Faith and Reason

On 8 November 2000 Raphael Jospe, senior lecturer on Jewish Philosophy at the Open University of Israel and adjunct professor of Jewish studies and Hebrew at the Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies, spoke on reconciling faith and reason. Faith, which begins with a conclusion that may be reinforced and verified through study, and reason, which begins with study that leads to a conclusion, can be reconciled by either a rationalist or a nonrationalist approach, Jospe said.

In the rationalist view, all revelation from God is rational in content and eventually will be shown to be consistent with reason. In the nonrationalist view, God’s revelation conveys truth that may be nonrational (i.e., beyond the range of human understanding) and thus fundamentally different from the truth that reason can discover. Jospe argued that because divine revelation is based on higher truths, we should not always expect it to be amenable to verification through human reason. He said that faith is valid on its own terms as long as it does not contradict reason.