More on the same theme as the previous post, this time taken from a discussion on Ship of Fools on whether Fundamentalism is the Grandmother of Atheism. I ended up writing quite a long post which I think is worth reposting here.

I think there probably is a connection [between fundamentalism and atheism]. I suspect fundamentalism [see caveat on usage in my previous post] and Western secularism are two sides of the same coin, where the coin is disconnecting reason and faith from each other.

Both make the same mistake, and so it’s relatively easy to move from one form of that mistake to another. As has been raised already [in the forum discussion], it cuts both ways, and you get people leaping from one ditch to another. It’s easier to change what you believe (the content of your beliefs) than the way in which you believe (your epistemological framework). Evolutionists like Dawkins and creationists like Ken Ham seem to have an awful lot in common in the way that they think.

When people divide faith and reason, they usually end up basing their beliefs on one without the other.

One form of fundamentalism is to insist that you have The One True Way, which every right-thinking person ought to be able to see if presented with the right evidence (or if we don’t have it yet, it’s just a matter of finding the right evidence to produce absolute certainty) – essentially reducing belief down to reason alone. So if someone doesn’t respond to a simple presentation of, say, the Four Spiritual Laws and a historical apologetic for the truth of the Gospels, or a scientific lecture on the evidence of evolution and why this makes God unnecessary, or any other magic-bullet rational “proof”, then that person is obviously stupid, mad or being wilfully stubborn. This neglects that there is no neutral position free of preconceptions and faith-commitments (many of which those holding them are not consciously aware they hold and are unexamined). We humans are supposedly able to discover the truth by our own autonomous reason.

Another form of fundamentalism is one that has faith alone against reason. We aren’t supposed to question – just accept! Often “God’s revelation” (or a substitute for it) will be invoked as the answer to the problem of how we know the truth – he’s told us, so we just have to accept unquestioningly his Word, no matter what our mere human reason may tell us.

(I think Marx and Engels fall into this trap in The Communist Manifesto. They say that no religious, philosophical or ideological arguments against Communism are of any merit because all ideas are the product of man’s material conditions. Logically, if we dismiss beliefs on the grounds they are determined by material conditions, we should include Communism – but Communism is justified by “deep intuition”, a clear case of special pleading which pretty much amounts to “you gotta have faith!”)

Funnily enough, people can hold beliefs they base on reason against faith, and on faith against reason, at the same time. They can still do this while treating the two things are seperate. One manifestation of this is a division between “rational knowledge” (things known with Cartesian certainty), and you have “irrational faith” (things believed subjectively and against the evidence).

Secularism assumes this division of reason and faith. Religious belief is thought to be based on blind faith, faith divided from reason, and so should be excluded from public discourse. It’s fine to believe it, but you have no grounds to impose it on everyone else. Scientific facts, however, are based on neutral, objective reason, and so are binding on everyone.

(Incidentally, this division of reason and faith is the epistemological error that has taken us up the blind alley of modernism and postmodernism. Very broadly, modernism believes truth can be known by autonomous neutral reason without faith; while postmodernism believes our only “knowledge” is faith without reason, and so Truth is an arbitary personal preference).

So what do I think is the answer? An epistemology and practice that reconnects faith and reason, and recognises that all knowledge, not just religious knowledge, comes about through “faith seeking understanding”. I think we really need to explain to people the true nature of faith, as something that should work in harmony with our reason, and have church practices that encourage thought and intellectual engagement as well as personal commitment and relational experience, all as overlapping parts of the Christian life. There’s lots more that could be said on this!

When I get chance, I’ll post my notes from the CHUMS (Christians in Humanities) session on engaging with Modernism and Postmodernism, which covers some of the same ground, with a bit of historical analysis drawn from the likes of Francis Schaeffer thrown in for good measure.