Faith - 2

Continuing from where we left off, the first thing we need to recognize is that any debate that posits religion and science (or, more particularly, faith and reason) as irreconcilable rivals (or, at least, inhabiting totally different spheres) would make almost no sense to some of the greatest philosophers, theologians and – yes – scientists of the ages.

When Socrates went on trial for (among other things) blasphemy, he did not defend himself by declaring his monumental intellect to have superseded the might of the Gods.  Rather, he pronounced himself a pious man, even if his form of piety was as eccentric as every other aspect of his life and belief. 

While many have an image of the Middle Ages as a period of stifling religious orthodoxy which snuffed out the merest hint of an inquiring mind with accusations of heresy and the stake, in fact the world did not stop thinking for a thousand years between the fall of Rome and the birth of Galileo.  In fact, the embrace of Plato by first Millennium Christians and the rediscovery of Aristotle by second Millennium Christians and Jews led to some of the most rigorous logical proofs for (among other things) the existence of God.   And these proofs demonstrated the power of reason to the religious and not-so-religious, a process eventually leading to Enlightenment.

Even great scientists (although not necessarily the religiously ambiguous Charles Darwin) did not set out to prove that gospel was filled with fairy tales or that belief in God was an evolutionary quirk.  Rather, these were believing men whose brand of faith (sometimes referred to as “Natural Philosophy”) felt that since God had created a universe ruled by unbreakable laws, that it was their duty to discover those laws and, in the process, glimpse slightly more of the divine.

Now it is true that faith in such “Natural" science rubbed more-conservative believers the wrong way, implying as it did that God might not have flooded the entire world or stopped the sun in the sky (or, at least, that we should live by a science that ignores the possibility that such divine intervention could happen again at any time).  But those disputes, like most historic arguments over faith vs. reason, managed to produce at least a little light. 

Would that we could say the same thing about discussions of this topic today. 

Is it only me, or do most of our debates over religion in the public square or the role of church and state in contemporary American society seem to be about something else?  Now I’m in favor of a rigorous, even tumultuous debate on this subject in particular.  But are we really on the verge of becoming a woman-enslaving theocracy or wiping out all trace of religion in a frenzy of secular revolution?  Certainly such religious (and secular) excesses can happen and have happened, particularly over the last 100 years.  But are paranoid fantasies that such terrors are being repeated today in America really our most burning issues of faith vs. reason? Or have we reduced discussion of this important topic to something resembling a different medieval tradition: that of bear baiting (or, perhaps, elephant and donkey baiting)?

Most supporters of faith tend to fall back on claims of religion as a transmission belt for moral virtues, or claim that long-held traditions (while mysterious) might contain forgotten wisdom that even the most enlightened among us might not know enough to decode.

That last notion was raised in one of many important essays written on this topic by my favorite political philosopher Lee Harris.  In addition to helping us look at hot-button religious topics such as tradition and evolution (written largely to reconcile believers and non-believers), Harris also points out in this essay that in our debates over faith we might be making a fundamental mistake by confusing scientific reason for reason itself.

For example, can reason tell us if one religion is “better” than another?  Scientific reason certainly can’t, since in terms of science, any faith-based belief system is equally unprovable and thus equally invalid (or equally valid, if a scientifically minded judge is feeling generous).  But what if you had two faiths that were exactly the same in all respects except that believers in Religion A were content to live alongside unbelieving men and women of  reason (and even be ruled by them) while Religion B believed that all men and women of reason should be killed immediately?

Ancient thinkers would have no problem answering this question (and thus avoid what Harris calls “The Suicide of Reason”) for, to them, reason could be applied to any subject, including (or should I say especially) questions regarding the relationship between man and God(s).

That’s all I’ll say (for now) on the subject, but as the Presidential candidates take to the pulpit (figuratively and literally) over the coming months, it might be best if we find a way to discuss the relationship between them, us and the divine that goes beyond sneers, suspicion and selective outrage.

Vote Reason!

The last post alluded to what might happen to a Presidential candidate who decided to demonstrate his or her critical thinking activity in public, and noted the irony of how the voters might react negatively to such a demonstration, given that most of us hope our leaders will think and act deliberately once in office. But if “I reason well!” is tough to pull off as a Presidential campaign tagline, could reason become a campaign slogan in some other context?

This issue was brought home recently when looking at two authors (well, three actually) who appeal to reason in the context of political decision making.

The first is former US Vice President Al Gore whose 2007 book The Assault on Reason was a political broadside published during the last years of the Bush administration.

While much of the book is dedicated to listing what Gore perceives to be the many failings of the man to whom the author lost the 2000 US elections, undergirding these criticisms is an argument that “reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions.”

According to Gore, a combination of political corruption and dumbed-down public dialog (created by saturation media distorted by partisan and corporate interests) has reduced the country’s ability to think clearly, to base important decision on reason and logic, rather than ideology and superstition.

No doubt skepticism over global warming (the subject of Gore’s best-selling An Inconvenient Truth) was playing a role in the author’s analysis that both the public and its leaders were failing to act logically and reasonably. And without getting into the substance of the global warming debate, the relevant point for readers of this blog is that a skilled politician and celebrated political author felt that the public (or at least a large segment of it) would sympathize with the argument that reason should prevail in politics and public policy.

If your position on one of Gore’s issues (or Gore himself) prevents you from looking at his work from a non-partisan perspective, a second book that makes a similar argument (albeit from a completely opposite political perspective) might provide some distance.

The World Turned Upside Down by British journalist and author Melanie Phillips makes the same argument as Gore (that the world is rapidly losing its ability to reason and think critically about important political subjects). But in her case, the issues we debate irrationally are the very ones Gore sees reason providing settled answers to (such as global warming and how the US got into a war with Iraq).

Now Phillips ties her observations into what she perceives as a growth in superstitions belief, lumping together New Age cults, 9/11 conspiracy theories and unquestioned faith in subjects such as man-made global warming and even human evolution into a single phenomena which she traces to people desperately searching for meaning in a post-religious age.

And while her choice of targets may not fit together as well as the author thinks, again we should note that she is not calling for a return to decision-making based on religious belief. Rather, she is claiming that in our post-religious age, reason does not take the lead but instead morphs into its own cult of irrationality.

Again, separating out the writer’s particular politics (as we did with Gore’s), we are left with a political writer (this one from the opposite end of the political spectrum to the former Vice President’s) who feels that her audience will respond positively to the argument that our polity should be informed by logic and reason, even if she feels that logic and reason lead to a very different place than where Al Gore had ended up.

The third author I alluded to earlier is Lee Harris, author of such books as Civilization and Its Enemies and The Suicide of Reason. While his political point of view (notably as a critique of radical Islam) makes him controversial as well, his arguments regarding politics and reason takes aim at reason itself.

His main thesis is that the culture of reason that many in the West live under (and both Gore and Phillips are playing to) is not the result of mankind taking the next evolutionary step towards progress (leading to an end of history, with all societies eventually being run by rational actors). Rather, he sees the reasoning society as itself a sub-culture, a sub-culture that could never have been created by reason alone.

I will leave the details of his arguments for another time, but suffice to say that whenever we are trying to apply the principles of critical thinking (logic, reason, analytical weighing of evidence) to political debate we are embarking on a highly artificial project, a project that would confuse (and possibly appall) most people throughout history, as well as a fair number of people living today.