Remember logical positivism? If you weren’t a philosophy major in college, quite probably you don’t, since it cropped up around the time of the first World War, and was pretty much dead by the second. It was an anti-metaphysical school of philosophy that sought to pare down the proper domain of rationally meaningful propositions to those that were either simple truths of logic (“analytic” truths) or the empirically verifiable statements of science (“synthetic” truths). For reasons I’m not going to slog through here, a general consensus emerged that it wasn’t a terribly adequate theory. But to read Lee Harris (oh, Lee Harris…), riffing on Pope Benedict’s recent controversial speech on faith and reason in the pages of The Weekly Standard, you might think it was still all the rage among secular intellectuals. This is pretty ballsy, since when conservatives want to take potshots at some intellectual strawman, they usually keep themselves at least current enough to flog the equine corpse of postmodernism.
Harris’ main point—after a somewhat rambling historical prelude—is that Benedict is right to criticize “modern reason” as too impoverished and thin to deal with serious questions of ethics and metaphysics. But his summary of what “modern reason” consists in could have been pulled straight from the Vienna Circle:
Modern reason argues that questions of ethics, of religion, and of God are outside its compass. Because there is no scientific method by which such questions can be answered, modern reason cannot concern itself with them, nor should it try to. From the point of view of modern reason, all religious faiths are equally irrational, all systems of ethics equally unverifiable, all concepts of God equally beyond rational criticism….To the modern atheist, both Gods are equally figments of the imagination, in which case it would be ludicrous to discuss their relative merits. The proponent of modern reason, therefore, could not possibly think of participating in a dialogue on whether Christianity or Islam is the more reasonable religion, since, for him, the very notion of a “reasonable religion” is a contradiction in terms.
Now, Harris goes on to say some interesting and basically sound things about the importance of recognizing “reason” and “rationality” as historical, human cultural achievements with a specific historical pedigree, rather than something naturally inscribed in every human mind. But his picture of what actual contemporary secular thinkers would regard as the proper scope of reason seems badly off.
For instance, the idea that reason has nothing to say on questions like the existence of God does have some modern defenders, like the late Steven Jay Gould, who promoted the idea of science and faith as nonoverlapping magisteria. But that always had the air of self-defense rather than genuine conviction about it: “Look, let’s stay in our own little domains, so don’t try to throw Darwin out of the classroom and we can just pretend our research has no implications for your theological propositions.” Richard Dawkins has a good riff on this notion in his new book, which I mentioned the other day. It’s true, of course, that if the standard here is absolute apodictic proof, then we cannot “prove” or “disprove” the existence of God. But almost nothing—no propositions of science, not even the fact that you’re sitting in a chair right now really reading a blog post—is subject to that level of proof. But if we’re talking about coming up with reasons for assigning some level of probability to a proposition, of course we can do that. We can, for instance, notice that complexity in the universe seems to arise slowly through very gradual processes like natural selection, and that a being of such mindboggling complexity as a God just existing, in the absence of some further explanation of how such complexity emerged, is not very probable at all.
As for weighing the relative merits of different varieties of faith, Harris seems to be conflating what John Rawls would’ve labeled as the distinct concepts of “rationality” and “reasonableness.” Two faiths might be equally irrational to believe—though not necessarily, since one might have a concept of God that was in some way internally contradictory, which would be still less rational—but differentially “reasonable” in the sense of being amenable to peaceful cooperation and discussion with others. I can have a perfectly “reasonable” discussion on some issue with a person I think has come to an “irrational” conclusion about it.
Maybe the thing I find most perplexing, though, is the apparently widespread notion that secular thinkers just can’t have anything to say about ethics beyond treating it as a matter of subjective taste, like a preference for strawberries over kiwis. There are ethicists working in just about every philosophy department in the country, churning out books and articles in large quantities. I haven’t done a random survey, but on the basis of my sample, I think I can confidently estimate that the large majority of these people (and philosopehrs generally) are atheists. What does Harris think they’re doing all day? Just writing “I have nothing interesting to say” over and over again?
The version of secular reason Harris sets up as his foil would indeed be thin and inadequate, unsuited to guide us in resolving many of life’s central questions. How fortunate that it’s a version most of us rejected a long time ago, even without the benefit of papal insights.
