‘Rational Religion’

To inject a slightly cosmic tone into this blog at the earliest possible stage ...

Religion: ‘belief in … a higher unseen controlling power or powers’ (Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary).  Isn’t it inherently irrational?  To answer the question ‘Why does anything exist?’ with ‘Because an invisible super-person put it there’ seems like fairly childish guesswork; and religious experience, a sense of the presence of gods and spirits, can easily be explained in terms of the poorly understood quirks of the human brain.

Yet arguably it is ‘rational’ to have a religion, if ‘rational’ means ‘knowing what’s good for you’; plenty of studies show that people with religious beliefs are happier and live longer than those without them.  To take up religion for your health’s sake, though, seems absurdly back-to-front.  Equally arguably, religion can seriously damage your health: it causes wars and justifies oppression.  And yet to wish it away from the world seems about as realistic as wishing humans didn’t have to be bipeds.

It was much simpler in the days when no one needed to make any effort to ‘believe’ in God – when gods and spirits were just ‘there’.  Then, there was no conflict between rationality and religion.  Having a religion included thinking about it as well and as clearly as you could.  Once reason seems to conflict with religion, however, you are in a no-win situation whichever side you choose.  Choose religion and you have to keep on consciously avoiding certain questions and trains of thought; in effect, choosing to be stupid, as we see so clearly in the case of fundamentalists of all stripes.  But choose your critical faculties and when they have done with demolishing your religion, they turn on everything else, themselves included.  Many philosophers believe that language is a system that refers only to itself and can tell us nothing real about the outside world; hence, that truthfulness and objective knowledge are impossible and that culture is nothing but a jostling crowd of conflicting fantasies – or ‘narratives’.  Stymied by their own logic, they are in no position to defend us from the worst excesses of idiot fundamentalism, for if truth does not exist then is not fundamentalism as valid a viewpoint as any other?

To divorce faith from reason ends by making thinking pointless.  From the religious point of view, thought is unnecessary; from the rational point of view, thought is illusory.  For those of us who actually like to think, and even believe that it is useful, we have to find some way of bringing the two back together, uncomfortable and contradictory though it may be.  To declare that clear thinking is valuable is itself a religious claim, an act of faith as groundless as any supernatural belief.

That is why I wish that there could be a reconciliation between religious people who have room in their belief-system for reason and conscience as well as revelation and authority, and non-religious people who still believe in the ultimate value of truth, as well as other un-provable values like liberty, equality and fraternity.  And that is why, by contrast, I get deeply uneasy when I hear, on the one hand, intelligent Christians saying that they need to make common cause with other believers, not excluding fundamentalists, in the battle against secularism and materialism; and, on the other hand, old-fashioned freethinkers like A.P. Grayling and Richard Dawkins thundering against the tolerant, Enlightenment-upgraded traditional Christianity of the western world as if it were their ultimate enemy, as if there were not far fiercer enemies of reason hemming them in all round. 

It might irritate him inexpressibly to tell him so, but Richard Dawkins is a man of deep faith.  Perhaps the definition of being ‘religious’ needs to be modified from ‘believing in higher unseen powers’ to ‘having a vision of what is ultimately good and sticking to it’.  Dawkins believes in truth at all costs; he believes that we can really know things about the universe; he believes that it is our human vocation to see the world as it is, in all its grandeur and terror, regardless of anything we can get out of it; in theory at least, he is as pure a contemplative as St Anthony of Egypt.  All these positions need faith.  Logic alone will not maintain them.  Recent church leaders in this country, on the other hand, have gone out on a limb to try to defend the humane and reasonable in religion against the forces of visionary fundamentalism – with precious little respect from secular intellectuals. 

So, please, can’t those of us who believe in faith with reason, stand firm on our common ground?  The fundamentalists will accuse us of being wishy-washy sell-outs, the cutting-edge philosophers will call us nostalgic and muddle-headed; we have to wear both badges with pride.