REASON AND FAITH

The dual dissatisfaction with science and religion is rooted in Western history: Once science was the handmaiden of established religion; now reason and faith both seem to be courting each other.

A. In the second half of the thirteenth century, the Church openly at­tempted to suppress rationality or self-reliance; and one assertion which illustrates the mood of the avant-garde of the age was condemned, namely, that there is no need to accept as a matter of faith a thesis which can be accepted as a matter of reason.

In general, self-reliance was presumably viewed as such an obstacle to the endorsement of faith that even its specific employment in support of faith was feared. Efforts to destroy self-reliance abounded; the cleverest and most appealing to the self-reliant is the effort to do so philosophi­cally. The Christian philosopher could destroy the self-reliant’s self- reliance by proving to him the truth of Christian faith. But this is not all. Not only in Thomas Aquinas’s Sumina Contra Gentiles, but also in his Summa Theologica, the idea that science is subordinate to religion reigns supreme: Aquinas proves that without sacred doctrine there is no science. It is incredible: The man whose direct intellectual ancestry was Jewish and Muslim (Maimonides and A verroes), and whose intel­lectual heritage was secular and pagan (Plato and Aristotle), the same man said, in effect, if you are not a Christian you cannot be a scientist!

The view of science as handmaiden of religion has been retained after a fashion even in modern times. Thus, Descartes could still pre­tend that his philosophy, though it started in skepticism, ultimately re­inforced religion. A few decades earlier, Kepler, Galileo, and Bacon tried to present science and religion as noncompetitors - on condition, of course, that under the pressure of reason the claims made by estab­lished religion will sometimes have to be modified.

B. After the foundation of the Royal Society in 1661, and prior to the Einsteinian revolution of 1905, the relations between science and religion seem to have been progressively those of polite hostility. Fre­quently the leaders of science were irreligious, or else they tried to con­ceal the fact that they were religious. There are exceptions, to be sure; but even since the formation of the Royal Society, the exceptions have been rare. Boyle and Newton were leading scientists and they were both religious - each in his own very peculiar and highly unorthodox way. And yet the forceful leader of science at the time was Edmund Halley (of the Halley comet), and he was an agnostic, though a less aggressive one than some or his successors. As is well known, Bishop Berkeley developed his philosophy in reaction to Halley’s agnosticism. He also attacked Newtonian self-reliance as the cause of Halley’s agnosticism. His views adumbrate the much more modern views, to be discussed below. Joining the scientific or rationalistic movement at that period often was tantamount to leaving behind established traditional religion. It was customary at that period to conceal the fact that one came to rationalism and science after disappointment with traditional religion: it doesn’t matter what one thought previously, we all look alike before science. And so, after the foundation of the Royal Society, and prior to the Einsteinian revolution, reason, namely science, surreptitiously won over religion, while officially it was not hostile to established religion. Reason was not supposed, however, to prevent the study, critical or otherwise, of religion as an intellectual and social phenomenon; and the study was quite critical in part - and that part had quite a devastat­ing effect. The official policy was expressed openly only in the latter part of the period, particularly within the Marxist movement: Let established religion live in peace; help rational education (both scien­tific and political) to develop; and subsequently religion will quietly fade away.

For three centuries, the seventeenth through the nineteenth, religion has been on the retreat; scientists often had no part in established re­ligion, or belonged to a church but felt awkward about it. Even the religious scientists, including the pious Robert Boyle himself, openly preached against any religious idea which clashed with their own reason. Loyalty to science came first, and so in every conflict between science and religion, science invariably won. Bible criticism, archaeol­ogy, geology, Darwinian biology, social anthropology, every field which developed scientifically, led to new retreats for religion. A well-known instance of this is Albert Schweitzer’s work early in this century - his The Quest of the Historical Jesus, and his doctoral dissertation on the psychiatry of Jesus; they are frankly apologetic, but only to the extent permitted by reason or science and scholarship.

C. Meanwhile, the dissatisfaction with late nineteenth-century sci­ence bred a new attitude toward religion. The dissatisfaction became almost universal among literary intellectuals, and affected many scien­tists. The trend had finally reversed, and scientists started courting reli­gion. Russell’s Religion and Science of the 1930s records symptoms of that transition, and in it he expresses his surprise at the phenomenon. It has occurred time and again, of course, that a philosopher who had attacked religion when young endorsed it when older (Heine, Religion and Philosophy in Germany), that a rationalist, with an anticlerical career almost completed, called the priest to his deathbed. But, as a public phenomenon what Russell narrates was obviously a novelty: A movement of religious scientists is a twentieth-century product.

IV.