The Myth of Pure Reason

The Literature of the Heretics, pt. 5

“Reason has built the modern world. It is a precious but also a fragile thing, which can be corroded by apparently harmless irrationality. We must favor verifiable evidence over private feeling. Otherwise we leave ourselves vulnerable to those who would obscure the truth.” – Richard Dawkins

“Past and present religious atrocities have occurred not because we are evil, but because it is a fact of nature that the human species is, biologically, only partly rational.” – Christopher Hitchens

Our (biological) inability to be entirely rational prevents humans from achieving perfect peace with one another. It is this irrationality, surely a vestigial trait not (yet) weeded out by the process of evolution, that causes strife and chaos and, perhaps most importantly, blindly guides us toward religion.

But for the general tone of negativity, I can almost agree with that sentiment. We are, in fact, only partly rational; and our utter inability to act entirely according to reason is, indeed, a defining factor in who we are as humans. It is the thing that carries us toward religion; the thing that makes us quarrel and either agree or disagree. But my disagreement is in this: I strongly believe that our not-all-there rationality is perhaps the single most beautiful element of humanity. It is our most defining characteristic and the one we should be the most grateful for. It is not erroneous or vestigial—it is purposeful and beneficial.

As for the two quotations above, therefore, I partially agree with the latter, but disagree almost entirely with the former. Reason, no matter what Dawkins may believe, has hindered as much as it has helped in building the modern world; and those who have chosen to look beyond reason have brought us the invaluable spark that makes us human in the first place. As for Hitchens, I agree with his statement, but for the implication that our inability to reason fully is a hurdle over which we must jump. In fact, pure reason is perhaps the one thing that, when obtained, can actually steal the humanity from a human.

Pure reason is no more an evolutionary leap than would be growing a second appendix. To become creatures of pure reason we would become mere creatures; our great leap would actually prove a tremendous and tragic fall.

This is a significant truth missed almost entirely by the heretics, and only rarely considered by those of us to whom it should be the most important: reason is absolutely not the thing that makes us human. It is not the thing that turns a civilization into an advanced civilization, or a world into a modern world. The truth is exactly the opposite: what makes us human is that we are not saddled with the burden of pure reason.

The man of pure reason, by definition, thinks that all men must strive toward reason as the next step in his advancement, but they forget that it is only by transcending reason that we are human in the first place. It is not our scientific achievement that brings us beyond the apes, nor our understanding of mathematics, but our ability to see that reason is not a thing to be worshipped, but to be transcended.

Want to see a creature of pure reason? Observe an earthworm. Pure reason means nothing more than survival; it cannot, by definition, mean anything more than that. It means responding instinctively to stimuli and nothing more; the earthworm is hungry, so it eats dirt; it is full, so it excretes; it has an instinct to reproduce, so it finds a lady earthworm.

This is, of course, the sort of creature that Richard Dawkins takes great pains in proving man to be—a creature of pure instinct; exactly the sort of creature evolution has produced. Religion? It is a biological necessity. Love and charity? Genetic modifications evolved to create more stable colonies, like so many ants on a hill.

When I say, therefore, that stepping beyond reason is the thing that separates us from the animals, Dawkins and Hitchens might, in fact, agree; because to them we are no different. Dawkins makes this point while offering the evolutionary argument in favor of abortion-on-demand: “The humanness of an embryo’s cells cannot confer upon it any absolutely discontinuous moral status. It cannot, because of our evolutionary continuity with chimpanzees and, more distantly, with every species on the planet.” A human life, he therefore argues, cannot be differentiated from the life of any other creature. This is the danger (one of many) of a pure reason; it demands that we refuse to honor thoughts of human uniqueness; it bogs us down into an ethical mire necessitated by utter dependence on evolutionary explanations; it opens the door for social darwinism and every evil associated with it.

Those are the negative arguments; the arguments against pure reason. But the negative should never be the most important argument. The most important must always be the positive; the argument in favor of transcending reason. This is the most important argument, and it is merely this: man’s ability to glance, even if only partially, beyond the veil of reason, is the first step in the direction of worship. I have argued before—and I think that it is one of the most perfect arguments in favor of God if rightly understood—that man is a creature made to worship, and we are only enabled to do so because we are not dominated by the burden of pure reason. This is not a flaw, it is a magnificent element of perfectly executed design. If we were creatures of pure reason we would certainly be able to create shelters, but never architecture. We might draw pictograms, but we could never create art. We might write rational correspondence, but never literature. We might make use of tools, but we would never use those tools to satisfy our wholly irrational curiosity; we would never build particle accelerators or blast rockets into space.

Indeed—the very same irrationality that leads us to worship is the irrationality that makes us curious about our world; the irrationality that enables our species to become scientists in the first place is the drive that pagan scientists hope to root out and destroy. When Hitchens says that, “We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books...” he is only saying that he himself has not yet succumbed to pure reason. To sit in awe of the universe is to feel the throbbing, pulsing need to worship. To appreciate the artistic qualities of literature is to throw off the shackles of reason and exist, for at least a moment, as a transcendent being. Hitchens may openly deride the Christian’s “resistance of the rational,” but he is just as prone to this resistance as I am; he simply has not learned to enjoy it as I have.

One needn’t worry about those who would seek to destroy the imagination in favor of pure reason. I am confident that such a thing is impossible; it is chasing after the wind. Man can suppress himself all he likes, but he can never truly steal his own humanity.

One final note on this subject: Reason, it must be remembered, is not a bad thing. Reason is what keeps us alive while our ability to transcend reason makes life worth living. What makes us human is that we have transcended reason while not doing away with it altogether. And what makes Christians unique is that we, alone, seem to have understood this. As Chesterton explained, “The substance of all paganism is that it is an attempt to reach the divine reality through the imagination alone; in its own field reason does not restrain it at all... But in reality the rivers of mythology and philosophy run parallel and do not mingle till they meet in the sea of Christendom. Simple secularists still talk as if the Church had introduced a sort of schism between reason and religion. The truth is that the Church was actually the first thing that ever tried to combine reason and religion.”

To the heretics, the ideal is a man of pure reason, which robs him of his humanity. To the pagan, the ideal is a man entirely divorced from reason; who lives only in the heights of heaven and never lets his feet down to earth. To the Christian, the ideal is a man to whom reason is a gift, but the ability to see beyond reason a far greater gift; a man who at once seeks rational truth about the world created for him and who falls to his knees in worship of He who created it.