some sense already know, but do not yet understand.
Nihilism is a way of seeing the world that acknowledges no truth other than what the human intellect can impose on things, according to an excruciatingly limited calculus of utility, or of the barest mechanical laws of cause and effect. It is a “rationality” of the narrowest kind, so obsessed with what things are and how they might be used that it is no longer seized by wonder when it stands in the light of the dazzling truth that things are. It is a rationality that no longer knows how to hesitate before this greater mystery, or even to see that it is there, and thus is a rationality that cannot truly think."
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