RELIGION OR REASON?

Taranaki Daily News, 6 September 1935, Page 3

RELIGION OR REASON?

DEVELOPMENT OF FUTURE W.E.A. LECTURE EXPLANATION. AUTHORITY OF REVELATION. “Just as, in the middle ages, a few rare but valuable spirits kept alive humane and sceptical temper in the face of a powerful and often tyrannical religiosity—and just as their work was invaluable in the development of the human spirit—so to-day the few rare and valuable spirits who keep alive the religious temper are doing a work equally invaluable in the development of the whole man,” said a lecture read by members of the New Plymouth W.E.A. at the weekly evening last night The paper presented was on the contemporary spirit in religion. The chief question was the present day battle between religion and reason and the contrasts in each were presented by by the lecturer. There was, he said, an intractable courage in humanity that made men believe it right to inquire into things—whatever the cost to their beliefs—and so men would always do so. A world in which the only value was intellectual curiosity would seem a drab place, as cold and unlovely as that imagined by Bernard Shaw in “Back to Methuselah,” where the ancients spent their lives in pure contemplation and were content to satisfy their hunger with doses of higher mathematics.

The temper of western civilisation could be described as one in which religion found a place with difficulty. The scientific mind in the popular form pervaded the whole of life. It was taken for granted not only that reason must organise things, but that reason alone could organise. Optimistically, a future was waited where all things would be scientifically managed. It was not habit to think in terms of a religious or celestial millenium. A more valuable world was not looked forward to, nor even the coming of the Prince of Peace. Rather was a world where there would be no unemployed and where a higher standard of living prevailed. Pessimistically, humanity thought of human reason as the only but insufficient wedpon for dealing with what might be insoluble problems. The reign of antiChrist was not looked to, but a reign of chaos, when science itself would have grown unruly and the world was too small to direct its findings.

The religious outlook had a validity not less, perhaps more fundamental than the validity of the scientific outlook. Discussing the church of the present day, the lecturer said there was a large number of well-organised and well-en-dowed bodies with common powers of persuasion. They held elements of belief in common but certain of them maintained a hold on their members by offering them specific privileges. The privileges included special and monopolistic communion with the Almighty, a chance of being one of the elect, opportunity ,to get in touch with the dead and faith healing of physical disabilities. PRESTIGE OF THE CHURCH. Taken as one heterogeneous part of the body politic, the church had prestige in the state unlike that of any sub-state organisation. Public utterances about religion made it clear that there were in the religious life of the community two characteristic reactions from modern critical and rational temper, the surrender to reason and the flight from season. The reactions arose from inability to make a reasonable criticism of the sphere ol reason. One party capitulated to reason, the other escaped and hid its head. Modem religious thinkers had made a surrender to reason by two ways, by allowing reason to make an illegitimate criticism of faith and by taking over the results of' scientific investigation and from them making illegitimate moral and cosmological references.

Certain spheres of religious practice and belief must be held, by those who observed them, to be outside the operation of reason’s criticism. Their authority was the authority of revelation and reason must hold its tongue once it had allowed the possibility of revelation. Either the mystery was accepted or it was not. If it was, reason would neither destroy nor confirm it. Anthropology, chemistry, phsy'chology might all make comments on it, but the mystery still remained for those who chose to regard it as such* It was possible to grant all that reason said but reason could never transcend the authority of revelation for the very reason which had initially accepted that authority must assert that the mystery of revelation as beyond its criticism. Religion was a way of solving the problems of life where reason broke down. Religion could not be a rationally established question, though its reasonableness might be unquestioned. No religioncould be natural and it could, therefore, be dismissed as irrelevant obscurantism. Reason, on that strength, could be dismissed as an importunate interloper. , . Parsons were wrong to take science so seriously and they were wrong on. their own ground. The conclusions of science did not touch the mystery they preached and it was an undignified condescenion on the part of religious thinkers to seize on which scraps of science they could pick up and to use them either to confirm or modify the mystery. The authority of revelation seemed to them so small that it willingly yielded to the authority of reason or else gladly availed itself of its support The church had inflicted great damage on itself by its offering as a sycophant of science a sort of intellectual parasite that fed where it did not sustain. The sceptical and inquiring mind would take the place of the credulous or the believing mind and action which was now moral would then become mental because its exact effects could be estimated. Belief and faith would give way to knowledge and prediction. That was the supreme capitulation to reason. What was going to be done?