Is Reason the Enemy of Faith?
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Starting with her grandmother, who was a war lord’s
concubine, Chang takes the reader through the transition from feudalism to
communism and the bizarre succession of communist regimes that governed mostly
by whim. This includes, of course, the long reign of Mao Zedong and his
“cultural revolution,” which interrupted the lives of millions of students and
workers to eradicate, among other things, grass, which was considered
“bourgeois,” and melt pots, pans, machinery and everything metal to contribute
to the nation’s need for steel.
During much of this period, ideology and the personal cult
of the Great Leader always trumped human reason. The consequences were
predictable. Humans discouraged from reasoning were reduced to little more than
domesticated hominoids living in a confused state of uncertainty and
insecurity. The book reminds you how important the use of reason is to making
us, and keeping us, human.
That’s why it’s unfortunate that many contemporary people
see reason as the enemy of faith. Our daily lives are a mixture of random
experiences, successes and disappointments, chores and projects, continual
decisions, and incessant attempts to make sense of things. Indeed, the human brain
is continually searching for meaning. Though we may not express it this way, it
is perhaps just another way of describing the search for God.
And the search for meaning, which is at the heart of faith,
is as rational as the search for the composition of dark matter.
That’s not how many see it, of course.
Adam Hincks, a Jesuit priest and astrophysicist at the
University of British Columbia in Vancouver, writes in a recent issue of
America magazine that many people see faith as “unscientific, subjective and
private,” and knowledge as “scientific, objective and part of a common fund.” But
is the human brain really this disjoined?
The common view that the brain has two hemispheres that
determine our proclivities and aptitudes seems to support the disjoined view.
In this scheme, the left hemisphere is responsible for logic, language,
details, patterns in things and looking at “parts” as opposed to “wholes.” The
right side is responsible for emotions, meanings, music, art and synthesizing
into a whole.
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According to recent studies, however, this is mostly myth.
“There is a misconception that everything to do with being analytical is confined to one side of the brain, and everything to do with being creative is confined to the opposite side,” says Dr. Jeff Anderson, director of the fMRI Neurosurgical Mapping Service at the University of Utah as quoted on the Web site, livescience. “In fact, it is the connections among all brain regions that enable humans to engage in both creativity and analytical thinking.”
This seems to support the view of Hincks, the Jesuit astrophysicist, that there’s a fine line between reason and belief, pointing out that belief is at least as much a part of everyday learning and observation as reason and that “we accept, at least implicitly, that belief is rational.”
“I did not personally verify the vast majority of scientific theories that I learned while earning my degrees,” he writes. No, he took them “on faith.” He adds that “no one…sees such instances of scientific belief as fundamentally irrational.”
We believe if we trust the source, and we test the insights gained from beliefs against other data until we’re satisfied that they are trustworthy. A child believes his/her parents, for instance, because of his/her experience of the parents’ trustworthiness.
Hincks argues that authentic religion involves both knowledge and belief (Some would say that belief is one way of obtaining knowledge.) and “…our belief in God is complemented by the immanent knowledge of God we acquire through prayer and spiritual exercises.”
And that brings us to the view that besides complementing reason, faith as a gift from God goes far beyond belief.
“Faith is thus primarily a grace that draws us beyond the sort of believing and knowing that we can achieve through human reason,” Hincks writes.
The bottom line is that God is both the creator of reason and the giver of faith. They complement each other and human beings have trouble when relying solely on one or the other. Faith is not reason’s enemy, nor is reason the enemy of faith. People who promote the view that the two are incompatible do a disservice to both.
The lack of either, as shown in the lives of the millions of Chinese who lived during Mao’s regime (and North Koreans in our time), cripples our humanity. And it’s only as fully functioning, healthy, rational and faithful humans that we can successfully seek God.
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