The irrationality of faith

In the Catholic Church, every year is “the year” of some irrelevancy or other. This year it’s “The Year of Faith”! The irrationality of faith can never be reconciled with reason. Whenever attempts have been made to reconcile faith with reason, a backlash against reason and philosophy always ensued.

The persecutors were the imams, the rabbis and the priests. The victims included Ibn Rushd (Averroes), Maimonides, Erigena, Siger of Brabant, William of Ockham, Michael Servetus (burnt at the stake), Giordano Bruno (burnt at the stake), and Spinoza (anathematised with terrible curses by the rabbis).

St Bernard of Clairvaux, a pillar of mediaeval Christianity, dreaded reason and despised philosophy. He hounded and persecuted scholars like Abelard, William of Conches and Gilbert de la Porrée. St Bernard felt so insecure in his faith that he wrote to Pope Innocent II: “Is not our hope baseless if our faith is subject to inquiry?”

Orthodox Islam and Orthodox Judaism were just as intolerant and obscurantist. The Aristotelian Ibn Rushd was denounced and banished by the imams, and the Aristotelian Maimonides had his books burned by the rabbis. In mediaeval Europe, the works of Aristotle were forbidden at the University of Paris. Nevertheless, by the end of the 14th century, the impact of Aristotle on mediaeval theology inaugurated its disintegration.

Historian Will Durant explains: “Scholars who had learned to love philosophy refused to be subordinated to theologians who rejected philosophy. The two studies quarrelled and parted; and the rejection of reason by faith issued in the rejection of faith by reason...

“Aristotle’s philosophy was a Greek gift to Latin Christendom, a Trojan horse concealing a thousand hostile elements. These seeds of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment were not only ‘the revenge of paganism’’ over Christianity, they were also the unwitting revenge of Islam; invaded in Palestine, and driven from nearly all of Spain, the Moslems transmitted their science and philosophy to Western Europe, and it proved to be a disintegrating force; it was Avicenna and Averroes, as well as Aristotle, who infected Christianity with the germs of rationalism...When a religion consents to reason, it begins to die.”