Reason Versus Faith

By Richard Wolin
The Chronicle of Higher Education
June 15, 2009

Edited by Andy Ross

In 1802, Georg W.F. Hegel wrote an impassioned treatise on faith and reason. The Enlightenment credo celebrated the sovereignty of reason. From that standpoint, human intellect was a self-sufficient measure of the true, the just, and the good. Religion was viewed as the last redoubt of delusion and superstition.

Soon skeptics and naysayers emerged to cast doubt on the Enlightenment conceit. What if ultimate reality weren't attainable by the methods of secular reason? What if the Absolute had more to do with the faculties of the imagination or the unfathomable mysteries of the human unconscious?

We haven't gotten much beyond that landmark dispute between faith and reason. For with the exception of Western Europe, a global revival of spirituality has occurred in reaction to the broken promises of enlightened modernity.

Jurgen Habermas now refers to the advent of a "postsecular society" to characterize religiosity's staying power. He questions whether modern societies possess the moral resources to persevere without their religious roots.

In his political theology, Carl Schmitt argued that all modern political concepts are secularized versions of theological concepts. He sought to call into question the legitimacy of the modern age, which in his view fed parasitically off of a nobler theological past.

Marxism provided a framework for radical social criticism. But with Communism's demise, the discourse of critique has seemingly been deprived of an immanent, secular basis. This is one key reason behind the revival of scholarly interest in political theology.

A Secular Age is the title of a hefty tome published by Charles Taylor. To judge by his account, religiosity resembles a lifestyle choice: "In our 'secular' societies, you can engage fully in politics without ever encountering God, that is, coming to a point where the crucial importance of the God of Abraham for this whole enterprise is brought home forcefully and unmistakably."

In Taylor's view, the failings of a secular age are egregious and manifold. He claims that we live in an era of "exclusive humanism." To him, the ideal of "fullness" is tied to ends that surmount both the self as well as the profane ends of creaturely life, and such ends can only be religious or transcendent.

Taylor indicts the multifarious shortcomings of a secular age. In his view, modernity's "crisis of meaning" has reached grave and epidemic proportions. As denizens of a fallen world, our social existence has withered to the point where we have become a mass of atomized selves. We have become incapable of community.

Taylor is incapable of conceiving of meaning in secular terms. Taylor refuses to acknowledge that dogmatic religious doctrines have stood in the way of meaningful self-determination. Historically, the fundamentalist credo whose loss he mourns has inhibited freedom of inquiry, tolerance, human rights, and political emancipation.

Max Weber: "The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the 'disenchantment of the world.'" For Weber, the rise of rationalization meant that in the modern age all aspects of life are increasingly subjected to the solvent of instrumental reason.

Scientific skeptics challenge religion's resurgence. They argue that since religion is an illusion and since illusions are detrimental to progress, the world would be a better place were the last vestiges of belief entirely extirpated.

Historically, belief and meaning have been integrally intertwined. To reject belief in the name of science potentially aggravates the crisis of meaning.

Religion's neo-Darwinian detractors seem unable to fathom the correlation. They are tone deaf when it comes to comprehending the attractions of belief and spirituality for a great many denizens of our hyperrationalized, disenchanted cosmos. Richard Dawkins's portrayal of belief is so dismissive and simplistic that one wonders why anyone would embrace such demented and malicious ideals.

In Breaking the Spell, Daniel Dennett describes the suicidal behavior of an ant that repeatedly strives to climb to the top of a blade of grass where it can be better spied by potential predators. It turns out that the insect is the victim of a parasite that, to the ant's peril, is angling for the completion of its own reproductive cycle. Dennett treats this vignette as a cautionary tale about the perils of religion as an instance of demonic possession.

From a narrowly neo-Darwinian perspective, it is impossible to account for religion's indispensable role in forming the higher ideals that help to make our species genuinely civilized.

>> Wolin on veiled intolerance
 

AR  Irritatingly triumphalist and combative, as bad as Dawkins at his most abrasive. And the claimed impossibility at the end is unwarranted — my own Godblogs account in terms of the autophenomenology of genocentricity is just such an "impossible" account.
 

Science and Religion

By James Hannam
The Guardian, June 14, 2009

Edited by Andy Ross

As the battle between creationism and evolution heats up, some atheists have been insisting that it is really a battle between religion and science. For their position to make sense, they need to show that there is some sort of existential conflict between religion and science. But the historical record clearly shows that accommodation and even cooperation have been the default positions.

The popular perception of a historical conflict remains strong. As Ron Numbers at Wisconsin-Madison ruefully admits, "Despite a developing consensus among scholars that science and Christianity have not been at war, the notion of conflict has refused to die." He has edited a new collection of essays, published by Harvard University Press, called Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion.

Much of the evidence for the conflict myth is bogus. Not only are most people ignorant of the real history, but what they think they know about it is actually untrue. The conflict between science and creationism is the exception, not the rule. For most of history, science and religion have rubbed along just fine.
 

AR  I am happy to accept this verdict on the history. My own view is that science is an "ultimate" purification of belief just as Christianity was once an "ultimate" purification of religion.