It was a great pleasure to visit the Kamet student centre in New Delhi for a talk on faith & reason. Thank you to BernardLaurens and all the residents of the centre for such hospitality.

• Faith is the belief in things unseen; it is suprarational – goes all the way with reason, and then beyond to where it points. Strictly speaking, the contents of faith are not fully rationally demonstrable, but based on a convergence of probabilities, and to achieve certain goods in life (deep charity, trust, self-gift), one has to have faith in certain realities. 
• Reason refers to rationality, logic, and argumentation, which is to say, conclusions are justified based on various types of evidence.
• Faith involves going beyond the immediately demonstrable to both theoretical posits about reality, and a practical orientation to the world that is trusting, and hopeful.
• Faith allows us to fully realize all of our inclinations, and attain the highest goods in each dimension of life. This is because faith is linked to charity.
• We cannot trust others, believe in them in a project of committing and growing closer, without this. People who are always looking for signs, and proof, and demonstrations to an excessive degree, upon which to form the basis of their every judgment – they will not believe because they have an irrational, and logically incoherent standard of evidence, which can close them off to reality. In people who lack faith, you can see that they are more easily prone to being closed, worried, anxious, untrusting, and this makes them unable to live and love to the fullest.
• Relationships require the ability to trust, to form bonds, to be vulnerable, all of which are preconditions of love.
• No one can love if they do not give themselves over to something higher, if they die to themselves and their own personal sphere of need by trusting others and being dependent, and committed. Faith is thus the door to charity.
• Faith is irrational when it is contrary to reason. It is not ‘faith’ to be blindly superstitious, to ignore or deny evidence that is contrary to one’s orientation of trust in a person, or hope in some outcome.
• Faith & Reason are two ways of knowing – knowing is a kind of grasp or possession of the object of knowledge, so it is a union – an adequation between intellect and the object of what is known.
• Faith leads to hope and charity. Love is the greatest thing humans can do, for God is love. To love God is greater than to know him.