Where is the power?

I will be using culture as a bridge to lead into a short monologue on Faith and Reason.

Look at how Sociologist Daniel Bell describes culture -

"Culture, for me, is the effort to provide a coherent set of answers to the existential predicaments that confront all human beings."

Is culture, then, a variable thing that is infinitely different depending on where one might venture? Certainly not, at least philosophically - the fact that all cultures must answers questions at all leads us to an absolute. All cultures must ultimately answer questions of origins, meaning, morality, and destiny. The fact that human beings have a common set of questions they must answer points to the common experience of humanity.

It is interesting that this set of answers must be coherent. Must what we believe be rationally defensible, non-contradictory set of beliefs which are applicable existentially? Or can it exist in a vacuum as our idee fixe and still have any meaning?

Hinduistic frameworks and certain cults claim that contradictions really do not affect our reality - we can sustain these contradictions with Dialetical Logic. Dialectical logic is the method of taking an antithesis and finding a synthesis, when it is logically applicable.

Example - Let us suppose that two men only had knowledge of the primary colors - Red, Yellow, and Blue. These two men have no knowledge of any other colors, and lets say they come across a wall. One man says that the wall is blue. Another man says that it is red. Can both be right? Perhaps the color is purple. In part, both men contained part of the truth, and since they did not have the terminology in their brains to adequately explain the reality, they both thought it was their limited concept of truth. Many would try to use this line of thinking to say that all religions can be true, and that mutually contradictory worldviews are sustainable (a Hindu ideal, i believe).
There is a problem though. Both of the men were partially wrong, as well. Purple is not blue, and Purple is not red. We certainly wouldnt call an axle a car, would we? Red and blue are each only part of the composite whole of purple. I guess philosophically the qualification is that i have used two monadic concepts to describe a composite concept.

Before i begin my next exposition, i define the human being as 3 parts - Body, Soul, Spirit. I can defend this biblically, but that is not here nor there. If i was to say that Mary is a soul, i am not incorrect. If i was also to say that Mary is a spirit, i am also correct. If i was to say that Mary is a body, i am also correct. If i say that Mary is only a soul, i am incorrect. What does that prove?

If i was to say God is a Spirit, God is Jesus, and God is the Yahweh of the Old Testament, under Christian thinking, this is a most rational statement. Since the composite nature of God is both singular (Deut. 6:4) and plural (use of Elohym, a plural hebrew form), a qualification is necessary to maintain monotheism. One might say, God is undefinable by our words because they merely cannot describe him adequately. They are only right if they accept a God other than the Bible, because God uses words to describe himself quite frequently. However, I have digressed.

A different example - Perhaps two men are testifying in court, and one says the particular defendant was waiting at a bus stop at 5:30 pm on thursday. Another witness, without knowledge of the other witnesses' testimony, claims that the man was with him at a local pub at 5:30 pm on thursday. Let's say for the sake of argument that these locations are 5 miles apart. It is easy to say that these are mutually contradictory - only one of them can be true. Both witnesses may believe in their testimony with their whole heart, and to their knowledge are not testifying incorrectly, but ultimately those two ideas cannot both be true. They are unreconcilable.

Ultimately this brings us to define a contradiction. A contradiction (although its common use may vary) is defined in logical terms as a necessarily false statement - i.e. "This book is written completely in English" and "This book is written completely in Amharic." It is a statement with two absolutes that do not possess a valid qualification. There is no logical statement that could vindicate these statements of their mutual contradiction. There are some contradictions, however, that can be qualified and thus are justifiable.

The example of the witnesses possesses no valid justification or explanation that would allow both statements to retain their logical weight. The example about the color of the wall does. So certain kinds of contradictions are qualifiable, while others are clearly incontrovertible. With the statements that are made by religious systems throughout the world - and when someone honestly evaluates the veracity of each of their claims, it is clear that the claims are too different to be validated. At least some of these systems of thought must be false, and at least some of their cosmologies must be false.

Faith and Reason. These are both very loaded concepts. I am going to define them as best i can.

Faith is a trust in a specific source for a specific end. This trust is one that leads to actions.
Note that this is not the same as "blind faith," which is kind of a misnomer. Why? Because blind faith requires that you know absolutely nothing about that which you are trusting, which is impossible. If you do not know anything about God, period, it is impossible to put your trust in him because the issue doesn't even come up in your mind. If you do not know anything about banking, you cannot trust a bank to keep your money safe, because you do not even have any sense of their existence, not even to think about the word "bank." Blind faith, therefore, is kind of a contradiction in terms, because we have to know at least something about the sources which we place our trust in.

Reason is a process of thought by which information is compared with other information to form a conclusion. It is not objective. It has the requirement of previous knowledge which comes with an inherent bias, because if one knows absolutely nothing, there is nothing to reason about. Reason requires more than one statement in order to be coherent.
Example :

People who are intelligent plan ahead.

This is a statement in a vacuum. There is nothing to reason about, there is no argument being presented. This is not reason, because there is no comparison, analogically or otherwise.

Intelligent people plan ahead.
Mary is an intelligent woman.

The process of reason takes two individual pieces of information and compares them. It is by nature something that requires a person to take information or concepts or truths they already possess and to use those to acquire new or undiscovered truths. Any attempt to use one piece of information to show anything else logically betrays a veiled truth that is being used to say something.

Example :

God exists.
Therefore, I should believe God exists.

Immediately the individual would be giving away the underlying assumption that :
"If something exists, i should believe it exists."

All this shows us that reason by definition requires previous knowledge. It is not objective - that is, it is subject to previously accepted truths.

One might say that reason holds the power to check all currently held beliefs and can show objectively whether or not they are true. This gives away an inherent bias.

Let's say that we have a room full of clocks. All have different times. The only way to figure out which one is right is by appealling to an accurate standard. Reason alone could not tell us which time was correct, if any of them. One might reason that they could consult the official time indicator on the internet, and this would be valid, but that comes from the rational belief that this standard is correct, and one has left reason alone and now consulted a standard in addition to that reason.

So reason itself is not the arbiter of truth - reason requires an objective standard in order to understand life. So we could actually create a new definition for reason that is refined by this parable.

Reason is the process by which new questions are answered based on a previously proven or accepted standard.

Note that this definition says nothing about the standard itself, because if the standard is wrong, regardless how well one has reasoned, they are still wrong.

Faith, therefore, is trust based on some measure of previous knowledge concerning some subject. For example, i could say the following:

I have faith that the next time i flip the light switch, that light switch will turn the light on, because the last time i flipped the switch, the light came on.

Likewise, one might posit the following:

I have faith that reason produces good in society, because reason has produced technology, saved lives, and increases our knowledge.

What this brings us two is how these concepts are related, and how they might be different. Let us ask the following: Why is reason good? Let's try it this way:

Reason is good because it allows us to come to conclusions we believe to be correct concerning the world around us.

If the standard used in the course of reason is wrong, it may or may not bring us to correct conclusions. Therefore, reason relies on faith in that reason requires a standard. Faith provides an objective and absolute standard, because if we only accepted that which we can 100% prove, we would accept nothing and therefore could not reason about anything.

Faith itself becomes ultimately superstitious without reason as a method of taking pieces of information and comparing them with each other, because it may fail to differentiate the source of what has occurred.
Example :
I have faith that whenever i walk on my tiptoes for the first 2 minutes i am up every morning that i will have a good day. I may indeed have a good day, but it may not necessarily be because i walked on my tiptoes for 2 minutes in the morning.

What i believe is starting to substantiate is that faith and reason are conclusively linked. Reason requires faith that reason itself is effective, whereas faith requires reason to give itself substance and sustainability as a way of approaching reality.

I have done this at length because i see few scholars approach this subject beyond typical antithetical treatises, often loaded with anti-theistic polemic based on the supremacy of reason. It is interesting that what humans divide is often meant to be united, and what humans unite is often meant to be divided.