In considering the relation of faith and reason it is important to appreciate that the issue generally is viewed from the perspective of the secular rationalism which has characterized much of the modern age. This is the cultural context within which we are born; it constitutes the glasses through which our world is interpreted.

There are various and complex reasons for this. One, as with John Locke, is the desire to make everything patent to everyone in order to facilitate the transfer of the exercise of power to popularly elected authorities. For this everyone needed equal access to all that entered into the debate. Locke recast the understanding of human knowledge on the basis of a story — which Wittgenstein found incorrect — of its origin whereby all was sense observation or what could be done with the ideas it produced. Religious ideas were not unwelcome to Locke — he wrote extensive Biblical commentaries — but they came from without and were added over and above reason in accord with the new reformation theology.

In the liberal mode, some would see the modern person as freed from all hierarchy, whether state or ecclesiastical, and competing equally in function of the new capitalist ideology. Others, such as Rousseau would return all to a fictitious state of nature prior to the development of any superstructure.

All would converge in the supposition that the basic human character was a-religious, defined by contrast to faith and hence secular in the sense of being concerned with life only in this universe of limited and temporal beings, in terms of which all would be judged. Religion then, if it were to be justified at all, would need to be seen not as gratitude and honor to God, but as service to humanity understood then reductively in terms only of its life in this changing universe.

It is precisely this assumption that has proven inadequate, indeed thoroughly destructive. The hope of founding thereby a worldly utopia during the 20th century has been drowned by wars hot and cold. It now sinks under waves of mutual hatred, descending even into genocide on a number of continents.

As a result "humanist" assumptions of the Enlightenment now come to appear ever more inhumane and it is important to review their basic assumptions. Prime among these is the issue of the context within which humanity is to be understood. Is it the self-enclosed and self-sufficient individual seen as creator of all else, or is it the relation between nature and God in a pattern of interchange that is open and fruitful. If so then faith is not a superstructure which can be dispensed with, but is foundational and indispensable; nor is it a constraint upon reason, but its natural context, inspiration and support.

The chapters of this book largely are lectures delivered at the University of the Punjab in Lahore.

Part I of this work surveys human development and examines how reason first emerged and then developed for literally thousands if not millions of years — almost its entire lifespan — within a religious context.

This follows Heidegger’s suggestion that human reason chooses among different paths at critical junctures, thereby developing some capabilities while leaving others undeveloped. Hence the real way forward, he suggests, is not incremental steps along the pathways already developed, but a step back to take up different possibilities not yet explored.

In this light we begin by returning to the initial totemic and then mythic stages of human awareness to see if and in what way these were religious in content, method and character. This will constitute an archeology of human consciousness, after which we shall proceed to investigate the religious structure of participation in the philosophy of Graeco-Christian and Islamic thought. For more extensive studies of these issues the reader is referred to my Ways to God: The Iqbal Lecture (Washington: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 1999), where separate chapters are devoted to these themes which here are sketched more schematically.

This provides the context for the main burden of this work which concerns directly the issue of faith and reason and is axised on two crises.

Part II departs from the medieval crisis of al-Ghazali as described in his Munqid and follows with the interchange of related work in the Christian and Islamic thought, especially that of Thomas Aquinas and Mulla Sadra.

Part III concerns the present crisis of faith and reason generated by disillusionment with Enlightenment rationalism at the end of the 20th century. Reversing both the modern rejection of religion by reason and the recent "post-modern" drive to dismiss reason, the Encyclical Fides et Ratio calls instead for a renewal of reason on a more integral bases. Long dismissed by reason as inadequately enlightened, it is religion which now affirms the dignity of humankind and the high mission of reason in time.

Part IV looks for the meaning both of philosophy for faith and of faith for philosophy.

Parts I-III are the series of lectures delivered at the University of the Punjab beginning with the Iqbal lecture, to which is adjoined lecture on Mulla Sadra prepared for the conference on his thought in Tehran.

Part IV consists of three related lectures on faith and reason delivered at the al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt, at Mofid University in Qum, Iran, and at People’s University of China, Beijing on the occasion of the renaming of its Department of Philosophy as "The Department of Philosophy and Religion".

To these are appended the encyclical letter Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason) of Sept 14, 1998, by Pope John Paul II. In it he studies the present juncture and rethinks in positive terms the relation of faith and reason and their mutual complementarity and contributions.