The Edge of Reason

A Rational Skeptic in an Irrational World

Julian Baggini

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780300222081
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Rationalism in Philosophy

An urgent defense of reason, the essential method for resolving—or even discussing—divisive issues: "A timely masterpiece."—Patricia S. Churchland, author of Touching a Nerve Reason, long held as the highest human achievement, is under siege. According to Aristotle, the capacity for reason sets us apart from other animals, yet today it has ceased to be a universally admired faculty. Rationality and reason have become political, disputed concepts, subject to easy dismissal. Julian Baggini argues eloquently that we must recover our reason and reassess its proper place, neither too highly exalted nor completely maligned. Rationality does not require a cold, sterile worldview—it simply involves the application of critical thinking wherever thinking is needed. Addressing such major areas of debate as religion, science, politics, psychology, and economics, the author calls for commitment to the notion of a "community of reason, " where disagreements are settled by debate and discussion, not brute force or political power. Baggini's insightful book celebrates the power of reason, our best hope—indeed our only hope—for dealing with the intractable quagmires of our time. "The toxic gloating of 'gut feelings, ' hateful politics and heart-over-head attacks on good sense urgently need an antidote. Baggini has risen to the occasion…compelling."—Patricia S. Churchland, author of Conscience: The Origins of Moral Intuition

PART I: THE JUDGE

One of the central myths of rationality is that if we use it properly, we can do away with the need for personal, subjective judgement. It is always rebarbative to the philosopher to reach a point in an argument where it is necessary to admit that others may be presented with the same chain of inferences yet justifiably reach a different conclusion. The intolerability of this is implicit in Plato’s idea of ‘following the argument’ and has been most explicit in the rationalist tradition, where Descartes talked of following the ‘natural light’ of reason, and Spinoza set out the argument of his Ethics as a set of quasi-mathematical deductions. It also emerges in twentieth-century analytic philosophy – the dominant tradition in Britain and North America – which put the learning of symbolic logic at the heart of the undergraduate curriculum. Students were encouraged to believe that if they could translate their arguments into the language of logic they could neatly divide those that could be decreed objectively sound and those that were fallacious.

The dream that many philosophers have had is of a form of reason in which subjective judgement is banished and everything that matters can be demonstrated with the rigour of an algorithm. Reason leads to one correct conclusion and one only. Given this high benchmark, it is perhaps not surprising that many have taken the fact that it hasn’t been reached as evidence that rationality has been seriously overrated. For instance, it has been creditably argued that in science the observed facts always, or at least almost always, fit more than one possible theoretical explanation. Ideas like these have led some to more extreme positions in which scientific knowledge is dismissed as having no special status and as just another human construct or narrative.

If we are to save a realistic yet robust notion of what it means to be rational, we need to debunk the myth that reason requires no judgement without leaving ourselves reliant on subjective opinions that cannot be rationally criticised or examined by others. This is the purpose of the first part of this book, which will focus on the use of reason in religion and science. In these and in other domains of reasoning, there is an ineliminable role of judgement, but that does not entail a debilitating skepticism about reason and rationality.

CHAPTER ONE

The Eternal God argument

The big issues of God and religion are among the most weighty and important that each of us has to confront. Does God exist? Is science compatible with religion? Can there be morality without God? Although I have given each of these considerable thought, when I am invited to debate one of them in public I have become less and less inclined to accept. Having seen what such events involve, the whole exercise increasingly looks like a charade. One side presents its arguments, followed by the other. Reasons are stacked up to support both cases. But at the end, almost everyone believes exactly what they believed at the beginning. Only a few genuinely uncertain or confused members of the audience might be swayed one way or another. Such debates are framed as battles of intellect, philosophical trials where arguments are presented and assessed. In reality, they are like sporting contests when everyone comes out to cheer their own team and leaves convinced it was the best, whatever the result. It seems to me that the only constructive effect of such events is that they remind the audience that civil disagreement is possible and that those they oppose might be good, intelligent people too.

This sense of futility is not confined to set-piece debates. It is evoked even more by the academic world of philosophy of religion. Here we find very smart people, all committed to being as rational as possible about their beliefs. They write books and journal papers full of incredibly arcane, subtle and complex arguments. These are clearly people who take reason very seriously indeed. But how often do you find any of them changing their minds on any of the major issues? Hardly ever. The academic traffic between theism and atheism is virtually non-existent. On the rare occasions when someone switches allegiance, it’s big news; so much so that even a vague wavering counts as exciting. When the famous atheist Antony Flew, for instance, appeared in very old age to endorse a kind of deism, headlines like ‘Famous Atheist Now Believes in God’ appeared around the world.

If these philosophers of religion were simply following the arguments wherever they led, you might expect considerably more movement as they were led first one way, then another. The truth, however, is that such arguments appear to lead only to the next counter-argument. When, for instance, an atheist comes across a clever new version of an argument for the existence of God which she cannot refute, she does not say ‘Ah! So now I must believe in God!’ Rather, she says, ‘That’s clever. There must be something wrong with it. Give me time and I’ll find out what that is.’ Similarly, a theist will not lose her belief just because she cannot refute an argument for atheism. Rather, that argument will simply become a challenge to be met in due course.

All this might appear to be scandalous. The currency of philosophy of religion is supposed to be rational argument, but it can’t buy an opposing position at any price. However, to despair at this would be to misunderstand the nature of rational argument and its importance for big life commitments such as whether to believe in God or not. Reason does have an important role to play here, but it is not that of the independent, objective judge. The final judge is not reason, but the reasoner, for whom rationality is a tool, not some kind of authority.¹

1. Big pictures, broad brushes

One reason why the latest, subtlest arguments don’t make one jot of difference to people’s fundamental religious convictions is that when it comes to the big issues, it’s the big arguments that carry weight. Philosophers and theologians love to work with fine details, but it’s the broad brush that generally carries the day. You could call this the ‘end of the day’ test. Ask someone what, at the end of day, makes them convinced of their general position and I would bet you that virtually no one (there’s always the odd eccentric) would say ‘a journal paper’. And if they did, it would be because that paper managed to pin down a big point, not a little one.

Intellectuals do not like to admit this because it brings them down the same level as much simpler folk, like Homer Simpson. One of my favourite episodes of The Simpsons sees Homer stop going to church. He doesn’t stop believing in God, he just can’t see the point in worshipping him. His reasons for this are hardly sophisticated, but I find it hard to better them:

What’s the big deal about going to some building every Sunday, I mean isn’t God everywhere?

Don’t you think the almighty has better things to worry about than where one little guy spends one measly hour of his week?

And what if we’ve picked the wrong religion? Every week we’re just making God madder and madder?²

Of course, there might be any number of good reasons to go to church, whether God exists or not. Homer’s points merely show why he is not doing anything wrong by not going to church. All his arguments really point to the same general one: isn’t it bizarre to think that an omnibenevolent God would really think it important that people went to a particular place each week to worship him? Indeed, if God were like that, then we are likely to pick the wrong place of worship and annoy him even more. This is all mad anthropomorphism, in which God is imagined to be an egotistical despot who demands that his subjects prostrate themselves before him.

As I’ve said, I can imagine reasonable arguments for why it it would be good to go to church, if God exists, and even that God has reasons for wanting us to do so. But the idea that he would look unkindly on people who don’t seems so obviously absurd that considering clever counter-arguments would appear to be a bad use of limited intellectual resources.

That ‘obviously’ is significant. Because what really convinces are big, broad points and not small, intricate arguments; often the right general answer does seem obvious. Take an example from my personal experience. When I was a teenager, I voluntarily went to a Methodist church that no one else in my family attended. I was a believer, but my doubts grew. I did not have a de-conversion moment, but one incident did cement my loss of faith. It was at the London weekend of the Methodist Association of Youth Clubs. I had been throwing up from the moment we arrived, so when the worship came round on Sunday morning in the awe-inspiring setting of the Royal Albert Hall, I was sat in the first aid area, which was – ironically, it would turn out – somewhere up in the gods. So there I was, not feeling 100%, observing more than participating in the worship: detached, not involved.

It was a revelation. Suddenly, the central fact about the worship became blindingly, transparently obvious. My road back from Damascus moment came when I saw that the Holy Spirit was not at work at all: this was all people’s doing. You could see how the emotion was built up, reaching a crescendo at the key point where people were asked to make or renew their commitment to Christ. To call it mass hysteria may be a little over the top, but not by much.

Although I’m sure that some evangelists are con artists, this is certainly not how I saw the MAYC. I believe that the organisers genuinely thought that all they were doing was creating the right environment for the Holy Spirit to do its work. (In the same way, some ‘psychics’ use cold-reading techniques to dupe their hapless victims, while others sincerely use what are essentially the same techniques and are so impressed by the results that they really believe they have special powers.)

My close study of John’s Gospel at school had already made it pretty clear to me that the Bible was the work of men, not God. The London weekend helped convince me that the same was true of every other aspect of my religion too. A mental switch had been flipped: God was man-made, more fully than Christianity understood.

What I think is of more than just autobiographical interest is that once this cognitive corner is turned, it doesn’t take long before the human-made nature of religion becomes not just something one believes to be true, but something that seems obviously true. At the same time, however, for many believers, the reality of God is just as obvious and evident.

A very clear example of this is something the Christian and physicist Russell Stannard once said in an interview with my colleague Jeremy Stangroom. He was being asked about how one could ever get evidence that prayer established contact with God. ‘I think that what you have to realise,’ said Stannard, ‘is that when you are talking to a religious person, they feel that they have such strong internal evidence. It’s like Jung said, I don’t have to believe in God, I know that God exists – that is how I feel.’³

Up until that point, Stannard had been talking quite dispassionately about evidence for belief in God, as though He were a hypothesis to be confirmed by a scientific method. This comment, however, revealed that this was in a way a façade, because the believer needs no third-party verifiable evidence at all: inner conviction suffices.

I think this is typical of this kind of obviousness of belief. It is obvious because it feels or seems obvious, and no one other than the believer is required to verify its obviousness. Another example I have sometimes quoted is the last man on the moon, Eugene Cernan, who said, ‘No one in their right mind can look in the stars and the eternal blackness everywhere and deny the spirituality of the experience, nor the existence of a Supreme Being.’ It is an appeal to the obvious, but without any evidential back-up. It is like saying, ‘if you felt what I felt you’d find it obvious too’.

That is not to say there can be no rational argument at all between people for whom what seems obvious is very different. I would argue for the superior obviousness of belief that religion is a human construct. This obviousness does not rely on subjective feeling alone, but on the mass of evidence which is available to all. The sociology, history and psychology of religions all point to their human rather than divine origin. What makes this obvious is the overwhelming weight of evidence that points to this interpretation, rather than one which ascribes a divine cause. The same is true of other obvious tenets of atheism. That we are biological organisms whose being and consciousness depend on a functioning body and brain is obvious because the evidence is clear and overwhelming, not because we feel it must be true.

Hence we can see that there are...