The Reason of Reason

I recently watched the documentary 'Collision' which charted correspondence between and a subsequent debating tour by Christopher Hitchens and Douglas Wilson. I am very interested in the work of Christopher Hitchens, who is a highly-regarded journalist that is also well-known for his participation in public debates. It is my interest in Christopher Hitchens which led me to find this film. The topic of debate was 'Is Christianity Good for the World?', with Hitchens, an atheist/anti-theist, arguing the negative and Wilson, a Christian theologian, arguing the positive.

It was a very interesting piece, with fascinating footage of the debaters off-stage which provided some insights into their characters, and helped to humanise them both, which I felt was valuable in an arena where it's easy to demonise the individual who is proposing the world-view counter to your own. Also, seeing the two men treating each other with grace and politeness was very heartening, proving, to me at least, that the effort was to actually engage in a logical process of understanding, and not shout each other down or out emote each other, although bits and pieces of these behaviours do crop up in the piece, though that is human nature I suppose.

If you have the variety of nerditry that I possess, namely the enjoyment of debates, and you have viewed a fair amount of these, you will quickly find that a number of the arguments and refutations become repetitive very quickly. This is largely, I would speculate, due to one side thinking that a point is valid, with the opposing side considering it as solidly debunked and vice versa. This ensures that a vast amount of debates, specifically on the topic of religion/atheism (i.e. the existence / non-existence of god) I should perhaps specify, often cover the same ground. Therefore it is a joy to discover an argument that you've never come across before, it is like finding a free toy in a box of cereal which isn't even promising a free toy (I used to like the holographic pictures). Such was the case in this debate.

In actuality I just clicked through the film again to find an exact quotation of what was said, and I was unable to find the question I was thinking of. I have watched a large amount of such debates recently, which leads to the possibility that I heard this argument elsewhere, so I won't attribute it to Douglas Wilson in any concrete way, but I will present it nevertheless.

Now I should say in advance that this argument is perplexing to me, because my instinct tells me that there is some fundamental fallacy taking place, but after playing with it in my mind all I have managed to achieve is a headache. In questioning the mandate of morality in a world where there is no ultimate moral creator, we must suggest another way of justifying the importance of morality. In my memory of this argument, 'reason' was suggested to justify morality. Using reason we can come to the agreement that murder, perjury and stealing (three things that are often considered as being immoral in every human community that has ever been observed) are immoral because were they practised widely, the community in which they were practised would fall apart under it's own lack of solidarity. If there was a community who did not consider these things immoral, that community would not survive. Taking the argument a level further, and this is the point which perplexed me, is that on what terms are we judging the efficacy / mandate / importance of 'reason'. The proposition was that if we are judging the process of reason using the standards of reason that this is a circular argument and therefore null. My own personal reaction would be to suggest that the effort and the process of reason has been proved time and again to work, the only concrete and clear understanding and achievements we have achieved as a species have come from the application of reason. The process of faith has never once enabled a human to fly, though some would claim, ludicrously, otherwise. It is only reason, specifically scientific endeavor with reason at its core, that can claim that accolade. The counterargument to this claim is that the process of judging the merit of a process by its achievements is itself the use of reason, and so it is, again, circular reasoning. It was at this point that I fell prey to a frustrating headache.

Of course the argument also applies the other way around, I would argue, as if you say "you can only see the merits of reason by using a process of reason" then similarly "you can only see the merits of faith through having faith". The only way to avoid this that I can see would be to claim that the value of reason must be self-evident, which I would be wary of stating, as clearly there are a large number of people who seem to abstain from reason, and if not in every aspect of life then they seem alarmingly able to partition their lives into a) problems that can be solved with reason, usually in the material/scientific realm, and b) problems that can not be solved by reason, which usually land in the supernatural realm and sometimes the moral. I am skeptical of the existence of a supernatural realm because it, by its very nature, cannot be verified or observed using scientific means, which, as techniques and tools improve, has been able to verify and observe more and more. Of all the things we previously believed to be supernatural in origin and now understand, the supernatural claims were proven correct 0% of the time. Zeus threw the lightning until we figured out what was really going on, the world was flat until we figured out that it was actually a sphere, and while we may not yet understand precisely how the Universe came into being, precisely how life arose from non-life and precisely how morality emerged I am confident, because of our reason-based problem solving past record that we will eventually come to know the answers. Even if this is not the case, and we cannot know as a species how these fundamental processes began, then that is still no reason to hypothesize a solution that would be contrary to everything we understand about the nature of existence, which is what a supernatural creator would entail.

Some would also feel that a morality that exists simply as a survival mechanism because of evolution would be devalued, but I would argue that that is simply not the case. Though we arrived at our current state due to evolution, our possession of sentience means that we can evaluate, using reason, what is of value and what is not, what is good and what is not, so while morality evolved for survival reasons, we can understand that it is of more fundamental value. Simply because we have discovered that morality has it's origin in natural selection does not devalue its importance, just as understanding that love developed in because it helped propagate genes doesn't devalue or lessen the impact of love.

I fear I have drifted slightly askew of topic there. The core point of this entry was to discuss the idea that justifying the importance of reason using reason was a circular argument. In the brief discussion I had regarding this it was pointed out to me that this is perhaps an epistemological issue, which is an area I have not read into, so I will be endeavoring in that direction soon.

Headache.