Faith as Rational as Language (or Poetry)

Response after reading a Newsweek review of an atheist's screed against irrationality of religion; hearing songs on my nephew's gospel CD by a group "Casting Crowns"; reading the latest issue of Weavings, a journal of devotional and thoughtful readings.


A rash of atheist books and commentators have been in the public eye recently, not to mention a series of articles about religion's distortion of public policy and an expose by a Bush White House insider about his former colleague's cynical manipulation of Bush's religious base. The message is direct: faith is irrational at best.

My immediate reaction is to assert that the best things in life are irrational -- love, music, watching a play, reading a story, enjoying rhymes, enjoying weather....

Then again, those eighteenth century conversationalists who are celebrated in a new book (reviewed in Weekly Standard's latest issue) were believers both in revealed religion and in rationality. I certainly hate irrational argument, irrational behavior of mobs, and political appeals prejudices and to irrational fears.

I see a way to integrate both rationality and religion without appeal to historical artifacts of Resurrection or supposed holes in Darwin's work.

Let's ask, is metaphor rational? We communicate often through metaphor, using a shared image to bridge a gap between people's objective experiences. Stories affect us as metaphors, some kind of analogies to our own experiences. Language itself is a metaphor, in which symbols "equal" things to which they are not at all related. Math is perhaps the ultimate language, for its symbols represent universal experiences -- its statements operative whether we're counting sheep, atoms, or stars.

Language of any sort helps us to manipulate our ideas of objective experience. Without math, we can't easily divide or multiply, predict the trajectory of a space craft, calculate the right drug dose for a patient of a certain weight.

Now, let's ask if religion -- a mix of "myth" with "rites" -- doesn't work as an all-encompassing metaphor, one on which all who share it can draw upon. The CD by a gospel group Casting Crowns (appealing to fans of the popular rock group Counting Crows, no doubt) uses images drawn from the Bible as a way to work through day-to-day conflicts. The articles in this month's Weavings magazine frankly look upon the horrific and fascinating imagery of Revelation as metaphors for ends-of-worlds that our civilization periodically has experienced (as when the old Catholic order fell under the weight of Reformation, Muslim invasion, and Renaissance humanism).

As one part of an answer to those atheists angry at the falseness of religion, I'd say, "It's no more false than HAMLET or ALL THE KING'S MEN, and most of us (except some religious fundamentalists) see the merit in using those fictions as a lens for viewing our lives." I imagine a kind of chain of language, each useful in a different way:

objective reality - experienced by one <-- ordinary speech <-- metaphor, image <-- story <-- religious myth <-- mathematics As we move on my continuum further to the right of "objective reality" (something experienced by one person), we move into language that communicates the essence of that experience to more and more people. Remember that language doesn't just express, but it allows us to manipulate thoughts, as math does. So, we can apply rationality to metaphor to reach rational conclusions. Work back from metaphor to daily life, and act. So, say that Jesus never existed. Say that there is no God. Regardless, we find that the stories of the Bible, and the perrennial drama of the Church year, are a helpful way to think about ourselves, our world, our shared experiences. Now, I would add something else: that, as Paul writes, the Judaeo-Christian myths run counter to "the wisdom of the world," and seem all the more true because of that. To me, that's a sign that there's a reality speaking to us through the story that was not arrived at through human intellection alone.