It's become natural in our day to see a schism between religion and science. At heart though, this is a schism between the "naive" and the "sophisticated" and ultimately, between "faith" and "reason". This sounds right to our ears. In reality though, this differential, "a schism between faith and reason", is off the mark: removing the capacity for faith means that the capacity for reason disappears as well. I'll explain in two thought experiments.
Imagine yourself hopping into your car to get this week's groceries. A task so mundane that you don't even wonder whether or not you'll return safely. Will you? You won't be able to answer that question until you're actually back home and answer out of hind sight. Why can't you know the answer even before getting into the car?
In other words, we humans can see beyond ourselves into the "not-yet" of space time and future, but we can't know the future until it's become history. The question we must decide for ourselves is if this uniquely human perch, is in reality, a feature or a flaw?
Back to the mundane grocery trip and what normally and beautifully takes place every day.
First of all, if you didn't believe in your safe return, you wouldn't even get into your car. To get at such believing, you conduct your act of reason by looking at the road conditions, the car conditions, or even the traffic conditions. The moment you enter your car though, you are actually believing: as long as you remained in your house you will have only been reasoning. Believing has this "pull the trigger" aspect to it.
Oh- and by the way? You latch your seat belt: the brilliance of believing, is that it takes into account that one can never have complete knowledge. (Certainty itself has no such accounting. More on this another time.)
An Interlude on "faith".
If you were reading the New Testament in its original Greek language, you would come across two words that share the same root but differ in their suffix's: PISTis and PISTuo; the first being a noun the second a verb. When we translate these from Greek into English, we translate the noun by the word "faith" and the verb by the word "believe". One could equally say when it comes to the grocery trip, "I believe that I'll return home" or, "I have faith in my safe return". Apart from nuances available to the nature of nouns and verbs in general, choosing one or the other is merely an aesthetic one.
Thought experiment two.
Imagine yourself vacationing around Niagara Falls to escape the heat of the South during the middle 1800s. Being 4:00 p.m. in the afternoon, you're standing among fellow audience members gathered to watch an acrobat perform his wiles on a tight wire strung across one of the area's chasms. The audience is amazed at what this acrobat could do on such a perilous purchase against gravity. Shore side once again, he struts to his pile of props, grabs his wheel barrow and rolling it before the audience asks, "do you believe that I can roll this across without falling?! A man shouts "YES!" "Well then, good sir- hop in!" (our mustachioed acrobat invites while gesturing the pathway to the wheel barrow with a flow of his hand).
There's that "trigger-pulling" thing again.
Reason is not in the business of pulling triggers. In this case, I would hope that it would keep us from getting into that wheel barrow: after all, what's the pay off if having faith in the situation where you do indeed need to make it acrAt most, the proof that you can remain a still and centered load while the acrobat does his business yet one more time. The splat factor is too high for such minimal payback. On the other hand are the Wright Bros. who had to overcome the beliefs of their day, namely, if God meant for us to fly, we'd have wings.
On the other hand, when we marry another, aren't we really getting into each other's wheel barrow?
How can we say that marriage is a deducible task?
The essence of being human is that we have to "pull triggers" and "get into wheel barrows". Being religious or scientific can't remove this essence.
One can always remain in a state of reason and thus remain on the sidelines. Never leaving the sidelines though, misses the mark of what being human really is.
And then their's the notion that being human is the wheel barrow...
M
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