Today, Jamie talks about the relationship between faith and reason, touching on evidentialist and fideistic views, and eventually settling on the view he himself takes. Here's the book referenced in today's episode: https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Introduction-James-Jr-Dew/dp/0801097991/
Jamie Dew: Hey everybody, I'm Jamie Dew.
Joe Fontenot: And this is Joe Fontenot.
Jamie Dew: Welcome back again, to the Towel and the Basin podcast.
Joe Fontenot: That's right. What's that?
Jamie Dew: Podcast, I forgot to say podcast.
Joe Fontenot: Oh, gosh.
Jamie Dew: Yeah.
Joe Fontenot: I hope they know.
Jamie Dew: Yeah, epic fail.
Joe Fontenot: Okay. Really working through something here and my son, he's eight.
Jamie Dew: Okay.
Joe Fontenot: Well, actually he's going to be eight in a couple of weeks and he's doing something new for the first time. I just wanted to get your impression, get your advice. You're further along the line of parenthood than I am, and so what's your advice on Little League?
Jamie Dew: Yeah. You should play it, or he should play it.
Joe Fontenot: I should play it.
Jamie Dew: Yeah.
Joe Fontenot: I tried. They did not let me.
Jamie Dew: Well, maybe it will work out better for your son, then.
Joe Fontenot: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jamie Dew: He should definitely play. He wants to play Little League?
Joe Fontenot: He wants to play... Okay. The two things he wants to do is Little League and this Ninja Warrior thing that they offer classes on.
Jamie Dew: Uh-huh (affirmative). Naturally. Good, good.
Joe Fontenot: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jamie Dew: Yep. At least it's not Parkour though, right? Where he's going to try to jump off of the building or...
Joe Fontenot: He does talk about Parkour a lot.
Jamie Dew: No, hold off on that one. But baseball, a definite go. You should let him play baseball. Has he ever done this?
Joe Fontenot: No, no, no. This is a first for him. He's a little shy.
Jamie Dew: Okay.
Joe Fontenot: I shouldn't say all this, because he's going to listen to it one day maybe and I'm going to be talking about him.
Jamie Dew: Okay. Right.
Joe Fontenot: But he's a little shy kid.
Jamie Dew: How is he with throwing and hitting and stuff like that?
Joe Fontenot: He's somewhat athletic and he likes it.
Jamie Dew: Okay.
Joe Fontenot: I think we can catch on pretty good.
Jamie Dew: Okay.
Joe Fontenot: I think he can be good.
Jamie Dew: All right, here's the million dollar advice to you.
Joe Fontenot: Okay. Good.
Jamie Dew: Couple things. Number one, get him a real glove. Don't get him... A lot of parents, they spend money on the cheap. It's like learning to play guitar. Parents always buy their kid the cheapest, most impossible guitar in the world to play on and they wonder that they never really get into it. Buy him a good guitar, but buy him a real baseball glove made out of real leather. Don't get this pleather junk that you know is rigid, and work the glove. Make sure it's comfortable where he can use it. That's one big pro tip.
Second thing is man, at home with you every day, give him reps, throwing the ball, catching the ball, fielding the ball, and swinging a bat.
A baseball coach, especially in Little League. When you got such a mixture of kids, you got kids coming in that are really good. You got some coming in that have never played before. You got some that are aggressive, willing, trying everything, and then kids are scared to death of ball. The baseball coach cannot teach your kid to play baseball. That's the bottom line, because he's got, what, seven practices before games start and he's got to assess, teach all the kids all the positions, give them reps at the batting cage. Man, it's just, there's no way. The only way your kid has got a chance, is if you are throwing the ball with them every day and giving him some popups and some grounders and some stuff like that. Now, a lot of kids are afraid of the baseball to start with.
Joe Fontenot: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jamie Dew: Start off with a tennis ball. Don't don't start with, if he's scared of it, get a tennis ball, get up real close to him. Be very gentle and do it, bounce it off of his forehead a few times. I know that sounds crazy, but just bounce it off his forehead a few times. Don't bean him, just get him where you know, "Oh, that doesn't hurt." And then now you step back and you start soft-tossing it to him and get, get the hand with the glove, tracking the ball, and just get him lots of reps doing that. And get him a place where he can actually catch a ball.
I'm telling you if your kid can catch a baseball, then he is going to get playing time, a lot of it.
Joe Fontenot: Okay.
Jamie Dew: And then get him comfortable. Same thing. Batting, start off with tennis balls. I would go every year and I would buy, sometimes twice a year. Actually I'd do it once per season. I would go to Walmart and I'd get one of those big bags of tennis balls and we'd sit in the backyard and I would just pitch to him. Start off soft-toss. And the key there is don't let your kid, I don't know if you have a philosophy topic today or something like that, but I'm just-
Joe Fontenot: Well, this is very much a philosophy topic.
Jamie Dew: Okay, good, good. On the bats. Look, on bats, every parent... It would drive me nuts. I'd be sitting there trying to get the kids just to get basic swings, and their parents' standing in the cage with them, "Swing hard!" I just want to say, "No! Don't do that yet." You don't start swinging hard. Just a nice level swing coming through. You work on all the techniques as they get better. But man, if you can just get them swinging bat comfortably, catching a ball, and throwing the ball comfortably the kid's going to be awesome and have a great time.
Joe Fontenot: That's that's really great because you know, I love baseball. Not that I ever watch it or have ever really played it, but I just kind of love nostalgic things in this classic American nostalgia.
Jamie Dew: Yeah. Yeah.
Joe Fontenot: And I really didn't push him into this at all. He kind of came up with this idea on his own. So that's really good. I never... I was taking notes as you were saying this, the bag of tennis balls is good. I think I'm going to do that. Just buy those. We have a big field next to our house, or next to our house. So we're just going to go out there and hit them.
Jamie Dew: Yeah, look. And that's what we would do every day. And man, seriously, if you can get him doing those three things. He's going to get a lot of playing time. He's going to have a lot of fun. He'll enjoy it. He'll want to do more of it. And then just in terms, I always say baseball is like a metaphor for life. If you can overcome your fears there, if you can learn how to do some skills, if you can learn the discipline of hard work and reap the reward of that, man, how many things in life are that way?
Joe Fontenot: Yeah.
Jamie Dew: You know, for these kids that are getting out there, if they can push through their fears, if they can overcome those obstacles, to me... I just watched my sons become young men, little young men out there. And my proudest moments were not necessarily when they won, but it's when they stood in the gap for their team and did something hard and made that key play and just, oh, watching their face.
This is one of the very, very last things that ever happened in my baseball coaching career with my two boys. I had been working just starting to work on curve balls with Nathan and his last year, he told me at the beginning of the year, he said, "I really don't want to pitch anymore. Dad." I was like, "Okay." He's a really good catcher. And I was like, "Okay." So he caught everything. Well, man, his arm was getting stronger. And I just said to him, one day I was like, "Buddy, I got to have you a little bit on the mound. I need you," because I was kind of running low on some pitchers. And I said, "I need you." His last game that he ever played before we moved down here, it was the last game I ever coached. And it was the last out.
He was on the mound. It was to end the game. Two outs, got this kid two strikes, and I called him from... He tried a curve ball at like two other times in a game and just threw some terrible pitch. But he had two strikes on this kid, two outs, and I called his name and I just held up my two fingers for a curve ball. And he got this little smirk on his face and he kind of nod his head. And man, he, threw the most beautiful little curve ball in there and struck this kid out and the look on his face, because that was, we've been working on that for two years and it had never born any fruit for him. But man, when he got that out, that was just, that was a moment I remember of the rest of my life. And, and I think you will too. So anyway, it's a metaphor for life. You can go on that.
Joe Fontenot: That's good to know. That's going to be helpful. So I have a similar related question-
Jamie Dew: Okay.
Joe Fontenot: ...about philosophy. This is the world's worth segue and that is-
Jamie Dew: I was going to say, this can't have anything to do with what we were just talking about.
Joe Fontenot: Well, we're both talking about it. I think that's probably the only thing it has to do with it. But so here's my other question right? It is not Little League related. And this comes down to philosophy in the church and how should we think about this? And here's where I'm coming at from this. There's a lot of people that do philosophy in college, for instance, college professors, the college philosophy professors is sort of like a trope, right. A lot of times this is an atheist or somebody like that who's very critical of faith or belief or Christianity or things like this. And so sometimes we've grown up with this prickliness towards these people, this fear of these people and so forth. And so how in the church should we handle philosophy in general? Can you speak to that?
Jamie Dew: Well, start off with a bag of tennis balls. No. Yeah. I don't, I don't know this has anything to do with that, but so, all right. So I'm a philosopher. I get this kind of question a lot. I often say that in a lot of the classes I teach I tend to have to spend the first week or so of class just giving an apologetic for the very discipline that I belong to. And I have regularly encountered people in the church or the students that come from our churches who just have this skepticism about it. And they go, "Man." Because you're right. You painted the picture well. Unfortunately there are lots of philosophers that are very critical of any kind of faith, but there's actually far, far more philosophers that believe something about God and even Christianity than one would imagine.
It's unlike some other disciplines, like religion, for example, in a public sector. If I were to try to study religion professionally at a state school or a secular college or university, I would be laughed out of the place for holding the beliefs I do. But as a philosopher, it's not that way. And so that's just a word of encouragement.
But no, I mean, this is a common thing that I have to deal with. This is actually referred to as the... Or it's actually the question about the relationship of faith and reason. Can you hold these two together?
Just very quickly. I would say this, there's nothing in the concept of faith or in the concept of reason that should put these two at odds with each other. So it should be just a natural open question. Faith can be thought of as a verb or as a noun, as a noun when you use that way. For example, it would sound like this, if you were using the word faith as a noun, you'd say things like, "Well, according to my faith..." Notice there that faith is a thing that you possess, right? Well, what that refers to as a set of beliefs that you hold. And there's nothing there that prejudices us against reason. Faith can also be used as a verb. So for example, "I'm going to put my faith in Jesus Christ." There I'm using faith as an action that I'm performing or you're performing. And there's nothing there either that should prejudice me one way or the other against reason science or other things like that. So, all that to say, I think that Christians should have a little bit of an open mind here about what this relationship supposed to look like.
Now, historically there's a lot of different views. And if you're interested in maybe a little bit more richer or fuller discussion than I could give on this podcast, in the book that Paul Gould and I did, Philosophy of Christian Introduction, I think it was published back in 2018 or in 2019. Yeah, it was 2019. Anyway, I have a chapter in this faith reason and modern science. And I give eight different views and walk through them in detail. But let me just hit a couple real quick. If that's all right.
One very common view that a lot, you will probably, as I explain it, you'll, recognize this. You may have never heard it called this, but you'll recognize it. One view is what we call the Evidentialist view or the magisterial view of faith and reason. And on this view, reason, science, and some kind of philosophical argument or scientific evidence acts as the judge, by which any other belief system can be held.
So evidentialism would say that essentially for you and I to be counted as rational people in holding the beliefs we hold, then we have to have evidences and reasons for what we hold. And if you don't have those evidences and reasons, then you're not a rational person you're irrational. And what kind of evidence and reason? Specifically something, some philosophical reason, or some kind of scientific reason. Here, reason and science serve as a judge, hence the name magisterial, right? It serves as a judge over all other beliefs. So you can have these beliefs, but only if they check out according to science and philosophy and things like that.
Now I would reject this view. Okay. Here's why this view is attractive to some people. In short, none of us want to be irrational for holding the beliefs we hold, number one. And number two, when we do have reasons and evidence that seems to give us epistemic confidence. Meaning you, and I feel much more confident in the belief that we hold when we have reasons and evidence, as opposed to not having reasons and evidence. So that's why this view's been so attractive to so many people.
But there's a question about whether or not that view has evidence and reason for it, right? There's also a question as to whether or not science really does answer all these questions and solve all these problems. And so for a variety of reasons, generally speaking, Christians are not prone to follow this approach. And I think rightly so, but I would call that the Evidentialist approach or the magisterial approach.
Joe Fontenot: Okay.
Jamie Dew: There's another approach, it's the very opposite of this. This one will sound familiar. There's a lot of Christians that will hold this view. It's called [Fideistic00:13:34] approach to faith and reason. [Fideism 00:13:37] comes from the Latin word "fidei" which means faith. So Fideistic approach basically says there is no real relationship. The Christian shouldn't pursue evidence, arguments, reasons, science, and all that stuff. On this view, you simply have faith, and faith is held as this epistemic, the most noble of all the epistemic positions one could hold. So you just believe. On this view they would argue that number one, you couldn't demonstrate a lot of these things by faith and reason, and even if you could, it wouldn't be pleasing to God because what he wants you to do is just have faith. He doesn't want you to bolster it with all these evidences and things. He just wants you to have faith. And so what's most pleasing to God is just to believe. This is called the Fideistic approach.
Joe Fontenot: Okay. That makes sense. I know I've certainly met these people before, who certainly in the latter category, the Fideistic, who have taken an antagonistic view against science. And what you said makes a lot of sense because it's as if they... It's not simply that science is a threat, if I'm understanding this correctly, but it's that they believe that God wants us to have faith and not have science, is kind of this-
Jamie Dew: Kind of. Well, I'd say it this way. There's a general disposition that anybody that doesn't believe the Bible, doesn't believe in God, or something like that, that there's an inherent evil move at play there. Right? There's sort of an ill-motive of kinds. And so there's just this general skepticism to the motives of those who don't start there. And so therefore there's a lot of skepticism about all of those disciplines and things like that. And so by contrast, "Hey, I just believe the Bible," right? And, "I just believe in God," and maybe they can't go any farther than that. They could tell you what they believe in the Bible and why they believe that in the Bible, like doctrinally, they can defend their theology with Bible versus, but to establish or to defend the very basic belief in God itself, they're not going to do that. It's, "Just have faith."
Joe Fontenot: Okay.
Jamie Dew: I would argue that neither one of these is quite right. Right? On the positive side of the evidentialist approach, I think, generally speaking, none of us want to be irrational. When we have reasons and evidence that does seem to give us confidence, and that's a good thing.
The problem there is though, that in most cases there's sort of this default philosophical presumption, that scientific evidence is by its very nature superior to any others. And I just don't know that you can establish that. On the flip side of that the Fideistic approach, what's I think understandable or commendable about that, is that these people really just at the end of the day, their primary concern is pleasing God. Look, man, I applaud that in my friends and peers to hold these views.
At the end of the day though, I don't think that that's what the Bible is telling us to do. I mean, John's gospel, Matthew's gospel. They marshal tremendous amounts of evidence for who Jesus Christ is. And then they call us to believe. I mean, John's gospel, for example, everything you'd want to know about Jesus, he's going to tell you in the first 18 verses of the gospel. Then from Chapter Two, all the way through Chapter 11, there's the Seven Great Miracles that happen. They get bigger, and bigger, and bigger, and bigger. And then you have the Seven Great Teachings from Chapter 11 onwards. And, John, after doing those Seven Great Teachings and Seven Great Miracles, John says, "I write these things." What things? All that evidence, he just marshaled. So that you might believe. So he's calling us to faith, yes, but it's not a blind leap of faith. It's a faith that's pointing at the very things he just talked about of who Jesus Christ was.
And Matthew's gospel, same thing, fulfilled prophecies, supernatural power fulfills the Genealogy of the Messiah. And all of that is built into this crescendo in Matthew:16, where "Who do men say that I am?" Peter says, "I say that you're the Christ, Son to the Living God." So I would say you got out of just the gospels alone, you've got two big examples that I think cut in the teeth of this Fideistic approach. I don't think that's the way we need to go either.
Joe Fontenot: Okay. So that leads kind of to the natural question, which way should we go? If evidentialist is not quite right, Fideistic is not quite right. What should we do?
Jamie Dew: Yeah, me personally, I like to be in conversation with all of these different views. I think that there really are some helpful things that I can get in dialogue with my evidentialist friends. I think that there's some helpful things I can get in dialogue with my Fideistic friends. At the end of the day, I don't hold either one of those views. I would hold what I think to be the most historic view of the Christian tradition, and that is the tradition called Faith, Seeking, Understanding. And that's a tradition that's given that label from the writings of St. Anselm, but you can find this as far back as Augustine.
According to these two thinkers, and really, you find this in the reformers, I think as well. I think this is the way Luther did it. I think this is the way Calvin did it. So in other words, when Christianity was at its best, I think this is how we operated. It was faith. So in other words, what we mean by that is look, "I do have faith. I do just believe these things I do." But I'm not going to stop there. It's faith that seeks understanding not the other way around. Anselm even says in a prayer to God in the Proslogion, he says, "I don't try to understand it so that I might believe it, but rather I believe it so that I might understand it." So in other words, to our intellectual surprise, he flips the order of it. And Augustine says similar things. Essentially we start off with our belief, but then what we're wanting to do is we're... Put it this way, you're auditing your belief. "Hey, I believe X, namely, God exists. But now what I do is I'm trying to understand that a little bit better." And that's where the arguments for God's existence were brought in by these thinkers to try to say, "Look, man, I do believe these things. Now I'm pursuing a more robust, fully textured belief in God, by exploring philosophy and science and all those things. And I'm utilizing all those things to better understand these basic, basic beliefs that I have."
And so in short, so let me give you a real life example, me. The way I came to faith was not at all through apologetics. I've spent my entire career doing apologetics and philosophy, but that's not how it started for me. It started for me after I came to know Jesus Christ when I was 18 years old. And if you've listened to this podcast at all, you know a bit of my story. If you've heard me speak, you know a bit of my story. Here's the deal. It was drugs, it was alcohol, it was the arrests, it was all those things. And then when I was 18 years old, I encountered Jesus Christ and he saved my soul and my life. I didn't encounter the cosmological argument, the teleological argument, the evidence for Jesus' resurrection. I didn't get any of that stuff. I just got Jesus. And I believed it. And I don't think that was irrational for me to do that.
Now, as I tried to execute this calling that he's placed in my life to share the gospel and to preach and all those things, and I encounter people that raise questions I can't answer, I begin to try to answer those questions That's where those tools begin to come in there. Right? And so my life has been one of, I believe, faith seeking, understanding, and I'm using those things now to try to bolster it. So that's one thing I hold that view.
Joe Fontenot: Okay.
Jamie Dew: Then I'd also add to that an insight or an approach that I get from Alister McGrath. And I wrote my first dissertation on Alister McGrath's scientific theology, which might be good to talk about at some point. Essentially what we do here is in this approach, he affirms what we call a dialogical approach to faith and reason. So in other words, on this approach, hey, these two views don't necessarily affirm the same things. These two views may at times have deep conflict with each other, but they also might have some times along the way where they agree with each other on some things. Either way, he says, what we could do is we could the theologians and the scientists, we could approach each other as dialogue partners.
I like to illustrate that this way, when I talk to my students about this, think about your dialogue partners, someone that you regularly have dialogue with about, and here's my questions for you as you think about them. Do you always agree with your dialogue partner? No. Sometimes you disagree sharply. Right? So what that tells us is, is when we approach the sciences or philosophy as a dialogue partner, what that tells us is, "I don't always have to agree with them. I'm free." In fact, I must at times and places say, "No, no, no, I don't hold that. I don't think that's right." Right?
Here's another question though, about your dialogue partner, do you always disagree with them? You clearly don't always agree, but you don't always disagree either. There's actually times where you go, "No, I actually agree with you on this." Right? So what that means is I don't have to treat the sciences or philosophy as something that I'm inherently opposed to. There may very well be some things that I could harvest, that I could bring over Augustine calls what I just said there, he uses the metaphor of "plundering the Egyptians". It's when the children of Israel came out of Egypt, and remember they left with gold, and silver, and livestock, and clothing and linens, and all this things. And his point there is all truth is God's truth. Right? So he's going to sometimes agree with these folks.
But here's my bigger question for you about dialogue partners, whether you agree or disagree in any given moment, is it not always true that by virtue of having that dialogue, that you now are stronger and better because of it? I mean, look man, the people... The thing probably that is impacted my intellectual life and my spiritual life more than anything else, more than reading books, more than writing books, more than listening to lectures, more than getting degrees. What has sharpened me more than anything is the dialogue that I've had with my peers and my colleagues over the years, and even my critics. When people that differ with me wildly. It's through those conversations, that my view has been sharpened and strengthened. Sometimes I agree with him. Sometimes I disagree with him, but I am always made sharper as a result of the dialogue.
If so then maybe the approach we ought to take to these disciplines that are not specifically Biblical studies or theology, is the posture of a dialogue. I'm in dialogue with these partners. I don't always agree with them. I'm going to differ with them sharply at points. I'm not always in disagreement though. There might be some things I go, "Man, I really think that's a helpful insight." But I'll always be made stronger if I do that. And I think that that's a good approach.
Joe Fontenot: That's a really great way to put it, because there are a lot of people who I think are either intimidated by some of these different points of view, or they're afraid to go too far with them because they're maybe what people will think or misinterpret you think of a pastor, maybe in a small town church. I'm stereotyping here, but something like this, if he goes in and talks with, or whatever, this dialogue kind of approach gives a very open, honest and true way of saying to people who are maybe critical of this, this is just a positive thing. We take the good and we eat the fish, and spit out the bones or something like that.
Jamie Dew: Right. We do. We do. Christianity has a long history of doing that. I think Christians still to this day do that. I think as we approach these different disciplines, that's a helpful disposition to have as we go in to those debates, and those dialogues with folks. But so in short, that's what I do, sort of a combination of faith, seeking, understanding. And how is it that I'm seeking? Well, mostly through dialogue with a lot of different disciplines and insights. At the end of the day, Christians are governed by the Word of God and that's where we bring everything back to roost.
Joe Fontenot: Awesome. Well, this is great. Thanks Jamie.
Jamie Dew: Yep. Hey everybody. This is Jamie and Joe again.
Joe Fontenot: If you liked this podcast, would you leave us a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts? That helps other people find it.
Jamie Dew: If you have any questions, we'd love to hear about them. Just go to jamiedew.com/questions and send them in that way, and we'll take a look at the most frequently asked questions and give them a shot.