Second, the juxtaposition of the two words makes it sound like “faith” and “reason” are parallel and equivalent ways of knowing, and we have to help students navigate between them. But universities are about reason, pure and simple. Faith—believing something without good reasons to do so—has no place in anything but a religious institution, and our society has no shortage of these. Imagine if we had a requirement for "Astronomy and Astrology" or "Psychology and Parapsychology." It may be true that more people are knowledgeable about astrology than about astronomy, and it may be true that astrology deserves study as a significant historical and sociological phenomenon. But it would be a terrible mistake to juxtapose it with astronomy, if only for the false appearance of symmetry.
I find the attempt to claim that 'faith' means 'believing something without good reasons to do so' very peculiar. As Alan Rhoda notes, it's not our colloquial sense of the term; it's not the way the term is used as a technical or quasi-technical term in theology. Aquinas considers faith to be the disposition to believe, understand as thinking with assent that is firm but not certain; e.g., we don't know what some good authority tells us is true, but we believe it because they are a good authority. Indeed, Aquinas explicitly insists that there are reasons for belief; they are the reasons inducing us to believe rather than merely suspect or opine. Many people, like Martin Luther, consider faith to be a sort of trust; and they would deny that it is baseless trust. Luther, for instance, explicitly tells us that we must first know of the mercy of God on good report, and that it is based on good reasons, namely, divine promises. Calvin says that having faith is having a constant assurance or complete confidence; in his metaphors, it is 'planting one's foot' or resting on a sure foundation. Nothing in any of this about believing without good reason. From what I understand of Islam, faith (iman) is usually taken to mean something like 'internal affirmation or acceptance of the claims of a good authority'; perfect iman is unreserved affirmation or acceptance of divine authority. And none of this seems particularly surprising or difficult to find out. So this whole trope -- faith is believing without good reasons -- seems odd. But I've come across it many times recently. What are the reasons for it? Or is this just another form of thinking by way of unexamined cliché?
(Incidentally, even setting this aside, Pinker slips up in the above argument by eliding the distinction between "ways of knowing" and things we are "knowledgeable about". Are we talking about ways of knowing, or are we talking about the objects of knowledge? The two can't be treated the same. Much better than this, his second argument, are his first and third arguments, which don't fall into this confusion. Since I don't have access to the report itself, which doesn't seem to be online yet, I don't know if the report has the same confusion.)
