Faith vs. Reason: An Attempt at Reconciliation

This post is an extension of a train of thought begun in the post "Reasonable Rhetoric," and followed upon in "Specificity Contra Art." The upside-down, read-from-top-to-bottom, inverse-Chinese aspect of the blog's chronological layout means that the commencement of this argument is to be found somewhere below this one. I would change that, if I knew how.

The apparent manifestation of the "unscientific backlash," as we will call it, directs us back to our concern with the New Synthesis of faith and reason. It's quite obvious that these two world-views have time and time again established paradigms in every field of human activity; that they have been all-too-often paraded as mutually exclusive criteria for Truth, despite the intrinsic mutual dependency that exists between them; and that contemporary social phenomena evidence a strong inclination towards the reconciliation between their adherents. All that is left to be done is to bring some of these exemplary phenomena to light, so that the hypocrisy that feeds the perpetual battle between the two might be exposed and eliminated.

Reason in Faith: Let's begin with the adherents of faith. The Roman Catholic Church is the most influential faith-based institution in the world, and as such represents the greatest threat to reason that has ever existed: I refer you all to the fates of Galileo and Descartes, whose scientific milestones were assailed with the stinking muck of heresy, insubordination and atheism before finally reaching their public's awareness. More importantly, I ask you to examine the "dogma" that stands as a prerequisite to the "profession of faith": it includes such bizarreries as Virgin Birth, Immaculate Conception and Resurrection After Death. Obviously, none of us were there to witness these miracles - we are instructed to accept them upon faith alone. 

But then what, according to the instructors, is this faith? From what I have seen, their "faith" consists of argumentation, syllogism and vast cobwebs of cold, calculated, often circular - reason. Take a listen, if you will, to the subterranean rumblings emanating from the caves of the Vatican: you will hear an army of apologentsia, devising rudimentary Aristotlean equations in order to prove that Christ rose from the dead, after having been conceived by a Virgin. They are out to devise geometrical proofs for the very mysteries that are to be accepted upon faith, and the laboratories in which they work are of a decidedly Frankenseinean nature. 

It should be clear to anyone without conceptual cataracts that the miracle-mystery dogmatism of the Catholic Church is nothing more than a crooked spinning wheel of social control, designed to keep even the most astute intellects occupied so that the political pressure-cooker might go on boiling undetected. But what concerns us here is the fact that reason has been employed to buttress faith - even in cases where the faith has gone bad. Despite their cries against the scientific community for trying to introduce reason where reason doesn't belong, the bedrock of Christian dogmatism is being reinforced with logical rebar. 

Faith in Reason: The scientific community represents humanity's immense investment in the power of reason; let us then address their method, for as we will discover, faith plays a critical role therein. 

The first assumption - that reason is capable of arriving at Truth - is an assumption which must be accepted upon faith alone. There is no way to prove that the products of reason are in any way congruent with what we call Truth, no more than we can prove that Truth actually exists independent of human consciousness. The attempt to drive out faith from the scientific realm is a pipe-dream; if this purging were actually realized, the vast bodies of knowledge that science has accumulated would fall into the same irreparable senselessness in which the theologians anguish daily. We require an immense amount of faith in our own reason to even arrive at the possibility of employing the scientific method.

The second assumption - that the Truth arrived at by reason is justified by experimentation - is also a faith-based assumption. In order to assert that, for instance, the theory of relativity correctly predicts the bending of light around high-mass astronomical bodies, one has to put a great deal of faith in one's eyes and instruments - how else would we then know that we are even witnessing an eclipse? What in the hell would the term "observation" mean, if we didn't trust the proper functionality of our cornea-lens-retina-nervous-system combo? The entire undertaking which we call "experimentation" has been constructed on these two basic assumptions - that reason leads to Truth, and that our observations of the world are reliable. And I thought I heard the scientists say that assumptions were to be left to the religious..?

The Backlash of Irrationality: It is clear (I hope) that the two most prevalent world-views, pronounced the one by the other to be antithetical and mutually incompatible, are indeed intertwined in ways that would lead us to believe that they are in fact mutually dependent - i.e. faith cannot exist without reason, and vise versa. The eventual synthesis of these two perspectives has already begun - has been underway, perhaps, since their conception - but is being achieved through a number of successive oscillations, at the extremes of which one of the two is demonized, and the other glorified. At the moment, as I stated in a previous post, we are witnessing a shift away from the cold logic of the twentieth century to a more aesthetic perspective that values the multifarious, the vague, and the ability to interpret. What I hope to have shown here is that, even during the periods of extreme faithfulness (during which rationality is demonized), there is a great deal of rationalization employed in the service of faith; and conversely, that when rationality is held to be the only method of attaining Truth (to the exclusion of belief), there is much faith required to justify that position. 

I cannot at this point determine whether or not these two tendencies will ever coalesce into one unified paradigm from which we may move beyond their respective limits; nor can I really imagine what such a paradigm might resemble, or what will be raised up against it as the New Antithesis. All I can ask - and I ask this of the Scientist, the Priest, the Politician and the Everyman - is that the idea of a synthesis be seriously entertained. With all the current limitations on knowledge and epistemology, it seems reasonable to assume that an alternative criteria for Truth would be welcomed.

Specificity Contra Art

In a society that has spent almost a century now observing Reality through a hyper-scientific monocle, it's often worth the time to examine the aesthetic value-judgements that run, if you will, in a countercurrent to the empirico-deductive mechanism that powers the sciences. 

The Division of Labor amongst Words: Some words, like "cat," "cake" and "limb," do not carry a heavy load of concepts along with them - they mean what they mean, and as such are specific enough to accurately describe natural phenomena. Other words, however, pull their weight: "his," "freedom" and "love" come to mind. These are words that have taken on a heavy burden, that fight for (if I may) the ability to communicate volumes quite briefly.

The Specificity of Words and their Value: The problem with these "heavy words" and their application is this: that words lose their specificity - and thus their immediacy, as far as comprehension in concerned - in direct proportion to the increase in their richness of meaning. The more weight a word has to carry naturally makes that word more cumbersome, or what is the same, open to more possibilities of interpretation; such words are inimical in the highest degree to the scientific spirit that has dominated the past hundred years. 

The Aesthetic Preference for Interpretation:  Interestingly, current aesthetic preference tends to place a high value on these more cumbersome words and the opportunity they afford us to make various interpretations. If we want to make an equation of this observation for all the scientific minds out there, it seems that the aesthetic value we place on words increases in direct proportion to the number of possible significations they may have.

In a world that is trying to become exclusively scientific - or, which is the same, as specific as possible - it is interesting to note that human beings are placing more and more value on that which is vague. Could we be experiencing the beginning of a backlash against science?

Outpouring #1

Monsieur de P... ,

I know you think you're not one for sentiment; accordingly, we're going to leave that out of this. To tell you the truth, I can't even begin to try and conjure up an emotion when I think of you - you can probably blame yourself for that. You were the one who taught me how not to feel, how to "play it off" and "roll with the punches" (your words). As far as I can tell, these skills have gotten me nowhere. 

So now we're back to square one, and the view here is just as clear and empty as it was before. I can see now that your professed "immoralism" is nothing more than a façade - a mask I even tried to wear for a time, in order to be with you. But I had to take it off, I couldn't breath under the sheer weight of inauthenticity...I'll leave it to you to imbibe that kind of lifestyle with whatever value you can.

As a romantic, it's hard for me to discover that my idols are nothing more than gross, feeble human beings; to learn, however, that they're not even human just blows my mind. And I don't mean to insinuate that you were my idol, any more than I want to think you're not a human being - you quite obviously are. It's just hard, to know that you made me believe you'd "overcome," that you were somehow more than just a "human being" - because now I don't think I can ever take you seriously again.

As for me, it's time that I took stock in my Self: improvements are a slow, energy-consuming process, and I can't waste any more energy trying to divine your nature through that mask. You say a lot, for someone who has close to nothing, and I'm done sifting through the shit just to find out that that's all there is. 

Subjectivity, in Physical Terms

I thought of something rather interesting last night as I was ruminating on cosmology, quantum mechanics and our general place in the world. It suddenly struck me that the methods used to observe and understand these two realms of the universe - the micro and macro - can give us a fundamental insight into the nature of the Subject. 

All of our knowledge of the physical universe beyond our planet is accumulated through passivity - in other words, we lie in wait for astronomical phenomena (almost exclusively in the form of electromagnetic radiation) to affect us. On the other hand, our knowledge of the micro realm (and this especially in physics) comes about through our manipulation of the object which is being studied: particle accelerators, chemical combinations and the famous "two-slit experiment" are all examples of this method. 

What this illustrates is the Subject's essentially twofold means of acquiring knowledge about the world: he is either passively or actively accumulating data, and his methodology depends upon whether the data corresponds to something larger or smaller than himself. And while I didn't enter into this train of though with any indication that it might pertain to the moral realm, does it not insinuate that the "will to power" is at work in the field of epistemology..?

Identity Crises

One of the greatest disappointments of maturity - assuming that we're talking about sensible human beings here - comes with the realization that there has never been a manmade institution that actually served to unify the different members of our species. One could consider religions, political parties, academic communities, corporations - no matter what the goal, the only way "organizations" can achieve it is by shattering whatever common bond we may have with our fellow human beings. 

Observe, if you will, the rites of initiation and ethical codes of any such "organization": each instance provides the members of said community with a number of criteria by which they can easily distinguish the Outsider - and this simply by his lack of knowledge. Failure to act or dress a certain way, to observe certain holidays, or even to glorify a certain Ideal - all these serve to indicate "otherness" so that it can either be excluded from or initiated into the "organization."

Now it may sound as though I'm passing judgement on "institutions as a whole," and a negative judgement at that - oh, but I would never dare! Although it's disappointing that they posture as so many unifying forces in society (which of course they are not), and thus breed confusion and misunderstanding, it is their exclusive nature that serves us best: being able to identify that nature is the first step in being able to identify its opposite. The next great evolution of mankind - the next übermensche if you want to call it that - will be easily distinguished from the rabble that cling to one another with apprehension and fear: his only initiation rite will be eye contact; his only ethical code, brute honesty. He will be a living example of transparency, and he will be reviled as such.

So if you're lost, and you're in love, and you're wondering, and you want to know where the next genuine human being is to be found - why, simply take a look at the great institutions: they will be slinging mud (as they always do), and one has only to follow their aim to find him.