FAITH AND REASON

The London Free Press
March 26, 2002
By Rory Leishman

What accounts for this paradox? Robert P. George, an eminent professor of philosophy at Princeton University, has explored this question in his latest book, The Clash of Orthodoxies. He observes that the West is divided between exponents of the traditional Judeo-Christian worldview which holds that morality is grounded in truth, and a new secularist orthodoxy which insists morality is a matter of arbitrary personal taste.

David Hume, the 18^th century philosopher and atheist, gave classic expression to this latter notion. He said: "Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and may never pretend to any office other than to serve and obey them."

Thomas Jefferson was not of this opinion. He upheld the Judeo-Christian viewpoint that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with an unalienable right to life and liberty. In contrast, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., the revered American jurist and secular icon, upheld the secular orthodoxy. "All my life," he said, "I have sneered at the natural rights of man."

The Judeo-Christian orthodoxy holds that all human life is sacred. In Law Without Values: The Life, Work and Legacy of Justice Holmes, Albert Alschuler, a professor of law at the University of Chicago, recalls that Holmes advocated the execution of unfit babies -- an idea that has been revived by Peter Singer, the animal "rights" activist and colleague of George's in the philosophy department at Princeton.

Granted, Singer is egregious: Most proponents of the secular orthodoxy do not countenance such abominations as infanticide and bestiality. Yet they insist there is no reason for objecting to these or any other immoral preferences.

George and Alschuler are Christians: They maintain there is an objective difference between right and wrong that is attested by both reason and faith. But if their claim is true, why has the reason of secular intellectuals not led them to agree?

Sir William Blackstone, Hume's great contemporary, explained this apparent anomaly. In his magisterial Commentary on the Laws of England, he held that reason alone would be a sufficient guide to moral truth, "if our reason were always clear and perfect, unruffled by passions, unclouded by prejudice, and unimpaired by disease or intemperance. But every man now finds the contrary in his own experience; that his reason is corrupt, and his understanding full of ignorance and error."

Does it follow that there is no sure guide to moral truth? Not at all. Blackstone understood that, "In compassion to the frailty, the imperfection, and the blindness of human reason, (divine providence) hath been pleased, at sundry times and in divers manners, to discover and enforce its laws by an immediate and direct revelation. The doctrines thus delivered we call the revealed or divine law, and they are to be found only in the holy scriptures. These precepts, when revealed, are found upon comparison to be really a part of the original law of nature, as they tend in all their consequences to man's felicity."

Note that Blackstone insisted there is no inherent conflict between reason and Christian faith. George and Alschuler concur. And so does their fellow philosopher, Pope John Paul II, who introduced his 1998 encyclical Fides et Ratio with the ringing affirmation: "Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth."

Rory Leishman
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