Faith, Reason, and Other False Dichotomies
from Jordan M. Poss @ Jordan M. Poss: Blog, Ltd.A recent article from Wired magazine showcases the incredible personal library of tech guru Jay Walker. Described in rich detail--though, oddly, without stating the actual number of books--the 3600-square foot library features Escher-inspired floor paneling and scores of museum piece books and objects, including a 16th-century Coverdale Bible and an Enigma code machine. Singled out for special mention is an illuminated celestial atlas. The atlas dates to 1660 and includes, says Walker, "first published maps where Earth was not the center of the solar system. . . . It divides the age of faith from the age of reason."
One of the most popular, difficult, and widely-disseminated attacks on "faith"--supposedly meaning religion in general but almost always Christianity in particular--is the idea that faith and reason--meaning science--cannot and have never coexisted.
I've recently encountered the idea, albeit in subtle, almost subconscious form, in my graduate historiography class. The majority of the class expressed impatience with the great medieval historians Bede and Gregory of Tours, who spend entirely too much time reporting missionary activity and mircles and blame everything on "the work of the devil." By contrast, the renaissance historians we studied the next week were "more rational," "more critical," and "more analytical."
The situation is only aggravated by a rigidly enforced false dichotomy--faith or reason, never both; anyone choosing faith necessarily abandons reason and becomes a pariah. Actor Matt Damon recently attacked vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin as an "absurd" choice, saying at one point in his rant: "I need to know if she really thinks dinosaurs were here 4,000 years ago. That's an important--I want to know that, I really do, because she's going to have the nuclear codes."
Dinosaurs and nuclear codes? What looks at first like a typical Hollywood non sequitur shows, on further examination, typical modern prejudice against "faith." What Damon alludes to is Palin's purported belief in creationism (extrapolated from her "Bible-believing" Christianity and the fact that she wants creationism and evolutionary theory taught in schools), a belief she holds for religious reasons. Since creationism--and its recent cousin Intelligent Design--fly in the face of established science, Palin has sacrificed reason for faith--regardless of how she came to the decision--and anyone who prefers the latter over the former must be mentally unstable. That is, someone you don't want to have "the nuclear codes."
Anyone and everyone is open to ridicule. President Bush is routinely lampooned as a religious moron. The trailers for Oliver Stone's upcoming film W. even show a Jesus impersonator lugging a cross past the window of a diner, pairing Bush with bizarre religious imagery from the get-go. Religious people are clearly nuts.
And when the religious protest, the rational point out that the faith-reason divide is historically attested. Remember the Dark Ages, when the Church held sway and people believed the earth was flat? Remember Galileo, Copernicus, and their struggle with the Church?
First, Westerners since ancient times--those who cared to think about it, at any rate--have believed in a spherical earth. St. Augustine, Bede, St. Thomas Aquinas, Dante--all believed in a spherical earth, and Dante especially hinged the physics of his Divine Comedy on the idea of crawling through the center of the earth, going so far as to depict himself and his guide Virgil climbing down and then up without changing direction:
"You think you're still on the center's other side,"[Virgil] said, "where I first grabbed the hairy wormof rottenness that pierces the earth's core;and you were there as long as I moved downwardbut, when I turned myself, you passed the pointto which all weight from every part is drawn."
(Inferno, XXXI, 106-111)
Pretty sophisticated for a religious nut.
"[P]hysically considered," wrote C.S. Lewis, who was a scholar of Renaissance literature and a man of faith, "the earth is a globe; all the authors of the Middle Ages are agreed on this." The flat-earth theory, it turns out, originates with a mock "history" of Christopher Columbus written by Washington Irving, placing the story on the same level as Rip van Winkle and the Headless Horseman.
But the most often-repeated story is that of Galileo Galilei.
Most first encounter Galileo in elementary school, where they learn that he improved the telescope and looked at the planets and stars, and learn perhaps later that he supported Nicolaus Copernicus's heliocentric theory--the idea to which Jay Walker refers in Wired, that the earth orbits the sun and not vice versa. That's when he got in trouble with the Church.
The story as usually told is that the Church disliked Galileo's experiments and solar observations, because science threatens religious belief (the dichotomy cropping up again). The officially accepted theory of the day--apparently given the status and endorsement enjoyed by evolution today--was that the sun, the planets, and the universe all the way to the "fixed stars" revolved around earth. Copernicus's theory contradicted that, and Galileo, within striking distance of Rome unlike the late Copernicus, supported him. At that point the Church stepped in to defend its power against the new theory, and Galileo was forced by the Inquisition to recant, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest for questioning the authority of the Church.
This is religion's "war" against science. Argue at length over the faith and reason dichotomy and this story will put in an appearance.
The story has myriad problems, not the least of which is that Galileo and Copernicus were both devoutly religious and that Pope Leo X was interested in heliocentrism--unlike Calvin and Luther. Galileo even dedicated his Assayer, a tract rejecting any authority outside of observation and reasoning, to Pope Urban VIII.
But a problem seldom pointed out is that the geocentric view held by the Church was that put forward by Aristotle--not a Christian, but a pagan and a convinced materialist. Galileo and Copernicus weren't arguing with the Church, they were arguing with Aristotle.
And the Church's resistance to the idea is easily understandable. Long-held ideas, especially those that matter deeply to the believer, are often bitterly defended. "This fool," Luther said of Copernicus, "wishes to reverse the entire scheme of astronomy." If you want to imagine mainstream reaction to a theory that upends generations or even centuries of established thought, look no further than Intelligent Design. Ben Stein, producer and star of a documentary on Intelligent Design and freedom of speech, has been viciously harangued since the release of the film as "hysterical," "unprincipled," and the star of "creationist porn."
But the problem is that Aristotelian theory didn't matter that much to the Church, which is why Christianity is still here and geocentrism is not. Once the new, untested Copernican theory was not so new and had been tested, the Church wholeheartedly embraced the idea and has been quick--some would say too quick--to embrace new scientific development ever since.
So much for Galileo versus the Church. But does that prove that the either-or between faith and reason is a false dichotomy?
Galileo can certainly be taken as a case in point, but if you need more proof there's always more. Copernicus, Newton, Mendel, and dozens of other scientists of the past were devoutly religious and there are many religious scientists today. And the development of more modern, more sophisticated sciences in the renaissance and early modern era do not prove that the Christianity-dominated Middle Ages were a scientific dead zone--without medieval developments in logic, historiography, engineering, mechanization, education, economics, and manufacture the world would be a much "darker" place than it believes it is now. Or, as Anthony Esolen poetically puts it,
Jay Walker is confused--there is, historically, no divide between ages of faith and reason. But it's strange that such an enlightened, scientific, rational age as our own should have such fear of competition from "faith."Magnificent churches, whose ingenuity challenges the most daring of modern architecture, and whose liveliness and beauty leave us far behind, stipple the continent. And who builds these, but teams of ordinary men? Modern music is born in the modes of Gregorian chant; one Guido of Arezzo invents Western musical notation. Capitalism is born, and international banking, and credit, and modern accounting. . . . The university comes into being, along with its stagy oral examinations, colorful, combative, and public. No fear of competition here.
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