Philosophia Christi

Volume 18, Issue 2, 2016

Symposium on the Trinity in Modern Context

The Rationality of Faith
How Does Christianity Make Sense of Things?

This paper explores the “rationality” of the Christian faith, focusing on the capacity of the Christian “big picture” to colligate and coordinate personal experience and observations of the world. To illustrate this, C. S. Lewis’s famous “argument from desire” is framed within the parameters of two significant philosophies of explanation: C. S. Peirce’s abductive approach, and “inference to the best explanation” (Gilbert Harman; Peter Lipton). It is argued that the Christian faith offers a “metarationality,” which affirms the ultimate rationality of mysteries such as the doctrine of the Trinity while also accounting for the way we make sense of the everyday world.