Reason and Religion: Irremediably Incompatible Bedfellows?

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However, comparable splits are common in our everyday life practices. To mention a random smattering of apparently mundane examples, a child may believe in Santa Claus, yet asks the parents about the price of the Christmas gifts she receives; she believes, yet she engages in language practices within customary consumerist practices. High school football teams pray to God before a game to help them to victory, as if the Christian deity were of a nature to take sides in the contest. New Age esoteric practices and beliefs in the occult are on the rise in the United States, in spite of the logicizing age of information.

In fact, in a poll reported in the Religious News Service, June 8, 2005, 42 percent of U.S. citizens described themselves as ‘born again’——perhaps in part following the role model of their venerable president, George W. Bush. Kevin Phillips goes so far as to write that never before ‘has a U.S. political coalition [the Republican Party] been so dominated by an array of outsider religious denominations caught up in biblical morality, distrust of science, and a global imperative of political and religious evangelicalism’ (2006: 393). Even the DOW Jones Industrial Average has over the years taken on practices that border on fetishism. If Alan Greenspan developed a strange cough, the market would take a dip; a blemish was once found on Ronald Reagan’s nose, and, you guessed it, the market responded; these days, under the watchful eye of Ben Bernanke, wild market mood swings following what appear to be inconsequential events are notorious.

In non-Western and marginally Western societies, certain Ethiopians believe leopards, considered ‘Christian animals’, will never attack their domestic beasts on a day of fasting, yet they do not fail to secure their animals’ enclosures on such days. The Romans believed in the divinity of their rulers; yet on important family occasions they always turned to their traditional gods. Ask many Afro-Brazilians if they are Catholics, and they will give you a positive response; yet they may often engage in African based candomblé, macumba, or umbanda ceremonies. Or, take the cases of the bigoted Southerner who swears that some of his best friends are ‘colored folks’, Bill Clinton who ‘never had sex with “that woman”’, Reagan and Bush Senior who apparently could not fully cope with the contradictions that emerged regarding the Iran-Contra affair, and so they conveniently forgot about it altogether. Or Bush Junior, who all but forgot about Bin Laden and Al Queda for the purpose of focusing on chimerical weapons of mass destruction in oil rich Iraq obviously in order to secure the second largest oil reserves for gas guzzling SUVs and other instruments of mass consumption in the U.S. These days the sentiment among the religious right is: if we will soon be running out of oil, God will provide a way; if terrorism is on the increase, it’s God’s punishment for our wicked ways; if there is global warming it’s not our doing, God makes the climate, and besides, is all this not prophesied in the Bible? Indeed, White House accounts of Iraq since 2001 square with a struggle between Good and Evil.

In these and other such cases it is often unclear whether we are dealing with different modalities of belief, or with separate beliefs that guide different spheres of life. On neither interpretation is there any need to postulate a split self. Nor do we need to make this strong assumption in cases where the formation of one belief, for which we have good evidence, is blocked by a strong a priori conviction incompatible with it. The television program, Candid Camera, once recorded people sitting on a bench in Central Park who suddenly saw a tree on the edge of their visual field walking toward them. Many of the subjects reacted by shaking their head as if waking from a bad dream, and then went back to whatever they were doing. What they saw simply couldn’t happen, so it didn’t happen.

And so on. The tales, of course, are virtually unlimited.

Illogical logic, logical illogic
To reiterate, according to a common Western assumption, Eastern mystical doctrines are groundless, while we God-fearing people have our feet firmly planted on terra firma. This, quite obviously, is a problematic issue. Some strains of Buddhism in the beginning stressed the rational and logical features of their doctrine, and continue to do so. The Mahayana form of Buddhism, principally of Tibet, China, and Japan, is by far the most widely known, especially in the United States where it has usually been imported simply as ‘Zen’, whether in pop or genuine interpretation.

Mahayana Buddhism and Christianity share a few characteristics. Yet they are at odds with one another on many important issues, as pointed out by a noteworthy Japanese scholar:

The relationship between faith and reason is an important consideration in comparing Christianity and Buddhism. There is a strong emphasis on reason within the traditions of Buddhism. The relationship between faith and reason is more problematical in Christianity. Gotama is often pictured as instructing his disciples in Socratic manner. Jesus is not. His teachings are more picturesque than argumentative. Many strains within Christianity downgrade reason as an appropriate approach to salvation. However, there is a tradition of Christian thought which holds reason in high regard. The tradition has been influenced by the contact between Christianity and Greek philosophy. (Nakamura 1973: 30)


The central philosophy of Mahayana Buddhism is the Mādhyamika. Nāgārjuna, one of India’s most profound thinkers who lived around 200 AD, is often regarded as the father of Mādhyamika and the great-grandfather of Zen. He is also considered a proponent of all that is irrational in Buddhism.

Some scholars, however, R. H. Robinson (1967) to name one, argue that Nāgārjuna always stuck close to the Principle of Non-Contradiction. His adherence to the principle stems from his insistence on nonsimultaneity. He believed that a thing cannot at the same time exist and not exit, be both black and not black, real and not real, good and evil, at precisely the same moment. In other words, the existence or nonexistence of something, its legitimacy as a member of the real or the irreal, and one of its attributes and the opposite of that attribute, are complementary. They cannot exist, at the same instant in time. (This is roughly comparable to the Bohr or Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory, where an event can be either of wave characteristics or particle characteristics, depending on the context, but it can’t be both in simultaneity.)

Yet, things are not so clear-cut as we might like them with respect to Nāgārjuna and Buddhism. If we consider the whole of Nāgārjuna’s interpretation of Buddhist doctrine, we realize that two contradictory terms can become quite convenient bed partners. But to do so, each term must remain in its proper place, and on different levels in sort-of bunk-bed fashion. If the upper level term is that of everyday experience and the lower level has been reserved for ‘emptiness’ (Sunyātā), then they are there, now, above and below. Though they are incompatible, or mutually exclusive, nonetheless, they can sit next to each other with quite handily. There is the world of appearances, the world we experience during our coming and going in everyday life, the world of Maya. But this world is actually ‘irreal’ from the other view, from the perspective of ‘emptiness’, even thought we might take it quite ‘real’ with respect to our daily affairs. We take the one view to be ‘real’ because it is part of our concrete world of living and breathing, though it is ‘irreal’. We consider the other view ‘irreal’ because it is ‘emptiness’. We simply cannot fathom it, cannot articulate it, cannot cope with it. Yet it is the ‘really real’.

Here, one might expect, we have a blatant violation of the Principle of Non-Contradiction. We might take the one ‘reality’, Maya, on the basis of what our sensory faculties tell us. Therefore it is what must be rational. At the same time we might take the other ‘reality’, Sunyātā, on faith, since we cannot otherwise account for it. So it must be irrational. In this sense we seem to embrace a double truth, and Buddhism would seem to share some commonality with Christianity. Troubling.

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