Religion and Reason: An Introduction

By F. B. Nieman

Our human nature incessantly challenges us to explain the great mystery of whence we came and why we are here at all. We simply do not want to die while saying to ourselves, “Well, that was interesting; I wonder what it was all about.” Religions have always flourished because they offer answers. But which, if any, is the right one to choose? This book examines the origin and nature of religion and offers a path of wisdom to find reasonable answers to the mystery of it all. The Hebrew prophet Isaiah once relayed as a message from God the exhortation, “Come, let us reason together!” (Isa.1:18). This book is an invitation to do just that.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Jun 26, 2015
• ISBN: 9781490879710

F. B. Nieman

Although a Roman Catholic by rearing and education, I was never tempted into business or to become a clergy person, I began my higher education with an Honor’s bachelor degree having a double major in Classical Languages (Latin and Greek) and Philosophy at Xavier University of Ohio. A teaching fellowship from Saint Louis University brought experience teaching Philosophy to undergraduates, a Master of Arts degree in Philosophy with a thesis on human understanding, and some work on a doctorate. Marriage and the arrival of children caused an interruption in studies while I taught Philosophy in the evening back at my undergraduate college. By day I became a Systems Analyst, helping to convert a large life insurance company from a punch-card system to the then newly-created digital computers. Life took an unusual turn when, after reading a Time Magazine article (June, 1961, “Religion”), I was accepted into an experimental program formed at the University of San Francisco to train professional lay evangelists for the Roman Catholic Church. A year of graduate studies, mostly in theology, followed and then I spent four years as an evangelist in California parishes. We evangelists, all college graduates and at least twenty-eight years of age, were directed specifically to try to convert the un-churched and I led more than a hundred adult persons to Baptism. This bold experiment was interrupted by the Roman Catholic Ecumenical Council, Vatican II, and parishes became more focused on updating than reaching out for converts. Always interested in theology more than philosophy, I took the opportunity to return to graduate studies when, just at that time, a doctoral program was opened for laity at Marquette University. With a good grasp of Greek, I was eager to do a doctoral dissertation in the Gospel of St. John. Fate intervened. The man on the faculty who led such studies took a leave of absence and I had no time or money for any delays. I turned to my Lutheran, Harvard-educated professor of Reformation Theology and he led me through a dissertation in the young Martin Luther. I ended up a Roman Catholic with a grasp on Reformation theology. I also taught a course in the New Testament at a local women’s college during this time. The program that I had entered to become an evangelist had meanwhile been invited to become an affiliate of the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California, as The School of Applied Theology, offering a professional Master’s degree in Applied Theology. Because I was finishing my Ph.D. studies and had four years of experience as an evangelist, I was invited to Berkeley to become Dean of the new program. I did that for the next twenty-nine years, President/Dean for the last nine. Besides directing the degree program, I taught theology, primarily on a graduate level, at the Union as well as at several other universities as a Visiting Professor. Motivated by personal efforts to engage adults, many highly educated, in the reasonableness of Christianity, I have made a specialty of examining what is happening when people “convert” to a religion. When I “preached the Gospel”, I seemed always to be only half preaching, the other half being a rational presentation, almost like a college class. This may be somewhat evident in this treatment In spite of my intellectual pursuits, my feet have, perforce, been kept firmly planted on the ground. With my spouse of over fifty years, we have raised eight children, all college graduates. Spurred by recent events wherein people have pursued wealth as if it were something holy or have suicide-bombed innocent women and children as if it were something God would bless, I was moved to write this essay. I pray that no one be scandalized by what I have written.

Book preview

RELIGION AND

REASON

AN INTRODUCTION

F. B. NIEMAN

An enlarged edition of Religious Faith and Reason: A

Brief Introduction

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Copyright © 2015 F. B. Nieman.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Scripture quoted taken from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright ©1952 [2nd edition, 1971] by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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ISBN: 978-1-4908-7970-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-7972-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-7971-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015907095

WestBow Press rev. date: 06/10/2020

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1 Reason and the Origin of Religious Faith

Chapter 2 The Significance of Revelation

Chapter 3 The Elements of Religion

Chapter 4 The Significance of Reason in Faith

Chapter 5 Reason and Holiness in Religion

Chapter 6 Christian Holiness—An Example

Chapter 7 God and Religion

Chapter 8 Good, Evil, the Mystery of Life—and Reason

Chapter 9 The Standard of Reason for all Religion

Chapter 10 Some Clashes with Reason Examined

Chapter 11 Religion, War, Church, and State

Chapter 12 The Significance of Change and Evolution

Chapter 13 Dealing with Change: Religion, Authority, and Believers

Chapter 14 Beyond Holiness Codes

Chapter 15 Religion: Human Dimensions

Chapter 16 Reason, Religion, and Change

Chapter 17 Religion and Inspiration

Chapter 18 Evildoers in Religion

Chapter 19 Evil in Religion

Chapter 20 Good and Evil, Nurture and Nature

Chapter 21 The Natural Impulse to Religion and Its Danger

Chapter 22 Faith and Reason in Conflict

Chapter 23 Reason and Accepting the Revelatory Event

Summary

Inter-religious Dialogue

Conclusion

About the Author

References

Endnotes

INTRODUCTION

Come now, let us reason together.

Isaiah 1:18

This small book might be useful to some as a brief study of religion and its place in human life. The approach used is to examine the origin of religious faith and the various dimensions of arriving at and living in a religion, using Christianity as a model. The dimensions form a philosophy of religion. Anyone thinking of joining a religion or interested in the study of world religions or religion in general might find it helpful.

Religion has been both a blessing and a curse to the world. The world has been inspired and horrified, liberated and enslaved by religion. This is because religion can be true or false, and, it appears, both true and false. Separating what is true from what is false is the role of reason, human wisdom. No one is immune to reason and the rules of logic. These, in turn, are reinforced by metaphysical principles.¹ Nothing is excluded from the scrutiny of reason.

Reason is that most developed power of the human mind, the one that distinguishes us from the other animals. Reason enables us to abstract from the individual conditions of the material of our world and form sciences—orderly presentations of knowledge about any given item or area of human knowing, with conclusions that apply to all the individuals in that area. Some higher forms of animal life other than humans have exhibited many kinds of knowing, but only humans form sciences and insights from experiences, save their discoveries in places like books and libraries, and pass the information to the next generation. This form of information causes a development in the lives of those receiving it so that our way of living today is much different and more complex than that of people of the past. The whales, great apes, porpoises, and pigs plod on exactly as before. Sometimes, as in the last century, progress in some learning is so profound that human lives and living are immensely different even within the memories of older people.

This, of course, does not mean life is better in any moral sense, and maybe it is even worse. The moral yardstick never changes. What is good or evil is based on the kind of creature a human is and depends on whether the action is reasonably supportive of that kind of creature. Good is what leads the human onward toward why he or she exists, and evil leads away from it.

That a why exists for humans is a matter of insight. The alternative to a positive answer is, of course, meaninglessness. With no meaning all the directional forces that have propelled the universe to produce us and our world are discarded as nothing. This is a remotely possible answer, but the odds are vastly against it. Religions always include an answer about why we exist.

In the modern world, a great need for reasonable analysis of religion has arisen due to a sudden surge in suicide bombings and terrorist groups around the world inspired and excused by religion and alleged sacred texts.² After a growing condemnation of war by Christians in the western world and some centuries into the Common Era, one religion arose and began warfare to spread its faith. Then, theories of a just war were developed, and the killing of human beings, even by Christians, became a regular occurrence. Over time, excuses for killing innocent bystanders, such as collateral damage, were developed. Today systematic killing of innocents occurs, some say, because God commands it!

Such behavior immediately suggests that it must be unreasonable and cries out for a reasoned rebuttal. However, since the behavior is cloaked in religious garb, a simple accusation that it is unreasonable will fall on deaf ears. God is involved. Defenders will immediately claim that, reasonable or not, God told them to kill.

This essay will use New Testament Christianity as a model and attempt to assert that religious faith, properly developed, can be reasonable, and inevitably must be so. It will also assert that both the religion’s faith and the behavior it inspires, especially violent behavior, are always subject to the demand that they be reasonable, no matter what any revelation says. The alternative of not permitting a religion to be examined and judged by reason perpetuates the unreasonable demands in the tenets of the religion. Some of these will be reviewed later in this treatise.

Chapter 1

REASON AND THE ORIGIN

OF RELIGIOUS FAITH

Societies with predominant religious faiths are known to most of the modern world, and the constitutions of many countries invoke God. Many of the men who helped to frame the United States Constitution also signed the Declaration of Independence. These documents refer to a personal, creator God who endows humans with rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This work will examine the basic meaning of the blessing of liberty and the parameters attached to the goal of human happiness.

Planting ideas of divine oversight creates backdrops to human thinking that are usually beneficial to civilized life. For example, morality is more difficult to grasp with any force if one is either unaware of God or hears of God only in dismissive or negative ways. One ancient text proclaims, Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Prov. 9:10). Fear of God, obviously not an ideal end of human growth, has been one starting place for checking some otherwise unrestrained human behavior. And occasionally, it is more effective than fear of human authorities.

On a more positive note, religion has profoundly influenced the world. Items like the Ten Commandments, which come from the Jewish people, get absorbed into a culture, and because of their ruling presence, many people of little or no religious faith stop killing, stealing, and telling lies. Eventually they might ignore or forget where their good behavior came from, but they often do start living morally because many people in the society have a religion.

Humans are born with their minds and wills as blank slates, available to learn what they need to know and to determine what will be considered good and evil in their lives. Most people appear to learn many of their attitudes toward right and wrong from their families and their societies, even before they begin going to a church. While organized religions may be strong teachers and preservers of moral values, their messages are primarily carried forward by the cultures in which they exist. Cultures form people.

But even in a godless culture, any mature person would sooner or later become aware of the fact that his or her life is a great mystery. We arrive in this world well-equipped with bodies and minds, in a place and time not of our choosing and to parents and other relatives we did not select. We do not even get to choose our own names.

Today, if we manage to get past the basic struggle for survival, we grow in knowledge of our history and deepen our awe over the emergence of our whole species from a fiery ball, Earth, now 4.53 billion years old.³ We learn of the gradual formation of a biosphere and evolutionary science, the steady appearance and development in complexity of a variety of entities apparently not present in the original fires. Without the eloquence of Shakespeare, we might dismiss the questions arising within us and finally conclude that life is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. More likely and typically, however, we decide the universe is magnificent and is going somewhere, we wonder about where it all came from, and we become filled with the need to address questions of how and why.

Whatever we decide, almost all of us face the fact that we are not happy about dying—but we must. Especially in old age, when the end nears and little else can be done but contemplate, the importance of the questions why? and wherefrom? abound and crowd out other thoughts. We fear death, but the awe at how we mysteriously came to exist keeps prodding us with images of possible immortality. The very facts surrounding our existence invite us to go beyond the superficial and to ponder these ultimate questions.

We can divide wonder, or human pondering, into casual ruminating and more-disciplined investigations. Less-disciplined searches have produced amazing spiritual results, like the megalithic burial mounds and religious traditions of ancient Ireland. Five thousand years old, they seem to have had two central themes; one was the worship of the earth that brought forth and nourished them. A little later, and perhaps inspired by a bright comet, the theme shifted to the sky. Similarly, the ancient pyramids of Egypt clearly represent attempts to explain humanity’s origins, purpose, and destiny beyond death. A natural force deep within us wants answers to the questions whence? and why?

In more recent times, disciplined investigations, with logic as their guide, are clearly present both in the natural sciences—chemistry and physics—and other sciences like psychology and philosophy. The natural sciences ask the how questions: How did this happen? and How did this come to be? This is the easy part of life. It makes no attempt to address the deeper questions. Modern science has been so successful with these how questions that its findings have transformed our earthly lives. Unfortunately, though sometimes helpful in finding material for directing our thoughts, the natural sciences have little to say about the important questions. Sometimes they say that these questions are unanswerable (scientism) and that we should not bother with them. They are quite wrong about this.⁴ Besides, who, given any intelligence, wants to face death by looking back at life and saying, Well, that was interesting; I wonder what it was all about. We have a deep, natural drive to form answers while we live.

The drive is not specific. Just as hunger is a general urge from the body to get food and just as truth is a general urge from the mind to get answers, the generic urge human beings appear to have is to use reason to find out why they are. But just as a food can satisfy hunger while being of little nourishment to the body and excellent but untrue answers to questions framed in a specific way can satisfy the mind, so beautiful answers to the question Why am I? can be quite misleading. The mystery of life is not solved easily.

When human beings start wondering about themselves and ask fundamental questions of wherefrom or why, they are usually traversing the realm of philosophy. In the process they may demonstrate the existence of a source, usually called God, by inference, as found in the Greek philosophers and the famous Five Ways of Thomas Aquinas.⁵

Not to ask such questions at all, as Socrates noted, is intolerable and makes life not worth living.⁶ Our own mysteriousness drives us to our most meaningful questions. Moreover, if we do not find some sort of answer to these ultimate questions, we