GOD SCIENCE AND REASON

THE ROLE OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE EVOLUTION OF WESTERN CULTURE

By Wallace H. Provost Jr.

The nineteenth century Christian theologian Soren Kierkegaard called Christianity a "logical absurdity". Kierkegaard had a reputation for outrageous statements, obviously, in his defense of the necessity for faith, he used this statement primarily for its shock value. But the statement has no shock value unless those to whom it was addressed believed in a rational world. In an irrational world there would be nothing either absurd or surprising in a religion being illogical. This belief in a rational world among modern westerners is so subtle that we seldom realize how deeply our most firmly held beliefs depend on it. The result of this fundamental assumption led Kierkegaard to state, "In my God-relationship I have to learn precisely to give up my finite understanding."

Note that it is not his belief in a rational world that he is giving up. He is setting a limit to his own reason, his own ability to understand what must be ultimately understandable. One would expect a scientist to stand firm on the belief in a rational universe, but western Christianity is just as dependent on this belief. How much more so is the belief of the atheist, in fact of that ultimate atheist John Paul Sartre who said that it was unfortunate that there was no God because that left the responsibility for legislating morals to man himself. How could man legislate if the universe was not rational? What of Neitzche, who claimed not only that god was dead but that man murdered him. Of course he implied that man had created God, thus his murder was not an irrational act. His conclusion was that in order to replace God man must create the "overman," a new kind of man who had the ability to determine the "wither" and the "to what end" of mankind. However, it is the activities and rules of men that the overman must legislate, not the rules of the universe. For these are fixed. At the same time, the rules for man do not exist in a vacuum. In order for there to be a rationally possible life for man there must be a rational universe in which it must exist. Otherwise legislating would be a waste of time because then the future would be unpredictable. The mathematician-physicist Ernst Mach in the nineteenth century even made the claim that if he knew the position and momentum of every particle in the universe he could calculate the entire future of the universe.

The idea of a rational universe is not a universal assumption made by all men for all times. It was born with and has been until recently the exclusive property of the west. It is not a concept that can be developed through experience. Most of what we experience is episodic, unexpected, unpredictable. What follows here is a story of the birth of that idea, and the birth with it of a new unprecedented culture. It is a view from the vantage point of those members of western culture whose primary interest lies in understanding the implications of the assumption that the universe is a rational place, western philosophers.