Position Paper on Faith and Institutional Purpose

(Area: Philosophy)

by Philip Blosser

Unlike the special sciences and disciplines, philosophy—although it has a specialized vocabulary—is a general discipline. One of its proper tasks is the analysis of the underlying presuppositions of the special sciences. These are usually taken as axiomatic and left unexamined by the special sciences themselves, but become the primary object of focus in such philosophical analysis. Such presuppositions or first principles, since they are not inferences from other, more basic assumptions, are taken as properly basic and not as requiring further proof or justification in themselves. As such, they have a quality formally analogous to tenets of faith.

It is on this level that philosophers can do most to spell out the various possible connections between pre-theoretical presuppositions of various theories (whether they be biological, sociological, or philosophical) and the pre-theoretical commitments of the Christian Faith.

For example, any theory describing human beings in strictly deterministic terms, as having no capacity for making responsible choices between alternative options, would make ethical and moral considerations irrelevant, and thus deny one of the fundamental tenets of Faith—namely that we are responsible moral agents, accountable to our Creator and to one another for decisions we make.

Likewise, any theory that described reality in terms that reduced it to its material dimensions would have the consequence of rendering inconceivable a great variety of conceptions essential to the Christian view of human beings and the world we inhabit, such as the assumption that we have minds or souls, that we are free and make decisions, that injustice is wrong, that love and forgiveness are real possibilities, that God exists, and so forth.

Philosophy, thus, has a foundational role among the disciplines, in my view, and can be instrumental in helping students think through their conception of the whole of reality and how the different aspects of it, and different disciplines that study these aspects, are interrelated. Further, philosophy can help to clarify the difference that various pre-theoretical commitments (such as Christian faith) can make in the way we approach the questions posed within different disciplines.