The Evolutionary Answer to the Problem of Faith and Reason

The problem of faith and reason, as I shall understand it here, is the problem of showing how the religious impulse of humanity can be fully reconciled with the rational one. Some, for example those held in thrall by postmodernism or scientism, may think they are solving the problem of faith and reason when they denounce one or other of these quintessentially human proclivities. But, on my understanding of the problem, they are simply refusing to admit it. Fortunately, approaches with more curiosity and tenacity can also be found in philosophy of religion. The deductive theistic proofs of Anselm or Leibniz exemplify one; Swinburne’s cautious inductive and cumulative case for the existence of God another; Plantinga’s critique of evidentialism and defense of theistic belief’s proper basicality in circumstances of religious experience a third; John Hick’s neo-Kantian religious pluralism, more irenic than theism though still experientially grounded, a fourth. But no existing answer to the problem of how to reconcile reason and religion seems to me wholly satisfactory; certainly none has won wide acceptance. Here I wish to outline a response that has not thus far been attempted, except implicitly in my recent books.1 It will, I hope, prove worthwhile to set it out more explicitly and crisply and under a single guiding concept, so that it can be captured, as it were, at a glance, and thus more easily compared wit