Reason and Faith

The New York Times today has a worthwhile article on Faith and Reason
and how the two are inseperable and seemingly incompatible. Especially
read the last several paragraphs, even if you don't like those at the
beginning of the essay.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/20/arts/20FAIT.html?ex=1072936830&ei=1&en=44d0cec78f5d3aad

Reason and Faith, Eternally Bound
 
December 20, 2003
 By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
 
One might have expected the forces of Reason to be a bit
weary after a generation of battling postmodernism and
having its power and authority under constant scrutiny.
Reason's battles, though, continue unabated. Only now it
finds its opposition in the more unyielding claims of
religious faith. This latest conflict is over seemingly
incompatible ways of knowing the world. It is a conflict
between competing certainties: between followers of Faith,
who know because they believe, and followers of Reason, who
believe because they know.
 
This battle echoes others taking place between
fundamentalist terror, which claims the authority of Faith,
and Western modernity, which claims the authority of
Reason. But some of Reason's combatants - as if reading
from the postmodernist strategy book - are also challenging
the heritage of the West, arguing that it, too, has been
riddled with absolutist faith, that the reasoned
achievements of the Enlightenment are still under threat
and that a new understanding of the past must take shape,
in which Reason's martyrdom and trials take center stage.
 
One motivation for Reason's latest salvos is political. A
Gallup poll last year said that about 40 percent of
Americans considered themselves evangelicals or born-again
Christians. They include the president, the attorney
general, the speaker of the House and the House majority
leader.
 
Critics of the Bush administration's policies sometimes
cite such beliefs as evidence of the administration's
potential fundamentalism and intolerance. In the recent
book "A Devil's Chaplain" (Houghton Mifflin, $24), for
example, Richard Dawkins, the Oxford University
evolutionary biologist, worries about American responses to
the attacks of 9/11 because "the United States is the most
religiose country in Christendom, and its born-again leader
is eyeball to eyeball with the most religiose people on
Earth."
 
Mr. Dawkins has long been a harsh critic of religion, which
he considers a form of infectious virus that readily
replicates, spreading its distortions. Last summer he
lobbied in The Guardian for adopting "bright" as a noun to
mean atheist (as in "I'm a bright. You're a bright").
 
The philosopher Daniel C. Dennett echoed his urgings in an
Op-Ed article in The New York Times. Mr. Dawkins and Mr.
Dennett argue that brights are a beleaguered group
confronting a growing religious right; they urge brights to
emerge from their closet and boldly proclaim their
identity.
 
"So, what's the opposite of a bright?" Mr. Dawkins imagines
someone asking, "What would you call a religious person?"
 
"What would you suggest?" he coyly responds.
 
There are of
course approaches that are less blunt and more liberal
minded, but the sense of embattlement and polemic has
become familiar. In the recent book "The Closing of the
Western Mind" (Knopf, $30), for example, Charles Freeman
argues that Western history has to be retold. Over the
course of centuries, he points out, the ancient Greeks
recognized the importance of reason, giving birth to the
techniques of modern science and mathematics, and
establishing the foundations of the modern state. But then,
he writes, came "the closing of the Western mind."
 
In the fourth and fifth century, he writes, the Greek
intellectual tradition "was destroyed by the political and
religious forces which made up the highly authoritarian
government of the late Roman empire," particularly with the
imposition of Christian orthodoxy. For a millennium
doctrine ruled. Reason became heresy.
 
It is precisely this sort of heresy that Jennifer Michael
Hecht celebrates in "Doubt: A History" (HarperSanFrancisco,
$27.95), which outlines the views of those who rejected
dominant doctrines of faith or proclaimed disbelief in the
existence of God. Her loosely defined roster of doubters
ranges from the ancient Greeks to Zen Buddhists, along with
such familiar figures as Galileo, Hobbes, Gibbon, Tom Paine
and Thomas Jefferson.
 
Ms. Hecht is more generous than Mr. Dawkins, noting that
just as there are believers who "refuse to consider the
reasonableness of doubt," so, too, there are nonbelievers
who "refuse to consider the feeling of faith." But her
sympathies are committed to the doubters, including such
unusual figures as the Islamic philosopher and physician
Abu Bakr al-Razi (854-925) and Annie Besant, who wrote a
"Gospel of Atheism" in 1876, helped reform London schools
with free meals and medical care, and later in life became
a theosophist and a translator of the Bhagavad-Gita.
 
Ms. Hecht's goal is to provide an affirmative history for
doubters. "To be a doubter," she writes, "is a great old
allegiance, deserving quiet respect and open pride."
 
What, though, is the nature of this doubt? Its demarcation
from faith is not as precise as these descriptions suggest.
Doubt can become a rigid orthodoxy in its own right. In
contemporary life, as Ms. Hecht seems to know, doubt has
become almost axiomatic (as if it were a matter of faith).
 
Meanwhile faith itself is riddled with doubt. As Ms. Hecht
points out, many religious texts (like Job or Augustine's
"Confessions") are also accounts of doubt.
 
Yet in these arguments faith is often portrayed as
monolithic, a host for intolerance and inquisition. And
while that has been part of many religions' history - and
is, as Mr. Freeman shows, part of the history of
Christianity - the nature of faith is far more complex.
 
In his recent book, "The Transformation of American
Religion" (Free Press, $26) for example, the sociologist
Alan Wolfe suggests that evangelical Christians in the
United States cannot be thought of as they once were.
Religion, he argues, has been transformed by American
culture to become therapeutic, individualistic and less
interested in doctrine than in faith.
 
Nor is faith always unreasonable. Religious beliefs were
fundamental to the abolition of slavery in the 19th century
and to the civil rights movement in the 20th. Faith may
even be latent in some of science's triumphs, inspiring
such figures as Newton and Kepler. The conviction that
there is an order to things, that the mind can comprehend
that order and that this order is not infinitely malleable,
those scientific beliefs may include elements of faith.
 
Reason also has its own problems. Isaiah Berlin argued that
the Enlightenment led to the belief that human beings could
be reshaped according to reason's dictates. And out of that
science of human society, he argued, came such totalitarian
dystopias as the Soviet Union.
 
Reason then, has its limits. The philosopher Robert
Fogelin's new book, "Walking the Tightrope of Reason"
(Oxford, $22) is subtitled "The Precarious Life of a
Rational Animal" because, he argues, reason's own processes
negotiate a precipice. Mr. Fogelin quotes Kant, who
described a dove who "cleaving the air in her free flight,
and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight
would be still easier in empty space."
 
Failing to understand what keeps her aloft and taking a
leap of faith, the dove might set off in "empty space" - a
vacuum - and plummet. But reason might lead to the same
end: if something offers resistance then logically can't
one proceed more easily if it is eliminated? So why not
try?
 
The problem is that the bird can never fully comprehend the
medium through which it experiences the world. In many
ways, Kant argued, neither could the mind. Reason is still
the only tool available for certain knowledge, but it also
presents questions it is unable to answer fully.
 
Some of those questions may remain even after contemporary
battles cease: how much faith is involved in the workings
of reason and how much reason lies in the assertions of
faith?
 

 
Received on Sat Dec 20 11:45:06 2003