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Modernising tendency Sam Fleischacker Guardian Saturday October 20, 2001 It is commonly said
that Osama bin Laden represents a medieval worldview.
If only! What is most dangerous about his brand of radical Islam derives from
something peculiarly modern in it. In Islam, as well as
Judaism and Christianity, the Middle Ages saw the
highest development of the notion that faith and reason can go together. For
medieval philosophers, faith could enhance one's understanding of the secular
world, and secular understanding could deepen faith. The existence and
nature of God, for instance, could be ascertained by reason. A great deal of
morality could also be determined without faith, and this view of morality - as
largely independent of faith - was, later, to be of great importance to the
development of liberal politics. One consequence of
this viewpoint was a moral constraint on the interpretation of revealed texts.
Many medieval thinkers held that if the holy scriptures - of any faith - seem to contradict what reason tells us God must be like,
then the scriptures need to be reinterpreted. God has given us scriptures, but
God has also given us reason; so reason can serve as a guide to what the
scriptures mean. Thus, if God can have
no bodily parts, then references to "God's hand" must be
metaphorical. Similarly, if a good God, to whom each human being is precious,
could not possibly desire the death of many innocent human beings, then we
cannot accept the apparent meaning of passages in scriptures that approve of mass killing. Of course, ordinary
believers were not necessarily inclined to follow this programme
for ensuring that revelation coheres with a reasonable morality. But they
received what education they had from clerics trained to bring revelation and
reason together. Religion, therefore, managed to be a force of restraint on
bloodshed and cruelty through much of the medieval world - and especially in
the Muslim world. It is a modern
thought that faith is antagonistic to reason. Scientific reasoning does not sit
easily with the presuppositions of any religion, and the work of Enlightenment
philosophers made the belief in God appear irrational. One response to that
was, of course, to become an atheist. But another, initiated by the German
philosopher JG Hamann, and made famous by
Kierkegaard, was to affirm that religion is irrational, but then to say,
"So what? The greatness of faith lies precisely in its triumph over
reason." This is the doctrine
that religious believers who encounter modern science affirm today. They can
reject all the good reasons modern thought gives them against their belief in
God, or against the truth of their sacred text, since faith has nothing to do
with reason. Unreasonable parts of
scripture can thus command faith just as much as reasonable ones do. Neither
scientific nor moral reason need be a guide: if scripture says God has a hand,
then God has a hand; if scripture says God wants you to kill unbelievers, then God wants you to kill unbelievers. As it happens, this
extremely anti-rational type of faith distorts the doctrines of Hamann and Kierkegaard, the latter of whom,
especially, was concerned to bring a rational ethic into some kind of harmony
with religion. But the anti-rational attitude is appealing precisely in its
extreme form to many young people who, at some point, face a sharp dichotomy
between a traditional faith and what they get taught in biology, history or
philosophy classes. By construing reason as utterly separate from faith, they
can insulate their traditional beliefs from the devastating challenges posed by
modern thought. It is easy to imagine
Mohammed Atta, at Hamburg University, encountering
the dichotomy between faith and modern reason, and turning to a form of Islam untempered by any rational morality. But
if so, Atta, like many others, followed a path first
laid out in the modern west. And,
unfortunately, we in the west do not offer much of an alternative to that path,
for those who are religiously inclined. We have reasonable atheists, religious
believers who take pride in being unreasonable, and a very few people who make
feeble gestures in the direction of a religion that one could adhere to without
losing either one's scientific or one's moral mind. One step towards
preventing future Mohammed Attas - and his kin in the
uglier extremes of Judaism and Christianity - would be to replace these feeble
gestures with a renewal of the honorable medieval attempt to reconcile
revelation and reason. · Sam Fleischacker is an associate professor of philosophy at the
University of Illinois. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers
Limited 2002 |
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