Each fall we had revival meetings. The speakers at these events were called evangelists, and they employed a highly emotional style of preaching. The preaching on hell was especially vivid, and it had an electric effect on me. I remember trying to imagine what it would be like to burn in a lake of fire for an unending period of time. Rightly or wrongly, I also derived from the evangelists' messages a belief that the vast majority of the human race is going to hell. They often quoted such scriptural warnings as "Broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: . . . and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be who find it" (Matt. 7:13-14, King James Version).

By my early teen years, I began to suspect that I would go to hell. After all, the evangelists had made it clear that only genuine Christians would avoid this fate and that genuine Christians were in the minority. Moreover, it was clear enough to me that I did not fit the evangelists' descriptions of what a genuine Christian is like. Not surprisingly, this realization led to a lot of gloomy thoughts. Without putting the idea explicitly into words, I gradually came to think of God as a being who offered the human race the following option: "Either do my will or burn forever--it's your choice." In short, I had come to think of God as a cosmic tyrant. My faith, laden with guilt and tear, no longer gave me any joy.

In my senior year of high school, I came under the influence of some Christian leaders who stressed God's love. I began to see that the Christian gospel was supposed to be something positive--"good news." But the ideas about hell existed side by side with the positive message of God's love, and both ideas pressed themselves on me in turns. Though I would no doubt have professed a belief in God's love, I was inwardly wavering and confused.

Perhaps I am making it sound as if my early life was fully absorbed in explicitly religious thoughts and activities. Of course, this was not so. I was involved in many of the usual activities at school and with my family. But I often felt my religion to be a burden, and I envied the secular kids at school. They didn't have to live with an all-knowing God looking over their shoulders all the time. They could sin without feeling guilty or fearful. Under peer pressure I frequently behaved as they behaved, but there was a price to pay later in solitude, when the fear of hell and the knowledge of my own moral weakness would come upon me.

Partly because of the turmoil of my religious thoughts and feelings, I decided to attend a college associated with the denomination I was brought up in, the Christian church or Church of Christ. I had a vague notion that attending this college would help me sort out my spiritual problems. I studied hard and began to take a deeper look at my faith. I read most of the works of C. S. Lewis, and through them I caught a glimpse of the vast sweep and richness of Christian theology. Through the lens of Lewis's theological works, something of the wonder of creation and life came through to me in a way it never had before. Looking back, I think this experience is one of the deep roots of my love of philosophy. For since my college years, it has been theology and philosophy that have again and again renewed my sense of the extraordinariness of existence.

Two courses, one in apologetics and one in philosophy, marked a profound change in my intellectual life. I became much more interested in logic and argument. I became interested in whether "faith" means "believing without evidence," and I decided that, if it did, then faith wasn't for me. I began to see that it would be intellectually dishonest for me to demand evidence for other religious or philosophical views if I refused to acknowledge this demand for my theological views. I was taking the first step in a way of thinking that would change my views dramatically.

At this time, I had an opportunity to spend one year studying philosophy at Cornell University. Some of the courses raised very difficult questions about my faith. What affected me most were books and papers that articulated and defended a materialist world view. It became clear to me that materialism could explain much more than I had previously supposed. This was disturbing. Also disturbing were the numbers of students who regarded Christian theology as unworthy of serious intellectual consideration.

On the advice of a friend, I decided to seek an undergraduate degree in philosophy from Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I found Calvin delightful and challenging. There I felt free to explore questions about my faith, but I also felt encouraged to regard my faith as a philosophical asset. Through the writings and teaching of such Calvin philosophers as Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff, I saw the possibility of combining Christian faith and philosophy. I decided to study philosophy at the graduate level.

Naturally enough, in graduate school I encountered a deeper level of questions about my faith. I soon became convinced that the doctrine of God's love is incompatible with the doctrine that some persons will be punished forever in hell. If a loving being seeks the long-term best interests of those he loves, how could a loving being make anyone miserable forever? Put bluntly, it couldn't possibly be in anyone's long-term best interest to be eternally damned, so a loving God wouldn't damn anyone eternally. It would be more loving to annihilate people than to make them miserable for all eternity. I thus jettisoned my belief in an eternal hell with a certain sense of relief. I was careful to remind myself, however, that the argument did not rule out divine punishment, only eternal divine punishment.

I realize that my giving up the doctrine of eternal hell will appear a quaint episode to many. But the episode had far-reaching consequences for me. Having made this step, I felt a new freedom to follow up arguments wherever they might lead. I also felt a combination of exhilaration and dread in regard to the power of philosophy. I saw that philosophy is a serious thing that can alter one's beliefs at a fundamental level. I had crossed a line and wasn't sure where it might lead. But I felt certain then, and still do, that intellectual honesty is the best policy.

Much deeper challenges awaited me. I found that nearly all of my fellow graduate students--even ones who were sympathetic to theism--had a low opinion of the so-called proofs of God's existence. Through a process of dialogue, I gradually came to share this opinion. I began to fear that the Christian faith could not be backed up with adequate evidence. Worse was yet to come as I examined the problem of evil at an advanced level. It was widely admitted, even by Christian theologians, that no one had ever found a convincing reason why God permits certain forms of suffering. A loving parent is not going to stand by and let her child be tortured until it goes insane--not if she can do anything about it. Yet, does not God stand by daily while His children are thus tortured in the prisons of tyrants around the world? So it seems. A neural disease destroys a child's capacity to think. Would a loving parent who is able to prevent this evil stand by without interfering? Surely not. Therefore, is it not straining language beyond reasona.ble limits to assert that "God is love"?

Several factors combined with these intellectual difficulties to bring me into a period of intense religious doubt. First, early in the third year of graduate school, my marriage of some years broke down completely. While I initially felt a sense of relief to be free of a strained relationship, my divorce administered a series of pyschological shocks. The counseling sessions that preceded the divorce made it clear even to me that my own immaturity was a major cause of my wife's disaffection. I knew that I had failed at one of life's most important tasks. I also felt that a failed marriage was proof of a lack of Christian virtue, and that my moral and spiritual inadequacy had thus been exposed for all to see. Finally, within a few months of my divorce, I began to feel terribly alone and uprooted. Far from family and old friends and under the intense pressure of graduate study, I lost my sense of direction and became deeply unsure of myself.

Second, at this time I decided to stop attending the sorts of churches I had grown up in, namely, those belonging to the Campbellite movement. I made this decision for a variety of reasons. I had moved some distance from the conservative theology these churches espouse. For example, I could no longer believe that the Bible is infallible. I also thought that these churches often evinced a suspicious attitude toward philosophy. The Campbellite slogan, "Where the Bible is silent, we are silent," left too little room for the valuable contributions philosophy had made to theology over the centuries. And, anyway, wasn't "Where the Bible is silent, we are silent" itself a bit of philosophy? Perhaps I should join a denomination whose history included some good philosophers and systematic theologians.

Whatever the merits of these reasons for leaving myoid denomination, doing so left me feeling even more uprooted and rudderless. Looking back, I can see that I was really asking for spiritual trouble by abandoning myoid church just at the time I was undergoing a divorce. I was increasing the psychological pressures on myself at a time when I was particularly fragile.

Third, I must record an attitude that came over me, and that put psychologi¬cal distance between me and all churches. Given my negative assessment of the traditional proofs for God's existence, I began to fear that my faith was due simply to my upbringing. How could I know otherwise unless I became an atheist or an agnostic--at least for a period of time? If I became an atheist or an agnostic and then regained my faith, I would at least know that my faith wasn't simply due to my being conditioned by authority figures at an early age. And how could I give up my faith if I were involved in the life of a church? I knew I wouldn't be able to do so.

These thoughts seem a bit fantastic to me now, but they didn't then. I seldom made them explicit to myself, but they had a hold on me. I couldn't act on them decisively, so the result was a ridiculous compromise of attending a variety of churches but avoiding any commitment or involvement. I kept this up for several years, and not surprisingly, it did have the effect of greatly attenuating my faith. To the best of my knowledge, I never entirely stopped believing that some sort of personal Power lies behind the world of appearances, but I came to have very deep doubts about God's love.

During this period of doubt, I became interested in the American philosopher William James and, in particular, in his famous essay "The Will to Believe." In that essay James argues that it can sometimes be rational and moral to believe even when the issue cannot be settled by an examination of the available evidence. James is not, I think, endorsing belief against a preponderance of evidence. Rather, he has in mind cases in which we find it difficult to assess a complicated range of pros and cons--cases in which we aren't sure where the preponderance of evidence lies. Moreover, it is a crucial part of James's view that believing in such circumstances is rational and moral only if the issue is momentous, that is, only if something important can be gained via belief. Furthermore, James says that "the option" to believe must be "living," and although this can be interpreted in various ways, I think James is trying to pick out a class of cases in which we are able to believe--perhaps because we are already inclined to do so.

I continue to think "The Will to Believe" is an insightful essay for several reasons. First, James emphasizes the practical nature of belief. What we believe about religious and moral issues has momentous consequences for the way we live and for the kinds of persons we will become. (Here I came to see a danger in agnosticism. The agnostic says, "We can't, or at least don't, know whether God exists." But people who claim to be agnostics typically live as if there is no God; for example, they don't pray or worship God. This amounts to placing one's bets on the side of atheism.) Second, James's view comports well with the fact that few (if any) come to faith primarily because of evidence or arguments. For example, people often come to faith because they feel that their lives are lacking in some important way and because they have the impression, based on their acquaintance with certain exemplary religious believers, that faith may be of help. Third, James rightly challenges the idea that one is always irrational if one fails to proportion one's belief to the evidence. When evidential considerations leave us unable to settle a matter, there is still a sense in which it can be reasonable, in a practical sense, to believe. After all, while well-evidenced truth is one of the goods humans reasonably seek, it isn't the only good. Thus, if I cannot in my own mind settle a given religious issue, such as the existence of God, simply by examining the available evidence, but I can gain greater moral motivation or hope for living by so believing, it may still be rational, at least in a practical sense, to do so.

As for myself, after the years of doubt described above, I found the halfway house of half-believing quite unsatisfying. For me personally, it was truly time to take decisive action: either reject the Christian faith and live a secular life, or else get serious about following Christ. It became clear to me, at this juncture, that both the historical figures I admired most and the persons of my acquaintance whom I most admired were men and women who had tried (or were trying) to follow Jesus Christ. This being so, why hesitate any longer? The option was momentous. I became actively involved in an Episcopal parish and plunged again into the life of the church.

While James's will-to-believe doctrine still seems to me a helpful counter to the plausible but oversimple view that one should always proportion one's belief to the evidence, this doctrine does not now seem to me satisfying as a justification for the belief of most Christians throughout most of their lives. My primary reason for saying this is that most Christians, for most of their lives, do not view central theological issues as undecidable in James's sense. For example, they typically believe (or come to believe) that "God exists" is more probable than "God does not exist." During a period of doubt, even of extended doubt, one may indeed have the opinion that the evidence favors neither theism nor atheism. But this view surely is not typical of theists. Most of them do think, or do come to think, however inarticulately, that theism is more probable (given all relevant factors) than atheism, or pantheism, or any other alternative they are aware of. So, we must ask: Is it reasonable for someone to believe that "God exists" is more probable than the alternatives?

Let me begin by clearing away one common misunderstanding. People often think it significant to assert that "God's existence can't be proved." A proof, I suppose, is something that will convince anyone who is intelligent enough to understand it. If so, very little of interest regarding major philosophical issues can be proved. This goes for issues in metaphysics, morality, political philosophy, and aesthetics. All or nearly all of the major positions under these headings are highly controversial. There are brilliant people on either side of the interesting fences. So, if we demand proofs in philosophy, we will wind up as skeptics on all or nearly all of the important issues. Surely that is not the way of wisdom. I often ask my students to imagine themselves giving an antislavery speech to a group of slave owners. What are the chances of convincing the audience? Slim to none. Surely, then, it is possible to have good arguments for a view even though these arguments are not recognized as such by groups of people who do not share our convictions.

I think the old metaphor of a jury's verdict, though currently unfashionable, is helpful at this juncture. It is noteworthy that in a civil case the standard is that of' a "preponderance of evidence" (as opposed to the standard in a criminal case, i.e., "beyond a reasonable doubt"). Furthermore, in a civil case, a verdict can be rendered even though not all the jurors agree (e.g., in a twelve-person jury, two can dissent). Several points about juries and jurors are worth bearing in mind. First, it is surely reasonable for a juror, in many cases, to believe that her view of the case is supported by a preponderance of the evidence. Second, and more important, I believe that most people who have served on juries would allow that individual jurors can have a reasonable assessment of the evidence even when their assessment is in conflict with that of some of the other jurors.

How is it that jurors who disagree on a verdict can reasonably regard each other's views as reasonable? The answer lies, I think, in their mutual aware¬ness of the difficulty of assessing a complicated range of evidence. One does not need to be highly intelligent to understand the basic concepts involved in the typical court case. But the sheer number of factors-the variety of wit¬nesses, the speeches of the lawyers, the judge's instructions-can be confus¬ing, and a responsible juror is apt to agonize over the weight to be given to the various bits of evidence. For example, many cases turn centrally on whose testimony is most credible. There is simply no formula for determining that sort of thing, and a reasonable juror is painfully aware of his own fallibility.

Third, even if the disagreements among jurors prevent them from rendering a verdict, those same disagreements do not necessarily make the beliefs of the individual jurors unreasonable. Perhaps only nine of twelve jurors agree in a civil case. If so, no verdict can be rendered. But the jurors may still have beliefs about what probably happened, and those beliefs may still be reason¬able in a given case.

Fourth, a jury's deliberations will usually focus on a few pivotal bits of evidence. For example, certain key pieces of evidence may be taken by some jurors to indicate that Mr. Jones probably did strike Ms. Smith with the intent to cause bodily injury. Other jurors may not agree with this assessment, at least initially, and the deliberations will focus on these matters. A juror's assessment of these pivotal bits of evidence often determines her view of the entire case.

I think this point about pivotal evidence helps us to understand how reli¬gious beliefs can be rational. The range of factors involved in assessing an entire world view is so vast and complicated that any formulaic approach is bound to be inadequate. We can and should try to be objective, but it will likely be our assessment of certain pivotal lines of evidence that determines our view, so far as the intellectual side of things goes. I hope it is clear that I am not suggesting that just any assessment of a given piece of evidence is reasonable. Some assessments are plainly unreasonable. On the other hand, it is clear that equally intelligent and fair-minded people can assess the same evidence differently, and this may lead them to widely divergent conclusions. I now want to illustrate these abstract remarks about pivotal evidence by de¬scribing one particular line of evidence regarding materialism and theism. This description is meant to be illustrative, so I am not pretending to provide a decisive argument. One the other hand, I do mean to sketch one key reason why I now assess the evidential situation concerning materialism and theism differently than I did during my lengthy period of doubt.

In graduate school, I tended to see as pivotal those matters that were then receiving a great deal of attention among professional philosophers. At the time, it seemed that the burden of proof was on theism. Is there enough evidence for God's existence? Are there any theodicies that provide an adequate solution to the problem of evil? Is theism logically coherent? I think the general climate of opinion in academic philosophy at that time, in regard to theism and materialism, could be summed up as follows: "Materialism is pretty clearly defensible, whereas theism at least appears to be indefensible." (By materialism I mean roughly the view that there are no gods or immaterial souls, that only matter exists, and that matter always behaves in accordance with the laws of nature.)

Two very important changes in my perspective have occurred since those days. (1) I do not now see theism as having any special burden of proof. The question "Is there enough evidence for God's existence?" now seems to me misleading. I think it is much more helpful to think in comparative terms. Does theism explain the range of relevant phenomena better than (as well as, or worse than) its rivals do? In my view, the serious philosophical rivals to theism are few, with materialism being the most impressive. (2) It now seems to me that materialism is a highly problematic view. I think its difficulties are more severe than those of theism, so I think theism is more probably true. I shall now attempt to describe one of the difficulties of materialism.

I am firmly convinced that humans are morally responsible for many of their actions. Sometimes they are responsible for acting in cruel or unjust ways. Sometimes they are responsible for acting in ways that are loving or just. However, there is a connection between moral responsibility and free will: If a human being is morally responsible for a given act, then she performs the act freely. And if a person does not perform a given act freely--for example, because she was coerced or drugged-then she is not morally responsible for that particular action.

Does materialism provide an adequate explanation of free action? It seems to me that it does not. Some materialists have not only admitted this point but have insisted on it. Thus, B. F. Skinner, in Beyond Freedom and Dignity, argues that the belief in free will is a relic of our pre scientific past. However, Skinner's view is extremely problematic, since it rules out moral responsibility altogether. An anecdote may serve to underscore the philosophical cost of denying that humans are morally responsible. I once knew an ethics professor who employed a dramatic pedagogical technique with regard to students who professed to be amoralists, moral subjectivists, or moral skeptics. If a student professed such views in class, this professor would give the student a failing grade on the next paper--regardless of the paper's merits. Inevitably, the student would complain about the grade. The discussion would go something like this:

STUDENT: Why did you give me an F?

PROF.: Do I need a reason? I just felt like failing the paper.

STUDENT: But that's not fair.

PROF.: Fair? Fair is a moral word. You're not suggesting that I'm responsible for an immoral action, are you?

However, the current trend among materialists is not to deny freedom and morality, but to claim that human freedom is compatible with causal determinism. In other words, a given act can be both free and determined at the same time. This view is called the compatibilist view of free will. An act is free for a person in the compatibilist sense if and only if she performs the act because she wants to (all things considered). The phrase "all things considered" is an acknowledgment of the fact that a person may have conflicting desires. I may want both to go to the party and to study for the exam. If I can't do both, I will presumably do what I want, "all things considered." Thus, for the compatibilist, "free" contrasts with "coerced." When I am not coerced, but rather perform the act because I want to (all things considered), I act freely.

But we must ask: What accounts for the fact that I want to perform a given act, all things considered? On the materialist account, every event is the result of prior states of the physical world together with the operation of natural laws. The way the world is today, right down to the last detail, is a result of the way the world was yesterday (and the natural laws that obtain). Now, I do not have control of the past (e.g., of the way the world was yesterday or the day before). Nor do I have control of which natural laws govern the physical world or, indeed, or whether any natural laws govern the physical world. It thus appears that I do not have control of my "wantings" if materialism is true. For my wantings are entirely the result of factors over which I have no control.

But if I do not have control of my wantings, am I free in the relevant sense? I think the answer is no. Suppose that, via a pharmacist's error, I am administered a drug that makes me want (all things considered) to hit someone. Am I free in a sense that makes me morally responsible if I hit someone while under the influence of such a drug? Surely not. I was unable to choose otherwise.

Perhaps I can make my main line of reasoning more concrete by applying it to one particular type of materialist, the type who claims that mental states are identical to brain states. On this view, a particular choice will be identical to a particular brain process. But brain processes are, of course, physical events, subject to physical laws. Given the laws of nature and the way the world was yesterday, we have the deepest causal account of the occurrence of this brain process, according to materialism. And there is no reason to stop at yesterday. Today's "choice" is a brain processs that is linked via natural laws to states of the physical world prior even to my birth. Again, since I am not in control of the past states of the world, and not in control of which (or whether) natural laws hold, I am not in control of my acts if materialism is true.

Therefore, it seems to me that we must take the incompatibilist view of free will, according to which a given act cannot be both free and determined. The details of this conception of free will are controversial, but I hold that an act is free if and only if (1) the agent performs it because she chooses to, (2) she could have chosen to do something else, and (3) nothing other than the agent is the total cause of her choice. But clauses (2) and (3) rule out the materialist picture in which the agent's mental states are fully caused by prior states of the physical world.

It almost goes without saying that materialists have replies to these arguments, but this isn't the place to go into the details. I can only record a firm belief that the materialists' replies don't work. It thus appears to me that to accept materialism is implicitly to reject free will and hence to reject morality. This is something I am not capable of doing.

It is interesting to note that, if my reasoning to this point is on the right track, then materialism confronts a problem of evil analogous to the traditional problem of evil for theism. The traditional problem concerns whether theists can explain the presence of moral and natural evil in the world. It presents the theist with this question: "Isn't it unlikely that a perfectly good and all-powerful Deity would allow certain kinds of moral wrongdoing (e.g., torturing babies) or extreme suffering due to nonhuman causes (e.g., earthquakes, diseases, or hurricanes)? But if materialism rules out free will, it rules out moral responsibility, and hence it rules out what is traditionally meant by the phrase moral evil. This seems to me at least as serious a problem of evil as any the theist faces.

Perhaps it will seem to some readers that I have been presupposing, throughout this chapter, that belief in God is rational only if it is based on philosophical arguments. I do not, in fact, think this. Many believers have neither the time nor the inclination to pursue such reasoning, and some lack the mental capacity. Is faith then able to go it alone, without any help from reason or philosophy? I think this is a complicated question, and I shall finish this essay by outlining one answer to it.

First, in the typical case, I think there are potent nonevidential causes of religious belief. For example, many Christians were brought up in the faith, and this sort of upbringing inevitably involves some psychological conditioning. Furthermore, in regard to those Christians who were not brought up in the faith, many decide to practice the Christian way out of a sense of deep psychological need.

It might be tempting to conclude that such causal factors leave no room for reason. But I think such a conclusion would be a serious mistake. There are several ways in which reason can and typically does come into the picture.

1. Thoughtful people are apt to recognize the existence of evidence that appears to run contrary to their views. And it is either impossible or exceedingly difficult to believe something if one thinks the preponderance of evidence is against it. So, reason must play at least an ancillary role for many people in enabling them to reconcile their convictions with contrary evidence.

2. We must keep in mind that having evidence and being able to articulate it are two different things. Two jurors may regard a witness as credible, but one juror may be much better at articulating his reasons for this opinion than the other. Yet, surely, both jurors may be said to have evidence by virtue of having listened attentively and critically to the witnesses. More generally, many peopIe who are good at coming to an intuitive conclusion based on a complex range of factors are not particularly good at breaking that intuition down into arguments. I think that the belief in God is often based on this kind of intuitive assessment of a very broad range of factors about the world and about human life. Furthermore, I think it is a mistake to regard such intuitive assessments of evidence as nonrational. They are, as it were, the well from which are drawn the reasons we can put into words.

3. Both those brought up in the Christian faith and those who come to it out of a sense of need believe that the church is an authority on religious isssues. (By the church I mean the community of Christian believers, i.e., those persons, whether dead or alive, who have adhered to the Christian tradition.IO) Thus, the faith of all Christians is supported by an appeal to authority. And an appeal to legitimate authority is entirely reasonable. Perhaps most of what we believe about the world is accepted on authority.

But is the church a legitimate authority on religious matters? This may be doubted for a variety of reasons. Here I can only outline why I answer in the affirmative. When we know little about a matter and are not in a position to sort through all the evidence thoroughly on our own, we do well to listen to some person, or group of persons, who is more likely to have the truth than we are. Such an appeal to authority is reasonable, it seems to me, unless one is aware of (or should be aware of) a superior authority. (Authority A is superior to authority B if A is more likely than B to be correct.) For example, suppose that I am trying to reach a remote location in the wilderness on foot, and I do not know the way. I will do well to take the advice of a person who has had the experience of hiking to that location. But how do I know that a given person has actually had this experience? Initially, I may have little to go on but her word and the impression of her credibility that I receive from listening to her story. Possibly some others can assure me that she is indeed an experienced hiker.

But what if some other experienced hiker contradicts the testimony of the first one? This is analogous to the religious situation, since there are religious traditions that contradict Christianity. Would I then be unreasonable if I still accepted the advice of the first hiker? Not necessarily. The contradictions may be on minor points that need not concern me greatly. But let us suppose that they are on major points. Then what? Well, I may still reasonably believe that the first hiker is the superior authority. Perhaps her account is more detailed and coherent, or perhaps I simply judge her to be a more competent and trustworthy person, even though I am not able to break this intuitive judgment down into convincing arguments.

Consider one example of contradictory religious authorities. The church says that ultimate reality is a sort of mighty Person, that is, a thinking, willing being. But one of the major Hindu traditions, Advaita Vedanta, says that ultimate reality is undifferentiated being. On this view, ultimate reality is not personal, as theists claim, and it is not physical, as materialists claim. Further, since ultimate reality is undifferentiated being, our perception of differences must be illusory. Is Advaita Vedanta as credible as the church on these basic metaphysical issues? I think it is possible to arrive at reasonable answers to such questions. For example, isn't there a real difference between me and you? Our sensory and moral experience tell us this is so, but Advaita Vedanta says that this distinction is illusory. Furthermore, isn't the distinction between illusion and reality itself a real distinction? And since Advaita Vedanta em¬ploys this distinction when it says that sensory experience is illusory, Advaita Vedanta seems to presuppose at least one real distinction while insisting that distinctions are unreal. Any view that says that all distinctions are unreal has a serious credibility problem, in my book.

Now, returning to the example of the two hikers, suppose that I cannot judge one hiker to be superior (as an authority) to the other. Is it then necessarily unreasonable for me to accept the advice of either hiker? Well, I can certainly accept those points on which they agree. But what about the points on which they disagree? For example, suppose that one hiker says that I should seek out a certain mountain pass, and the other says that there is no such pass. Should I ignore both hikers in favor of my own uninformed guess? Perhaps I'll be better off if I act on the advice of one of the hikers, even though it may be mistaken. After all, both hikers seem to be better informed than I am. (Naturally, I will remain alert on the trail and revise my plans if error becomes evident.) So, it seems to me that it can be reasonable to place limited trust in authority even when equally trustworthy authorities disagree on some important matters.

Of course, it is not reasonable for persons to place their trust in the church if they have (in hand) good reason to believe that the church is not worthy of this trust. To the extent that the church shows itself to be unconcerned with an honest examination of the relevant evidence, I believe that it presents itself as unworthy of this trust. Serious inquirers should be apprised of the relevant evidence the church has in its possession and on which its authority is based. This is one reason why the Christian community should place a high value not only on theology and philosophy proper, but on a broad range of intellec¬tual disciplines that have or may have a bearing on its central teachings. Thus, it seems to me that reason, broadly construed, plays a vital role in ensuring that the church is a trustworthy authority on matters of faith. In this sense, at least, faith requires the support of reason.

As I look back over my life, I see that I cannot be content with a faith that ignores or scorns reason. But the intellectual part of the Christian life is, like the other parts, a difficult and narrow way.

The above was entitled Faith has its Reasons by C. Stephen Layman in God and the Philosophers: The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason, Ed. by Thomas V. Morris.