Religion, evolution, reason

Andrew Brown's been writing an intriguing mini series in the Guardian in response to Robert Bellah's book on Religion since the axial age. There are some points he makes that are worth pondering further. One is to do with the 'invention' or 'discovery' of reason; we're so used to it that we forget that it may not always have been 'around' in human culture in the disciplined and methodical way we now approach it. And indeed, part of the story is about religion and not just in the inimical way that New Atheists would have us hear it (since the story begins before the so-called Enlightenment).

This isn't a universal conflict. "Reason" itself, as contrasted with myth, is a relatively recent invention. You could in fact understand the history that Bellah tells of religion up to the Axial age as a story of the invention of reason (or, for Platonists, and theists, its discovery).

The story involves understanding myth as something more than a mere fiction and being able te recognise the bona fides of cultures approaching existential issues and matters of public knowledge and indeed wisdom with different backgrounds and teloi than the Modern West.

Thus:

 If religions are best understood as ways in which we dramatise and come to understand the urge to power and the urge to nurture, it's obvious that they can never be displaced by science, nor vice versa. Science itself is a playground, or arena, for both urges.

In other words, I think, Science is not immune from its protagonists continuing to behave badly, to compete with malice, to deceive and do-down even while proposing that it is all about nurturing the common good and treading the way to a brighter future.

Nevertheless, moral imperatives are well to be grounded in some degree of reality else they'll not overcome the ingrained self-serving and confirmation-biases which would undercut ideologies of Reason: there is still a difficulty about deriving an ought from an is and any ought grounded in 'human nature' is too immediately self-defeated and open to challenge. Why should we follow the better angels of our nature? And who says they are better? And can we really argue with the Ayn Rand's of this world?

I think that this is part of What Brown is getting at when he writes:

Ever since that discovery [of reason], in all the places where it has been kept alive, reason and myth eat away at each other, and feed on the other's remains. Unless myth is felt as a truth larger than ourselves, and unless it is understood from the inside, it just won't work. But a working myth cannot be made entirely proof against reason. Perhaps the first discovery of this was by Adam and Eve. It was certainly obvious to the thinkers of the 18th century, whether or not they were Christians. You find it in Voltaire and Hume as well as Swift and Bishop Butler. They all understood that reason alone cannot justify the claim that we should live by reason alone.

It seems to me that the last bit there is a reflex of the incompleteness theorem in Maths and of the epistemological conclusions of mid 20th century philosophers that in order to know something, you first have to believe something.

Religion in Human Evolution, part 8: the invention of reason | Andrew Brown | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk: