PZ Myers at Pharyngula posted a photograph yesterday depicting one of those signs with movable letters that churches love to put up. This one says:
Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has.
Yeah, probably. Myers calls that “an irreconcilable difference” between faith and reason. Lots of religious people seem to think that reason enriches faith, but after reading piles of books by religious people who adopt that position, I am not convinced. They refuse to let reason affect everything they do. But the Baptists who posted that sign know better: reason prevails when you give it free run of the premises.
Try it. Put your faith up against your reason and stop giving faith a free pass. Scrutinize it. If it’s worth anything, it will stand up to scrutiny. And if it doesn’t, why would you want a faith that can’t withstand reasoned criticism?
Hey Peter! I just found your blog. It was good to hang out the other night and we should do it again shortly.
On your comments above:
I would not agree with the Baptist statement “reason is the greatest enemy that faith has.” However, I do think reason and faith can coexist.
Isn’t it difficult to pit such disparate categories as “reason” and “faith” up against each other, and to see which one might win? I see reason and faith as two separate dimensions of the human experience. The very fact that you can reason away a purpose or reason for faith, yet still have faith, is evidence of this; or in the reverse, the very fact that one might have several reasons for believing in the existence of God, but still fails to believe, is also an example of the different planes on which faith and reason reside.
That being said, I don’t think that either faith or reason could really trump the other. Faith predated the Modern era and the age of reason, but during and after the Modern era, faith was grabbed by the horns and wrangled and as a result was either discarded altogether, or (and probably much worse), was taken and attempted to be set up as a logical or reasonable act of human behavior. Currently, in the post modern movement, there has been a shift back toward an experiential relationship with the Divine, rather than focusing on “the top logical reasons to believe in God.” After almost losing my faith altogether by reasoning the hell out of it, this is where I have currently found a safe place for my faith to reside. I think faith and reason can cross paths, may once in a while linger together, but will often part ways again. Isn’t this true?
Whatup, Paul. Thanks for stopping by. I can’t resist a good conversation about religion.
Your comment does a pretty good job of avoiding anything that might tend to conflict with it, which is also a pretty good illustration of what I was trying to get at. You suggest, for example, a “shift back toward an experiential relationship with the Divine, rather than focusing on ‘the top logical reasons to believe in God.’” But there is no possible way to get from “an experiential relationship with the Divine” to the specific tenets of religion, e.g., there is some entity called “God.”
In the sentence I quoted, you referred to both “the Divine” and “God,” and then in the next sentence implied that “an experiential relationship with the Divine” led you a belief in “God.” But look at that more closely. I don’t think you can get there from here. Your method involves three elements: (1) experience (2) conceptualized as a relationship (3) with “the Divine.”
The first element is obvious and unavoidable. Everyone experiences something. But the second and third elements are where you’re smuggling a whole lot of other unstated information into the assertion.
First, when you use the words “the Divine,” you’re not really talking about a broadly agreed upon, neutrally applicable label. You might say, alternatively, “existence” or “being,” and only the silliest of sophists would still insist that an “experience of existence” or an “experience of being” is not universally shared. But you didn’t choose those words, and instead opted for “the Divine,” which comes with all kinds of baggage. Is “the Divine” something other than “existence” or “being”? Many people would say yes, and you may be one of them, but if that is the answer, then what exactly is that additional stuff that comprises “the Divine.” More importantly, how do you know what it is? You suggest that an experiential approach will lead to specific knowledge (e.g., of “the Divine”), but you have already stacked the deck by saying that the thing you experience is the Divine.
In other words, if experience is how you know things, and you begin by assuming that what you experience can be called “the Divine,” and you also claim from the outset (as you may or may not) that “the Divine” is something more than what is described by the words “being” or “existence,” then your experience could not have brought you to that knowledge: you began with that knowledge. So, again, the question arises: where did you get it?
Second, when you talk about “a relationship with the Divine,” by referring to “the Divine” instead of “God,” you’re also making a pretty specific decision not to refer to a “personal” entity, e.g., the Christian God. So when you advocate a relationship with “the Divine,” how is that any different from saying that people should choose to conceptualize their experience of being as a relationship? That gives you the hammer-and-nail problem: Relationships are between personal entities, but if you are not saying from the outset that “the Divine” is a personal entity (e.g., God), yet urging people to conceptualize their experience with “the Divine” (or with “existence” or “being”), aren’t you just creating a psychological predisposition to see “existence” or “being” as a personal entity, so that it becomes, at least to them, “the Divine” or even a personal God? If all you want is a relationship, then everything looks like a personal entity.
From that, it appears that you’re implying that one of the chief ways “the Divine” is more than “being” or “existence” is that it has a personal nature and is capable of having a relationship with individual people. But your method for attaining that knowledge is by packing it into a certain attitude—a relational attitude—and then receiving exactly what one would expect to receive when one tries to have a relationship with existence: a sense that existence is a personal entity.
“Faith” is how you might try to make an end-run around all those epistemological difficulties: since perception, reason, and science give you no way to derive information about God from the world around you, faith will lead the way. But what is the content of that faith, and where do you get that from?
In other words, why would you decide to have “a relationship with the Divine” in the first place? If there are no “logical reasons to believe in God,” then where do you get the concept of God in the first place? You can’t obtain genuine knowledge by adopting a relational attitude with existence because then you are very clearly just setting yourself up for anthropomorphism. So where do you get it?
In other words, even if you say that faith is independent of reason, and that it is a legitimate way of obtaining genuine knowledge about something real, there is no way to demonstrate that. Faith must always begin with an assumption. Someone who says “have faith that God exists” must begin by assuming that there is a “God” to exist. Why not say “have faith that an alien race lives deep below the surface of Mars”? Where do you get the content for that statement of faith?
Using reason to obtain knowledge means you have a method, usually called the scientific method, that recognizes ignorance is the beginning of knowledge, poses falsifiable hypotheses, and then tests them to see if they hold up. Faith, on the other hand, denies that those initial assertions spring from ignorance, never tests them, and then treats them like genuine information. You can object that faith deals with things that aren’t falsifiable, but then in what sense does faith do anything other than provide an imaginative filler where ignorance is intractable? For example, since we don’t know the precise nature of existence, we imaginatively approach it as a relationship, and then posit that our relationship with existence puts us in touch with something “other” and we call it “the Divine.” It’s not that there’s anything wrong with doing that—just as there’s nothing wrong with watching television or reading novels—but why should the specific assertions claimed to be derived from that approach be given any more weight than something I saw on television or read in a novel? It makes for a good time and a stimulating discussion, but has no substantial bearing on the real world.
And that’s the real problem with the more vocal religious people these days. Once upon a time, before people developed a systematic means of testing their assertions about the world, faith was what everybody used. Religious leaders held a lot of sway. Whole societies were organized around the assertions they made. But now, even though we have a much better system for deriving knowledge, a lot of religious people still want to be in charge. They want everyone, even people from different religions or with no religion at all, to accept their assertions as authoritative, and to build policy around them. But why would we do that when we have a much better way to build reliable knowledge? We can certainly differ regarding our political and ethical opinions, and for many people those may be deeply affected by their religious beliefs, but just like any other political opinion, nobody is automatically right just because they claim to derive their assertions from God or “the Divine.”
On the other hand, getting back to the idea of adopting a relational attitude, the practical aspect of some religions is certainly valuable for developing a steady approach to life. Conceptualizing things a certain way, engaging in rituals like prayer or meditation, and participating in the social functions of religion are obviously useful and have great value many people, for lots of different reasons, from providing basic psychological comfort to offering an integrative community in which to explore social possibilities. But isn’t that just what happens to faith after the onslaught of reason, and we recognize that religious communities are better at practical aid than providing genuine knowledge about reality?
Peter,
I really appreciate your comments. I too enjoy a good debate about religion. Let me state first that your reaction to my earlier post corroborates my assertion: you can engage faith with the mind and with reason, discard it (your choice), hold on to it and make it “reasonable” (not your choice, and not my choice of preference), or hold on to it whether or not it is reasonable (my preference).
For all of the terminology: Divine, God, Being, Person, etc., it doesn’t really matter what you call it. There is no need to become entangled in semantics. I really do not want to “hide” or “smuggle” (as you said) any beliefs within any terms. By the way, I did not state that there are “no logical reasons for God.” That is essentially what that Baptist sign said. I stated that regardless of whether or not you have reasons for faith (in God or whatever you want to call it–I call it “God,” amongst other things), faith can still exist. For whatever “reason” (or for none at all), faith always has and it (probably) always will exist.
You asked me where I get it. I guess I get it from all over the place (nature, the Bible, people, SOMETIMES reason). I know you have problems with the Bible, and quite frankly, so do I. I am not an apologist for the Bible, but what I mean when I say the Bible is that SOME of the stories within it resonate with me as being true (if not literally, then at least allegorically). I have no interest in proving to you that the Bible is true, that you should “follow” it, be enlightened by it, or anything else. I am simply explaining that it has been an integral work of literature in my faith. For example, my relational ideas about faith come from the Bible, from the story of God becoming incarnate to re-establish a lost connection with humanity. If there was a story about a Martian race living deep beneath the surface of Mars, I might consider having faith in that. A lot of people do without literature to support the notion. Actually, I am open to consider the possibility of Martians on Mars even without literature. But to answer your question about the source of my faith, the Bible is just one of many sources that I listed above.
I vehemently share your sentiments about religion being used as a tool of social manipulation. That pisses me off as much as it does you. I also appreciate your comments about faith being good for psychological health (I would assert physical health as well) and for establishing communities.
So far as other people’s beliefs go, my view is that everybody has (or should have) freedom of conscience to believe as fits their outlook and freedom of speech to say what follows. And I have never met an atheist, even of the really hardcore kind, who disagrees.
The problem is when people use their religious beliefs to justify conduct that harms others—especially children—or when they demand that their religious beliefs be given the weight of law.
An example of the harmful conduct arising from religion is when people refuse to let doctors treat their sick children, or when they engage in conduct that, but for their religious beliefs, would otherwise be openly recognized by everyone in society as cruel, insane, or torturous. That we give these people a free pass simply because their conduct is rooted in religion is unconscionable, in my opinion. (A great resource on this issue is Marci Hamilton’s book God vs. the Gavel.)
People demanding that their religious beliefs be given the weight of law occurs in many contexts, but the most commonly known ones are trying to make it a legal requirement that biology teachers include “intelligent design” or some other variant of creationism in their curriculum and religious people thinking they deserve exemptions from the laws they don’t want to follow for religious reasons. Another big one that has gripped California is the whole same-sex marriage thing. Nobody seriously believes that outlawing same-sex marriage is anything but a religiously motivated demand that the laws of society reflect the morality of a religious group, even to the detriment of the affected members (i.e., gay and lesbian couples), even when allowing same-sex marriage would have no significant effect on the people who oppose it. The people behind Proposition 8 have no sense of law as reflecting, say, an overlapping consensus, and not exceeding those things to which all or substantially all can agree.
On the political level are the people who essentially want to establish a theocratic state. I don’t care if you want to have religious beliefs and be in office, or if you want to practice your religion as a way of seeking guidance for decision-making, but to demand that anyone else do the same is unacceptable.
Anyway, religion and law present what I think is one of the most difficult and important set of questions for our society today. Our world is so complex (as the current economic situation demonstrates) that we need the most rational and informed decision-making possible. Religion is not going to help out in that respect. Intuition will not help either. We need real knowledge that will take the place of ideology, be it spiritual or economic. Making up stories to fuel beliefs that make people feel integrated and loved offers no reality-check. (See, e.g., Nazi Germany.)