AU Wackerlin Center for Faith and Action

Monthly Musings

June 2006

Whenever I return to England, I am made aware of the inability of many western and northern Europeans to understand the attraction and power of religion for the majority of humankind. Their condescending and deeply stupid assumption is that reasonable people have outgrown religion, and shouldn’t be taken too seriously. No wonder that many Europeans have no idea how to act towards the world of Islam in an adult and informed way. Just look at the French in particular, who haven’t a clue. But this isn’t an Englishman’s rant against the old enemy across the channel, pleasant though that pastime is. We aren’t much better.

I was watching a program on British television last week about Edinburgh’s contribution to the European enlightenment, especially the philosophy of David Hume. It popularized Hume’s philosophy rather well, so I thought (but I’m no philosopher). Yet what a caricature of religion it set up in order to knock down! Whoever, from this program, would have understood religion’s long hold over human thought and values, a grip that has often been for good as well as sometimes for evil? The presenter assumed that any reasonable twenty-first century person would acknowledge religion as a false and oppressive system. He had no sense that reasonable and secular people often believe outrageous things: I doubt that he knows that many nineteenth century anthropologists, for example, supported slavery on the grounds that Africans and others are less-developed as humans than the white man (they also assumed the second-class status of women, whom they believed allowed their emotions to override rational thought).

Moreover, the presenter claimed in so many words that rationality is the only dimension of human thought to which we have access and upon which we should act. This widely held yet idiotic notion was undermined by another TV program he presented, a pleasingly positive assessment of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign on the occasion of her 80th birthday celebrations. Yet surely these days no rational justification can be made for a monarchical system of government, any more than one can be proffered for the way that Cambridge University is ordered, or for steak and kidney pudding made with suet pastry. In all these cases, the best line of defense (which strikes me as a very good one, for I am in favor of all three institutions) is that of ‘if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it’.

If it is true that ‘in the beginning was the Word [of God]’, then we should attend to what it says to us. We should use reason to assess its claims upon us, but not just reason: intuition; if it makes sense and works, whether we can explain it fully or not; the power of tradition; and no doubt other things too. How unreasonable many people are in thinking that reason is the only tool available to humans with which to unlock the wonders of the world we live in.

— Martin Forward