Month: December 2025

The Infirmity of Reason versus the Certitude of Faith

Substack latest. Some thoughts on Pierre Bayle.

Reason is infirm in that it cannot establish anything definitively as regards the ultimate questions that most concern us. It cannot even prove that doubting is the way to truth, “that it is certain that we ought to be in doubt.” (Pyrrho entry, Bayle’s Dictionary, tr. Popkin, p. 205) But, pace Pierre Bayle, the merely subjective certitude of faith is no solution either! Recoiling from the labyrinth into which unaided human reason loses itself, Bayle writes:

The Mark of a Weakling

Plato puts the following words into the mouth of Simmias in The Phaedo:

It seems to me, Socrates . . . that to know anything certain about such things [as the immortality of the soul]  in this life is either impossible or exceedingly difficult, but to give up without completely testing the views on the subject and before you’re totally exhausted from examining them on every side is the mark of a weakling.

For we must accomplish one of the following: either learn the truth about this from someone else or find it out for ourselves, or if that’s impossible, at least catch the best most irrefutable human argument we can find and ride on it like a raft, sailing through life taking our chances on it, unless we can get safer, less dangerous passage on a securer vessel in the form of some divine explanation. (85c-85e, tr. Raymond Larson)