Neither Faith Nor Reason
“By focusing on the unwinnable debate between faith and reason, both Christians and atheists have agreed to ask the same questions – thus missing the potential for a type of religion that asks different questions in the first place.”
Photo by Alexander Hörl
In my poem “Put Reason Back to Sleep,” I reject both faith and reason without explaining my position, saying:
The future will have a place for neither faith nor reason.
But only a fluttering
As of birds in flight
That we can sight in season.
In this article, I intend to explain what I mean by saying that the future will have a place for neither faith nor reason.
No Middle Ground
In “Perspectives on Belief & Doubt,” the Bill Moyers on Faith & Reason website asks whether there is “some middle ground” in the ongoing conflict between reason and faith. It seems to me that a middle ground between two positions is only necessary for a person who feels torn between them, and who seeks to avoid being forced to choose a side - such as Sir John Houghton (a scientist unwilling to abandon his belief in God) or Mary Gordon (a Catholic who says she prefers to associate with atheists and agnostics). Neither position seems at all comfortable to me – both Houghton and Gordon seem restless and torn between irreconcilable opposites, unable to ever completely believe what they want to believe.
To a person who has already chosen either side, there is no conflict to resolve – a convinced Christian would confidently assert that the Christian religion is perfectly rational, and a convinced atheist would go right on having unquestioning faith in the universal validity of the scientific method.
The irony is that both sides rely on faith and both sides use reason – although mostly to bolster their existing faith. As Colin McGinn points out, if reason was sufficient to prove the truth of Christianity, faith would not be needed – all a Christian would have to do to make a convert would be to adequately explain the logical proof. However, the traditional “proofs” for the existence of God are not convincing to those who do not wish to be convinced, leading McGinn to conclude that there is no such thing as an intellectual case to be made for God. On the other hand, if atheists did not need faith to maintain their own position, McGinn would have no need to use a phrase like “devoted to rationality.” Reason is a tool, and people are devoted to faiths or deities – not tools. By treating reason as a thing to be devoted to rather than simply used, skeptics sometimes make a god out of reason.
Is there another option, or is the world really divided between faith, reason, and a constantly anxious middle ground? As a religious person – though not in any conventional way – I sometimes find myself in conversations about religion with atheist friends, who often express amazement and disbelief when they find out that I do not share their radically skeptical worldview. I can still remember one friend’s amazed reaction of “you believe in gods?!” as if it was almost impossible to imagine a person believing in such a ridiculous concept without being obviously ignorant in other ways. The same friend reacted with confusion and silence when I replied “what would be the point of believing in a god? I don’t ‘believe’ in you - I know you. It’s the same with gods.”
My reference to “knowing” the gods was not a claim of special access to the divine, but a reference to a type of knowing all or most people can have access to – the experience Rudolf Otto calls the numinous.
The Numinous
Like countless other people throughout human history, I have experienced the complex combination of ecstatic fervor and fearful awe that Otto describes as the mysterium tremendum. For example, I was once walking along a mountain ridge with a friend when we were both suddenly seized by the conviction that something – we couldn’t say what – was watching us silently. The hair on the back of my neck stood up, and I felt an overwhelming urge to flee – an experience of the type Otto refers to as “daemonic dread … the horror of Pan”.
Although the feeling was initially frightening, the fear I felt in that moment gave way over time to a deep sense of wonder and amazement, a prayerful mindset toward the mountain on which I had felt this mysterious presence and then toward other such remote and lonely yet beautiful places.
However, I do not claim to know in any rational sense what the presence was, and although I choose to think of it as divine my reverent attitude is based on my actual experience on the mountain, not on a mere belief that the mountain was home to a god or spirit. I do not embrace pagan religion because of anything I believe or anything I have worked out through reason – the basis of my religion is something different from both.
Otto, although a Christian theologian, provides the key to this approach to religion – an approach that can avoid being caught up in the endless debate between faith and reason. This approach to religion does not require belief in something you have never seen, because it is grounded in direct and personal experience. It does not require an appeal to reason to establish its validity, because it requires only the experience itself – not some specific opinion or doctrine about the experience, although the individual is free to interpret the experience according to a doctrine.
The numinous can accommodate many different doctrines. To a monotheist, the numinous might be interpreted as the presence of God. To an atheist, it might be interpreted as a psychological reaction to certain awe-inspiring experiences such as walking in a lonely spot along a mountain ridge, surrounded by the non-human world of nature. To a pagan, the numen might be a genius loci, the spirit of a particular place such as a fountain or an ancient tree – or it might be a deity such as Pan. The important thing about the numen is the numinous experience itself and your relationship to it. What you think about it intellectually is not as important as the bare fact of it and the personal relationship you establish with it.
As Stephen Palmquist says in The Tree of Philosophy, many people with no commitment to any religious doctrine have experienced the mysterious sense of something dreadful and awe-inspiring, the experience of encountering the numen – whatever the numen may be. For example, Robert C. Solomon’s concept of a secular spirituality based on direct engagement with the phenomenal world could be interpreted as one man’s reaction to the numinous outside the context of traditional religion.
A Religion That Asks Different Questions
By focusing on the unwinnable debate between faith and reason, both Christians and atheists have agreed to ask the same questions – thus missing the potential for a type of religion that asks different questions in the first place. Religions based around the numinous experience already exist. For instance, the Japanese religion known as Shinto reveres entities known as kami without ever explicitly defining what the kami are in a doctrinal sense.
According to University of Georgia professor Karl Friday, a specialist in the history of Japan, the word kami includes the numinous yet ultimately “defies succinct translation or even explanation” because Shinto treats all phenomena as potentially numinous and all actions as forms of worship when carried out with reverence. Kami sometimes refers to mythological deities, sometimes to natural phenomena, sometimes to people or other living creatures – the word is used whenever an experience evokes religious awe. Shinto practitioners have not felt it necessary to define kami precisely, focusing instead on the direct experience of the holy, the instinct to take an attitude of worship when confronted with the numinous.
This may not be a middle ground between faith and reason, but perhaps it makes a middle ground unnecessary. As Friday notes in his discussion of Joseph Kitagawa’s comments on Shinto, a religion based solely on the numinous is a religion of “direct, interactive participation – nature’s participation in human lives, as well as human participation in the life of nature.”
Numinous religion does not require faith, not even in the numen – although faith remains an option for those who are strongly committed to one interpretation or another. Numinous religion does not require reason, because the numinous experience cannot be proved or disproved by reason. There is no need to abandon reason in other areas of life, but when it comes to the numinous experience it has nothing to say. The numinous simply is what it is, a way of being in relationship with the world, a way of engaging passionately with all of life.
Christopher Scott Thompson
is an anarchist, martial arts instructor, and devotee of Brighid and Macha. Photo by Tam Hutchison.