Faith and (T)Reason

I have been listening lately, via Podcast, to Bill Moyers' Faith and Reason series, in which he interviews contemporary writers and thinkers on the relationship between faith, reason, and our contemporary social and political lives. It's a fabulous series, and I recommend it to anyone.

The subject is obviously relevant right now, given the rise in fundamentalism in this country and around the world. This clip from the Daily Show gives some sense of what we're up against: a lot of "faith," not much reason. Here's the Rapture Index to which one of the anchors refers. The people sitting around waiting for the End of Days can and do vote, influencing decisions about everything from international policy to school lunch programs. ("What would Jesus serve?")

The problem with the fundamentalist point of view is that it can justify any position. That belief in God strengthened, and did not ebb, in the wake of 9/11 is testament to the fact that faith is a distorting lens: it helps believers to re-shape an event to make it bearable. I remember hearing once my father ask my old-line Methodist grandfather why--I oversimplify here to compensate for hazy memory--God lets bad things happen to good people. "We can't pretend to know God's will," my grandfather said. This, the religious tell us, is faith.

The origin of such faith seems clear to me: fear. Maybe more precisely: dread. How terrible to imagine that a child's death from cancer isn't part of a divine plan, but only a human tragedy, a biological phenomenon no different from a young rabbit's death of myxomitosis or an elm's death from Dutch elm disease. How heartbreaking to think that death is merely the cessation of a chemical reaction and not the transition of a consciousness from one form to another. But, as philosopher Colin McGinn points out to Bill Moyers, the desire to believe in something isn't a reason to believe in something.

We need to be consoled. The great appeal of Christianity (and, it seems, Islam) is the promise of consolation: faith that, despite the darkness, light will come. The problem, though, is that, as we look for that light, the room stays dark. If we accept the darkness and let our eyes adjust, we discover a world of consolations right before us.