ABSTRACT:
The modern divide between science and religion obscures the nature of both reason and faith. For reason naturally seeks the truth about the authority we trust, just as faith presupposes a natural desire to understand the mind or thought constituting the very life or soul of authority.
(See further https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLG45dScGj8)
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The fundamental question is not whether we should base our lives on faith or on reason, but whether we should reason and seek reason 1. aside from authority or 2. at the heart of authority. If there is a reason at the heart of authority, then our own reasoning—the reasoning of those subject to authority—should have access to the reason of authority and so to the mind of authorities. Our faith, our trust would be rational in the respect that our quest for understanding would be originally seated in the belly of authority. No sooner, however, would our reasoning take its bearings from what is supposedly outside of authority than we would end up with an uncertain reason and an irrational authority and so with a mechanistic or materialistic world.
The materialist or naturalist, who seeks reason outside of authority, fosters the view that authority is irrational and reason is amoral or mercenary—as if virtue and truth were mutually incommensurate. What use would authority have if reason sought truth in a context transcending authority? The finding or invention of such a context presupposes disenchantment vis-à-vis authority, or the view that authority is naturally alien to truth—and so to reason. Yet, prior to seeking truth outside of authority, we seek it naturally at authority’s heart, as the truth about authority and so as the true face of the moral-political world we are commonly raised in.
The significant divide is not between those who base their reasoning on faith and “free thinkers” who reason autonomously of any authority, but between those who reason naturally, discerning authority as a mirror of truth, and those who reason mechanistically, rejecting authority as a mere imposture, a distraction from truth constituting a false and illegitimate context to be replaced with the mechanistic one of a truth radically indifferent to our search for it.
What, then, are we to say of those who place reason in the service of a despotic authority, as if reason were a mere instrument of despotism? Those ministers of despotism are essentially equivalent to the naturalist prophets of mechanistic science for whom the context of reason is fundamentally opaque or impervious to reason. The principal discrepancy between the two groups of instrumentalists is superficial, for in one case authority is defended overtly within sectarian or tribal limits, whereas in another case authority is defended covertly as a universal that is no longer needful of a sectarian face. In the former case, reason must submit to a God utterly beyond humanity; in the latter, reason is to submit to the absence of any humanly accessible God.
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