p13 Rationality of Religion

Keith Ward on Worldviewology

By John Taylor; 2008 Feb 06, 19 Sultan, 164 BE

Preparations for school were getting behind this morning and Silvie seeing the clock shouted:

"Would you all just stop not panicking!"

I will try to take her advice with regard to the talk that Peter and I are giving next Wednesday, the 13th of February at Mrs. Javid's. If you have any friends who happen to be heathen, infidels, unbelievers, atheists, lapsed believers -- we are ready for them, so bring them along.

Or, maybe not. Maybe I should stop not panicking. The talk is already a week away and I have hardly begun to absorb the basic materials for the promised subject, the distinctively Baha'i proofs of deity.

In order to give me time to gather my pile of accumulated research materials, today I will pass things over to British theologian and philosophy teacher Keith Ward. His answer to the new atheists taught me at least one thing: that there is such a thing as a worldview. In fact, according to him there are many possible worldviews, none of which is absolutely certain or totally based on evidence. But let him explain it in his own words. Here are the major headings he uses to answer the big question begged by the new atheists: are religious beliefs irrational?

Three worldviews

The contestability of worldviews

The legend of the leap of faith

What makes worldviews reasonable?

from: Keith Ward, Is Religion Dangerous?

(some beliefs) ... are so basic that there are no other beliefs on which they could be based, or from which they could be inferred. We do not get them by observation. Perhaps we could just say these are beliefs that are conditions of the possibility of living and acting in the world as we do. They provide our basic perspective on existence. If they have reasons, those reasons lie in the coherence and integration they bring to all the varied sorts of experience and knowledge that we have.

Three worldviews

Everybody has some basic worldview, even if they would not give their beliefs such a grand title. A worldview is a set of concepts for interpreting experience. It is possible to have a common sense worldview. This would just say that things are as they appear to us. We live in a world of coloured solid objects and we find out what is real by seeing, touching, smelling or tasting things. This is a pretty naive view, and it collapses as soon as we know about the scientific finding that colour and solidity are how objects appear to our senses, while the underlying reality is very different. It could be atoms or sub-atomic particles. It could be something even stranger, like superstrings in eleven dimensions. Whatever it is, reality is not what it seems to the senses, and we do not find out what is real just by seeing and touching things at all.

A different worldview that owes more to modern science is the materialist worldview. For this view, reality is what science, especially physics, says it is. We discover what is real by experiment, certainly, but we would not even be able to devise and understand experiments in quantum physics unless we had a great deal of mathematical ability and a great deal of theory, which we accept basically because of its elegance and predictive power. Materialism is the view that reality is whatever science says it is, and our means of access to it is by highly sophisticated abstract theories, by means of theorising, and not just, as in common sense, by means of the senses.

The appeal of materialism is that it is a fairly simple theory,  reducing reality to just one sort of stuff - matter, energy or superstrings, perhaps. It fits well with the fact that scientific theorising works, and produces amazingly acute predictions. And if we think that human existence seems unplanned, accidental, even cruel and pointless, it provides a theory that confirms those thoughts, and tells us there is no purpose or plan in human existence. There is just the inexorable rule of law, and the blind and purposeless circulation of sub-atomic particles, sometimes giving rise to an illusory appearance of design or intelligence.

However, there are also major problems with materialism.

The most obvious is that quantum physics seems to dissolve the idea of matter entirely. Whatever the strange hidden basis of quantum theory is, it is not hard lumps of solid stuff. Electrons become probability waves in Hilbert space, matter is just one form of energy, and we do not know all the other forms there may be.

There are basic problems with theories in modern physics.

It is, for instance, very difficult to make quantum theory consistent with relativity theory, and the well-established quantum property of non-locality does not seem to fit with relativity physics as we know it. It looks as though we do not have a very good grasp of the basis even of physical reality.

In addition, consciousness and the contents of consciousness - especially mathematics, logic, feelings and intentions - resist translation into purely physical terms. To most of us it is obvious that we need to explain many aspects of human life in terms of intentions, goals and evaluations. But all such things simply disappear in materialism. The simplicity that materialism offers may be bought at the cost of overlooking the real complexity that is part of reality. And of course if we believe that there is a spiritual dimension to reality, that in seeking truth, beauty and goodness we are seeking things that really exist, and that it is possible to apprehend a transcendent personal reality of more than human value and power, then materialism will not match our experience at all.

So a third main worldview is that of idealism. This view states that the fundamental character of reality is that of consciousness or mind. The whole material world is an appearance of what is fundamentally a complex mental reality. Consciousness is not just a by-product of the material brain, as materialists think. On the contrary, the brain and body are appearances, material forms, of an underlying mental reality. The material world exists in order to let finite forms of mind grow, relate to one another as objects in a common world, and develop their own attitudes and personalities from the store of potentialities and capacities that their material environment provides.

Idealism, too, has the virtue of simplicity, of finding one unitary type of reality as the basis of all the complexity we see around us. It is able to take full account of the existence and importance of human awareness, feelings and uniquely personal experiences. And it encourages us to see purpose and wisdom in the existence of the natural world, providing a basis for spiritual experiences and beliefs, without reducing them to illusions.

These are just three worldviews that exist and are very widely held in our world. There are many others. Christian theism is one of those others, since it agrees with idealism that one personal conscious reality - God is primary, and is the basis of all material reality. But it agrees with materialism that the material world has its own proper reality, though it is ultimately dependent on God.

The contestability of worldviews

In general, what we call religious views tend towards idealism. There are hardly any materialist or purely common sense religions. But there are many interpretations of idealism, and many ways in which it may be qualified. So Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism and the Abrahamic faiths all take rather different interpretations of idealism. But they all hold that the spiritual dimension of human existence is the truly important dimension, and that the goal of religion is to make people aware of that dimension and enrich their lives by such awareness.

 Many attacks on religion are based on the belief that idealism is false. There is no spiritual dimension to reality. The religious goal is unobtainable, based on a false view of reality, and illusory. It is therefore intellectual dishonesty to teach religious views as if they were true.

Fashions come and go in philosophy, of course. In the first decades of the twentieth century, idealism was almost taken for granted among English-speaking philosophers. That was basically because they took as their start human conscious experience, and never dreamt of denying its very existence.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, some of the very best professional philosophers opted for materialism. But most of them would concede that their view is provocative, and that there are deep and unresolved puzzles arising from quantum physics, from the existence of consciousness, and from the apparent irreducibility of historical, ethical, political and personal explanations to purely physical forms of explanation. Materialism is a bold and counterintuitive worldview - but that makes it all the more attractive to good philosophers.

I have taught philosophy professionally in British universities for at least twenty years and am on the committee of the Royal Institute of Philosophy. Looking around at my philosopher colleagues in Britain, virtually all of whom I know at least from their published work, I would say that very few of them are materialists. Some - a minority probably - are idealists. A good number are theists. And most seem to be generally sceptical or agnostic about all worldviews, preferring to deal with specific tricky problems case by case, and to eschew general theories, materialism and idealism alike.

The point is that religious views are underpinned by highly sophisticated philosophical arguments. They are not blind leaps in the dark, and they are not based on unthinking acceptance of the assertions of some holy book. All such views are highly contested. None of them is universally accepted, or can even claim an overwhelming majority among philosophers. Systems of idealism cannot be strictly 'proved' to everyone's satisfaction. But neither can systems of materialism. These are ultimate, highly reasoned choices, none of which is obviously false or obviously true either.

The legend of the leap of faith

There is a particular view of the history of European philosophy that has almost become standard, but which is a misleading myth. That is that everybody used to accept that there were 'proofs of God'. The first cause argument (the universe must have a first cause) and the argument from design (design in the universe shows that there must be a designer) were supposed to prove that there must be a God. But then along came Immanuel Kant, who disproved all these proofs. After that, belief in God had no rational basis and had to become a rationally unjustifiable leap of faith (where 'faith' means belief without any evidence).

This view of the history of philosophy is skewed in a number of ways. First of all, it was never generally thought that, by starting only with the observable facts of the physical world, anyone could demonstrate that there has to be an intelligent first cause outside the universe. That would make God little more than an inference from observed facts, an absentee creator who was never actually present or experienced.

As a matter of historical fact, the main philosophical arguments derived largely from Plato and Aristotle, whose concern was not with some sort of inference from observed reality to something else. It was with the question of what the nature and character of observed reality was.

 In Plato's case, his arguments (or many of them) were intended to show that the observed world can be seen by reflective enquiry to be a world of appearances. The underlying reality can be known by the mind, by intellectual investigation, and ultimately by a vision of the Good, as the true reality of which the material world is an appearance.

Philosophical argument was basically 'dialectic' - the presentation and representation of limited perspectives on the world that might lead to distinguishing reality from appearance, and discerning that the inner character of reality is mental or  spiritual. Plato does not ask us to infer an unseen designer. He tries to get us, through intense reflective argument, to see the world as the appearance, the manifestation, of a deeper spiritual reality that is akin to human consciousness, but of purer and more perfect goodness and beauty.

When Immanuel Kant came along, he did set out to undermine a specific set of rationalist arguments propounded by the philosophers Gottfried Leibniz and Christian Wolff. He did say that he set out to undermine knowledge in order to make room for 'faith'. But his whole critical philosophy was written as an attempt to set faith on a firm intellectual foundation, not to offer it as an alternative to intellectual thought.

A central part of Kant's philosophy was the attempt to show that reason leads to unavoidable contradictions when it tries to take observed reality as the true reality, as reality-in-itself. Only when you have, in this way, pushed reason to its limits can you see that reality must be something more than the empirical and observable, more than the world of Newtonian physics.

Faith, for Kant, was practical commitment made in areas where theoretical knowledge is impossible, but where there is still a pressure to make a rational choice. To make his case, he had to show that reason has its limits, and that it is necessary to make reasonable decisions in areas that go beyond those limits. For him, faith - faith in God, in moral freedom, and in the possibility of moral fulfilment ('happiness in accordance with virtue') - is supremely reasonable. It is not a leap in the dark. It is the use of reason beyond the limits of empirical verification.

Kant was, in fact, not so far from Plato. Kant did not speak of a vision of the Good because he was very suspicious, unduly suspicious perhaps, of claims to personal experience of God. But Kant did say that it was not optional but absolutely necessary to posit a rational and moral basis of the world, to posit the existence of the Supreme Good.

For Kant, all ultimate worldviews (all systems of transcendent metaphysics, as he would have said) are unverifiable. Yet it is supremely reasonable to have one, for we must base our practical life-commitments on something, on the best we can manage as human beings. That best, for Kant, was the postulate of a supremely good and wise God, on whom the rationality of the world and of human thought, and the reasonableness and obligatoriness of morality, could be founded. We have to go beyond the evidence, for reason itself compels us to do so.

 You might say that it is deeply rational to have an ultimate worldview, but the fundamental beliefs of such a view cannot be based on any more basic evidence, for there is nothing more basic. How then can we choose? For Kant, we must choose the view that best supports our basic belief in the importance of reason, truth, and objective standards of beauty and goodness. This is a reasonable faith, but it is founded on a serious moral commitment that it is logically possible to reject.

So the history of European philosophy is not really a story of moving from proofs of God to irrational faith. It is rather a story of a clarification of the methods and limits of science (which Plato was unclear about, and Aristotle was partly wrong about), and of the basis of our most general worldviews in the sorts of practical commitment, the ways of life and moral orientation, that make possible distinctive human activities like science, morality and religion.

Whatever all this is, it is not the ending of rational thought by blind acceptance of some absolute authority. When Kant spoke of faith, he was absolutely not thinking of blind acceptance of authority. He called that 'heteronomy', subjecting your will to the will of another. In its place he called for 'autonomy' - daring to think for yourself, even about matters said to be revealed by God. Faith was in human reason and goodness, seen as founded on an ultimate reason and goodness, rooted in the nature of things.

Kant did not have much time for special revelation. But if you think the universe is founded on a supreme wisdom, beauty and goodness, it is very natural to suppose that at some specific points the character of that goodness and of the purposes it may have for the cosmos may become clearer. It is very reasonable to suppose that a being of supreme goodness would not leave humans completely in the dark about what they are meant to be and do, and about the nature of the Supreme Good itself. In a word, it is very reasonable to expect some sort of revelation of the character and purposes of God.

It is for this reason that it is wholly reasonable to think that some revelation of God has occurred in human history. That revelation will not overturn or contradict reason (except where reason is being misused). It will take human knowledge of God beyond what reason alone can establish. For most religious believers, God is not just a postulate of reason, as God was for Kant. God is one who makes the divine reality known in history and experience.

Reason and morality must still operate here, in asking what sort of revelations are reasonable and good, and which are truly irrational and morally flawed. But the interaction of reason and revelation is a two-way process - or better, a sort of spiralling from one pole (reason) to the other (revelation) and back again, seeking the balance of reasonable revelation. So in the history of Christianity there have been many Christians who have claimed special revelations from God, in dreams or visionary experiences. We have to ask whether such revelations are consistent with what we already believe of God, and with the sort of goodness we believe God has. If they contradict belief in the love of God revealed in Jesus - if, for example, they call us to kill other people - we should reject claims to revelation. But if they can be seen as developments from prior beliefs - new insights, perhaps, into the way in which slavery is in tension with love of your neighbour as yourself, or insights into the place and role of women - we may say that revelation has brought us to revise our existing moral beliefs.

So in prayer and in the experience of the church there can be new revelations of God's will. But they must be tested by their consonance with what is believed to be a definitive revelation of God, and by their coherence with the knowledge we have of the world from other sources. Revelation can expand the insights of reason, but reason must always test claims to revelation. That is why revelation is never static. It is always developing, though the limits of such development are set down by the original paradigm, in the case of Christianity, of Jesus and the Bible, the witness to his life and work.

Religion, then, is based on a world view at least as reasonable as any other. Such worldviews cannot be based on evidence, for they determine what is going to count as evidence, and how evidence is going to be interpreted.

What makes worldviews reasonable?

There are fairly clear criteria for what makes acceptance of a worldview reasonable. There are rational procedures for setting out and defending a worldview. These procedures fall into three main groups:

 First, it is desirable to aim at clarity and precision in stating the beliefs that are involved in a worldview. Such beliefs should ideally be arranged in order of logical dependence, so that one can tell which are the truly basic beliefs, how they relate to one another, and how other beliefs are derived from them.

Second, at each stage, alternatives to proposed beliefs should be identified and considered. Comparison with other worldviews is vital to forming a considered assessment of the weak and strong points of a worldview.

Third, it is necessary to test the adequacy of the worldview to the widest range of data, whether they are experiences or other beliefs. The beliefs must be consistent with one another. The scheme should be as simple as possible though it is obvious that the criteria of adequacy and simplicity may often contrast with one another, and a choice will have to be made between them in many cases. It would be unreasonable to adopt a very simple scheme that did not adequately cover all the various sorts of data that are available. The scheme should be coherent with all other knowledge. It should integrate data in an elegant, or patterned, way, so that the parts fit harmoniously into a convincing overall interpretation. Finally, the scheme should have creative power, generating new insights, approaches or paradigms, enabling data to be organised in new and more illuminating ways.

In applying these criteria, there is an important and ineliminable element of personal judgment involved. They are not rules to be applied separately and automatically. They are criteria to be balanced against each other and woven into a convincing narrative. As in all historical, legal and political judgments, rationality consists in assembling the largest array of relevant data, organising them in a clarifying manner, and in a way that is fruitful for suggesting further advances in knowledge.

In the end, all reason can do is require that these procedures are followed. It cannot dictate one agreed result, for that will depend on differing emphases laid on differing data, different organising paradigms that seem to illuminate the complexity of experience, and differing practical commitments that express basic judgments about what is important in life.

Religious worldviews are not rational because they produce overwhelming arguments that 'prove' the truth of the worldview to all competent people. They are rational because they are structured and elaborated in a critical and reflective way, using rational criteria for judgment that are always open to diverse interpretations.

In a sense, each worldview embodies a large element of judgment and faith, and there is no way of avoiding that. Religious worldviews can therefore be, and often are, as reasonable as non-religious views. Secular thinking can be as filled with prejudice, partiality and neglect of relevant data, and as intolerant of and impatient with opposition as the most narrow religious view. There is just no reasonable case for arguing that religious belief is as such irrational or unthinking. Any such view is plainly false. It is, in fact, a prime instance of irrational thinking.

(Keith Ward, Is Religion Dangerous?, pp. 86-98)