I got this quote from a book on Aristotle. On the last few pages the authors mentioned the words of quite liberal Islamic scholars who believed that: Rationalism is the final form of religion and that God is reason itself, and so, rational thought is a better way of understanding divinity than revelation in scripture.
But the question is, how can can you be rational when speaking of God or religion? It is a set of beliefs based upon faith, something irrational in many senses. Faith starts from reason, but it does not end in it. It is reason and questioning that can sometimes drive one to be faithful, as an answer to questions, but in the end it is faith. You believe something because it makes sense to you, which means that it has then become not a pursuit of knowledge, but a matter of personal opinion, regardless of how followers claim that it is all truth.
What can also be taken from this, is that reason is a point of view, it differs from person to person, culture to culture. There is no objective form of reason. So even if we look at religion with rationalism, we still get nowhere, as again, we are stuck with someone’s point of view, with no more facts than when we began, only speculation.
Iam not surpised that Aristotle said something like this. In a logical world, what he says is true.
But, the moot point here is how we know that what we define as logical is logical in absolute sense..
I wish things were that straight as this quote.
@lallopallo – just a minor detail: not aristotle in a book on aristotle. :p
@ lucienlachance – thanks for sharing your views and welcome to my bloggie
I don’t agree or disagree with you. I it put up there because I thought it was an interessting approach towards worship and revelation in scripture. Quite the opposite of how we perceive religious sentiments.
(The above is pure laziness – need some time to react
)
Ok..thanks..But, since Aristotle’s treaties on logic and philosophy were the foundations of western philosophy ( which includes atheism), I was quite sure he said that..
Perhaps rationalism in the context of whichever specific “intellectual environment” we are discussing. In Aristotle’s case, this amounted to a belief that pure reason was the method for arriving at truth – not experiment – and this simply lead to erroneous beliefs, about all sorts of things: that circular motion was divine and primary, that comets were gaseous exhalations in the upper atmosphere, etc., etc. This was rationalism to Aristotle, and the entire spectrum of his erroneous ideas deriving from “pure reason” were in turn adopted as the intellectual foundation of early-to-Renaissance Christianity. There was a certain “rationality” (or at least it was represented as such) within the church all through the medieval period,a rationality believed to be fundamental and immutable, but mostly just wrong. And even worse, it was static. When you have a sky that is immutable, a book that outlines what is believed to be the absolute (if symbolic) truth of things, and a proscription on experiment (since observation and “reason” are the only way to arrive at conclusions outside of the Good Book), there’s no impetus for progress.
The venerable Yorgi, in The Name of the Rose (great flick)summed it up, when he admonished the monks that their function was “not the search for knowledge” but rather, “continuous and sublime recapitulation.”
All this brings us back to the question that lucienlachance brought up: is “rationality” or “reason” an absolute, or is it merely that mode of thinking employed with a certain intellectual environment, existing within a specific culture?
A present-day scientist might look back on those bygone days, and feel a certain sense of triumph, or satisfaction, that he and his colleagues have risen above such “flawed” forms of thinking. But there’s a problem with this: as Thomas Kuhn suggested in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, there are sociological aspects of modern science that are hardly objective, e.g., the tendency for practitioners trained in a certain intellectual environment to think in terms of established “paradigms,” and to profoundly resist thinking that challenges those paradigms, even when presented with evidence that severely challenges the existing paradigm(s).
In a strange way, Aristotle’s statement does make sense, though. Science in itself is a “way of thinking” profoundly shaped by culture. Even it is not “absolute reason.”
In fact, I would ask the question: can there be an “absolute reason?” It seems to me that the only kind of being which could employ perfect reasoning about any aspect of reality would be one who was omniscient – all knowing. Which, incidentally, is presumed to be the nature of God.
I’m not sure I expressed myself very well towards the end of the last comment. In the simplest possible terms, what Aristotle seems to be saying is that rationalism is the methodology which has the greatest chance of fathoming the true nature of things, and presumably then, the true nature of God. But this would only be possible if we could become omniscient, in which case we would begin to resemble Gods ourselves. But, in reality, we cannot know all, and we can probably never fathom the truest nature of reality, because we can’t separate it out from our perceptual channels. To illustrate this, what we “see,” here on the macro level is really just a tiny slice of what’s really going on all around us, most of which can only be known in a highly abstracted sense through mathematics. For example, what does it mean to say that we exist as a “skin” on a certain manifold dimension?
The best we can probably ever hope for is to “approximately understand certain slices of reality.”
So, trying to restate the point of my last comment more clearly: Aristotle’s statement makes sense in that he is identifying rationalism not so much as a mode of thinking, but as an aspiration, or an ethic – an attempt to fathom God through fathoming the creation. Basically “Einstein’s God.” It also calls to mind the statement from the Bible, “His invisible qualities are clearly seen from the world’s creation onwards.”
Striving toward the unreachable goal, the unknowable knowledge, the “mystery of mysteries.” Where science and mysticism meet. In that sense, even science, e.g., rationality, is religion.
I would like to quote Einstein’s “Science with religion is lame, religion without science is blind”. In the book “God’s debris”, the avatar asks “you toss a coin thousand times, what is the probability of outcomes?”. Assuming an unbiased coin, you would say, equal head and tail (0.5). But, the first thing to note here is, already we have neglected the assumption of the coin landing on its side. Still, you can’t give the answer as to why the coin lands so many times on large trials!! For that matter, Science is incapable of providing answers as to why certain things happen. Personally I seek the answer to questions with “why”. Religion doesn’t seem to deliver them, masking with a delusional concept of faith (at least to me). But then, I am as confused as any other!!
To paraphrase, again as narrated in God’s debris, if you deliver a parcel to a place, and i ask “did you bring the parcel here or did the parcel bring you?”, the answer to the question is “both were EQUALLY important”. I think its obvious that I concur to Einstein’s saying I initially quoted.
Sorry, “science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind”.
— arun.
Good discussion going on, I’d like you all to read an excerpt from a book I read entitled, you guessed it: “God Is Reason” by James Rushing…
“I think I have the answer: Ancient and modern man, initiated force in his passion to survive and to help his fellow man-violating individual rights with taxes, regulations, prohibitions- and in this folly of good intentions, man uses force to do good and instead created evil. Therefore, evil is an irony: initiating force to do good creates the opposite of that intended.
Lydia was inspired, “This is the basis for a challenge to the state’s basic premise for initiating force: taxes, regulations, and prohibitions. Since their benevolent tyranny is based onthe belief that man doesn’t have a rational nature and must be saved from himself because his nature is bestial and his life without their guidance would be short and brutal.”
Alice concluded, “Art not the state, should lead our cultural parade by discovering and showing the ideal. The people will strive for the ideal that the artists show them and that striving gives direction to the human parade that is marching, flags flying, through the Cosmos.”
Paul commented, “The people evolved the identity of God along the way, from many gods to one God. The Hebrew, seeking to maintain their identity evolved the idea of one God and the identity for God was: I AM THAT I AM. I AM THAT I AM begot the Old Testament and the Old Testament begot the Christ; and Christ begot the New Testament and the New Testament begot Muhammad; and Muhammad begot the Koran and the Koran begot the Renaissance and the Renaissance begot the Age of Reason and the Age of Reason evolved into science and science evolved into the constitutional rights of man. Reason is God leads the parade of man now and all the scientifically verifiable wriings in all he millions of books in he enire world are he new Bible. Science is he laes evoluion of he ideni God. To know Science is to know God.”
Lydia said, “It occurs to me that the first One God was named Yah-Weh and Yah-Weh means ‘I am that I am,’ and that our math formula for God; A=A, and so, God can be identified by a mathematical equation that dates from the beginning of recorded time.”
They were quiet for the first time in hours, letting the enormity of that thought connect up in their minds, then Alics continued with a distant look in her eyes, “Artists must protray the law of identity, A=A, as the force of Reason, the eternal Force of Identity, the force that created man and the universe; the force that frees man from mistakes by giving him the means to know the truth and the will to act on that knowledge. Mistakes of every proportion are made when man is separated from God, who is Reason.”
Expanding on Einstein’s parcel allegory, God is needed for man to be a man, otherwise he is just an intelligent animal; with rights only either given to him by government or taken by force. As predicated in the US Constitution. A man without God has government subsituted for it.
To be sure, the claim,”God is reason itself,” caught my eye. However, this statement is true but incomplete. Reason evolved. The existence of God (based upon reason) is the antecedent condition for the God/reason isomorphic relationship, and further, the reasonable expression of the claim “God exists as reason,” requires the additional antecedent of the isomorphic relationship of self/reason. In other words, God/reason, in order to be recognized as such, requires the antecedent condition of a Being who knows fear, passion, comprehensibility, cleverness, cause and effect, loneliness, anguish, love and death, a Being that calls out to God, “Why me?”
I’m particularly interested in the distinction between “reason” as an absolute, abstract entity and “a reason” which, while still abstract, makes more of an allowance for the existence of such a thing as case, which can be extrapolated to include cases in which reason fails us. The former usage seems more aligned with the philosophical schools of strong rationalism and logical positivism. I’ve written a short entry about this on my blog, including an excerpt from Timothy Keller’s book The Reason for God.
http://www.metatheism.com/2010/03/31/god-and-reason.html
Good Grief! How and anyone put the concept of a mythical being and rational thought together? This is so absurb! I cannot believe it. Well, not surprising since I do not have the ability to accept anything based on belief without thought.
I am reading the God Delusion. It is GREAT. I am also reading The Closing of the Western Mind, The rise of faith and the fall of reason. Also good.
I am so sick of religion. Every day I get another Thank god message. No matter what happens someone believes their idea of god is responsible.
Perhaps Aristole meant when we finally begn to think rationally, religion ends.
Hi Gail, you know James and Linda Rushing from Libertarian activism and conventions.
…religion didn’t “end” in the sense that a horse-drawn wagon didn’t end when the auto rolled up in a cloud of smoke. Religion evolved into science because scientific reasoning answered the big and small questions better.
So where it Jim Rushing? A mutual friend, John Robertson, asked me to see if I could find him or Linda. John is in Oregon. I am in San Luis Obispo.
Just found another book at Goodwill that I had seen inbookstores, God is Not Great.
In the beginning was Logos (Greek for Reason) ….and Reason was God -John 1:1.
So, Reason, which is the energy of thought expressed as Speech is thre power through which all things were made.
Since it is written in John 1:1 that God is Reason , then there should be no debate.
I googled Reason and God and found this blog. I think it’s true. The Pope teaches the necessary alignment of faith and reason, as most famously put forth in the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas. And as Chas said, John 1:1 as well.
As for the necessity of being to comprehend/conceptualize “Logos”, the question goes back to the distinction of Platonism and Aristotelian thought, about Truths existing a priori in the former/
God Is Reason, Jesus is Love and the Holy Spirit is the Spirit Of Freedom. This Trinity of Forces: Reason, Love and Freedom identify the true God when all three are present in human action. To Reason correctly, is to know God.
james Rushing who once lived in Orange or San Diego co. in CA? John Robertson was asking about you. Not sure if I can reach him. His son took in in and I am hearing rumors that he is not well. gail lightfoot [now in San Luis Obispo Co., CA]