What Has Reason to do with Faith?

Over the years I have seen that story line repeated innumerable times. You can imagine my surprise when I started actually reading the Great Books and the history of the West to find out that it is an absolute canard that the West moved from Faith to Reason at any point in its past. Western Thought has always been a blend of faith and reason, a melding of Athens and Jerusalem.

Samuel Gregg’s Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization is the latest attempt to beat back the myth that faith is no longer important. This is an argument that oddly needs to be repeated time and again; Gregg provides some clues as to why the point needs repeating.

The starting place for Gregg’s argument is that contrary to the popular story, the Enlightenment was not devoid of religion. My favorite example is Newton’s Principia, which easily wins if you had to pick the single most paradigmatic Enlightenment work. Newton invents calculus to demonstrate that a clean mathematical model of a heliocentric solar system shows that the same force causes celestial motions and apples falling to the ground. Before Newton, there is some doubt about how best to describe planetary motion; post-Newton, the debate is over. Newton closes his book with a long explanation of how all this demonstrates the amazing nature of God.

But Newton is not the only incredibly devout member in the pantheon of the Enlightenment. Many, probably most, of your own list of Enlightenment greats were quite religious. (Not Hume and Voltaire, obviously.) Gregg documents the breadth of the interactions of faith and reason throughout Europe. The Enlightenment’s ties to religious thought runs deep; it was religion, after all, that provided the argument that the world was sensible and follows predictable patterns because it was created by God. Without the idea of a reasonable God behind the whole thing, there is no reason to think the world itself is reasonable.

While the Enlightenment itself was a manifestation of the interaction of reason and faith, Gregg argues there were two outgrowths of the Enlightenment that proved to be hostile to faith. Prometheanism and Scientism both have their roots in the Enlightenment, but did not fully develop until the 19^th century.

Prometheanism is Gregg’s term for the view that humans can be created anew simply by changing the external structures which surround them. There is no innate human nature, no stamp of original sin. Fix the society and people will thrive. All the pathologies we see about us are purely the result of societal structures corrupting people from the moment of birth. In a Promethean world, faith is the enemy; it is a legacy of all those old structures which cause modern societal ills. Reason is the hero; if we just reason out the good society and have the will and power to impose it, then people will conform.

The second misbegotten manifestation of the Enlightenment is Scientism, the belief that the scientific method can discover all that can be known. Physics and metaphysics are divorced and only the former contains actual knowledge. Metaphysics is mere fantasy. The ultimate expression of scientism is the oft-repeated phrase, meant to be a conversation stopper, “Scientists say X” or “My opponent is a science denier.” Science attains the status of Holy Writ and so there is no need for any other source of authority, no need for faith.

The particular creeds generated by the combinations of Prometheanism and Scientism are obvious. Marx’s materialism with its inevitable historical laws eventually resulting in the perfect society as the material conditions are altered. Nietzsche’s observation that there is no longer such a thing as Truth with a capital T; that if all is relative, then the Will to Power is all there is.

The current manifestations are also obvious. Authoritarian Relativism with its claim that since everything is relative, and there is no Truth, there is no reason for the Enlighted Few to refrain from imposing their views on society. Liberal religion with its endless appeals to mere sentiment. Jihadism, with it assertion of truth immune to reason entirely. As Gregg’s title says, the Struggle for Western Civilization is the fight between those who believe in Reason and Faith and those in all these other movements which seek to destroy that union.

Gregg’s book is thus a call to arms, which makes a couple of features of the book so jarring. The chapter pointing to the problems arising from Marx and Nietzsche is entitled “Faiths of Destruction.” But, there is a third malevolent figure discussed in this chapters: John Stuart Mill. Marx, Mill and Nietzsche; you would be forgiven for thinking one of these three is not like the others.

From the first chapter to the last, Gregg asserts that freedom and liberty are the most important innovations in the West. You would naturally enough think that Mill is one of the heroes of the story. Instead, Gregg notes that Mill had no love for faith, that in Mill’s ideal world there is an inherent relativism. Mill’s ideal society did not privilege any particular view. As Gregg explains:

The notion that people might have good reasons to believe that a religions revealed truths (dogmas) might be true or that religious institutions like Oxford and Cambridge had a responsibility to explain their religious beliefs to their students was plainly foreign to Mill. Nor did he seem conscious that his own insistence that such things have no place in any institution of learning sounds itself rather dogmatic.

This is, as I said, terribly jarring. Is Gregg arguing that Oxford and Cambridge have a responsibility to teach religious truth as fact? Does Gregg reject the idea of the university being the marketplace of ideas? After all, one of the things he decries is higher education imposing its authoritarian relativism on the community.

Then a chapter later when Gregg turns to Jihadism and the discussion of Islamic terrorists who murder in the name of their faith, he begins the discussion by noting that Muslim terrorists are not the first people who rejected reason in favor of a blind fideism. The earlier example of this type of evil threat to Western Civilization? The Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther, you know, made some snide remarks about the Roman Catholic Church’s reliance on Aristotle for working out theology. Is Gregg really suggesting a link between Martin Luther and Osama bin Laden?

Gregg really tips his hand in the penultimate chapter “A Way Back.” The way back from the cliff over which Western Civilization is heading is Vatican I, in particular the decree Dei Filius. Now Gregg is obviously free to argue that the “faith” in Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization is, at its heart, the Roman Catholic Church. But, it does seem odd that if the struggle is as fierce as Gregg believes it to be, that Gregg does not do a bit more to make Protestants feel welcome on his side.

After all, his best example of the prominence of faith in the Enlightenment itself was the role of the Scottish clergy in the Scottish Enlightenment. Clearly Protestants have played a huge role in the integration of reason and faith. Indeed, there is a pretty direct line from Martin Luther’s emphasis of the priesthood of all believers to Enlightenment ideas that the people should be able to elect their rulers. Since Gregg clearly applauds the latter, it is staggering that Luther is lumped in with modern terrorists.

Even still, Gregg’s book is an important addition to the literature defending the notion of Western Civilization against its very obvious enemies. Gregg’s constant return to the idea of God as logos, God as the source and embodiment of reason, makes it hard to evade his argument that reason and faith have been co-mingled for two thousand years in the West. The attempts to rip religious influences out of the West are nothing short of an attempt to destroy the West itself.

One final note on the book. I read the book with a student reading group. There was a remarkable split in the way the students reacted to the book. The history and classics majors thought the book was a quick read. The students with other majors thought the book was incredibly dense and hard to read. I didn’t notice it when I was reading it—I too thought it was a quick read—but hearing the students who found it dense talk about it, it was immediately obvious why. Gregg assumes the Reader has a high degree of familiarity with the important names and events in the history of the West. It would be nice if Gregg’s assumptions about what is common knowledge were correct. But sadly, Gregg’s thesis that the struggle for Western Civilization is being lost is made remarkably obvious by the fact that some very smart, very curious students who are happy to think and argue about important ideas, the exact type of people Gregg would love to reach and that anyone would want to hire, have been miserably failed by the modern education system.