Belief and reason

What is the difference between belief and reason?

I recently put my argument about religion being belief over reason (something I cannot hold with) to my father who asked me, "what's the difference between belief and reason?". A thoroughly fair question and one, I'm sorry to say, I'd had 2 too many beers to deal with fully and correctly. Such is so often the way with philosophy, I find.

Reason is a combination of axioms and the scientific method. The scientific method involves the formulation of theorems by extrapolation from axioms or other theorems, then performance of experiments to show that the theorem holds (or otherwise).

As an aside - a single (repeatable) experiment will disproves a theory and will therefore produce more theories to fill the gap, but all the experiments in the world cannot prove a theorem. This means science can never be 'right'. Hmm..

Belief is the trust that axioms hold. So even accepting reason's other faults, it is based on some axiom or other.

There is one major difference I can hold up between religious belief and belief in axioms of reason: the axioms of reason are available to be questioned. Until just before Einstein's time, everyone thought that parallel lines didn't cross (an axiom of Euclidean geometry) but some Russian duo decided to prove that you can change the Euclidean axioms and still have a working mathematical system. This work lead into Riemann geometries, Leibniz' work and Einstein's relativity equations.

This only illustrates the availability of reason, but by comparison religion is a closed shop. I mean, wow! Some Americans even still teach creationism as truth! Some of the details of which are as laughable as Pratchett's space-turtle.

So, the answer is this: belief is knowledge which is unavailable to inquiry, reason is fully available to anyone to be experimented with at will.