Guided by Reason
The Rev. Dr. Matthew Johnson-Doyle
Sunday, August 15, 2010


Readings: From Karl Popper

"Faith in reason is not only faith in our own reason but also -- and even more -- in that of others.
Thus a rationalist, even if he believes himself to be intellectually superior to others, will reject all claims to authority since he is aware that, if his intelligence is superior to that of others (which is hard for him to judge), it is so only in so far as he is capable of learning from criticism as well as from his own and other people's mistakes, and that one can learn in this sense only if one takes others and their arguments seriously.

Rationalism is therefore bound up with the idea that the other fellow has a right to be heard, and to defend his arguments,"

The Atheist Prays by Barbara Pescan

I am praying again
and how does one pray when unsure if anything hears?
In the world I know as reliable and finite
when time and matter cycle back and forth
and I understand the answer to so many puzzles, still
there are moments when knowing is nothing
This accumulation of systems, histories—
repetitions falls from me—
how does one who is sure there is nothing pray?
Dark gathered around my eyes,
I sit in this room with my certainties
asking
my one unanswered question
holding myself perfectly still to listen
fixing my gaze
just here
wondering.
and this is my prayer.

Message: Guided By Reason

Note: The sermon is an oral event. This manuscript may not reflect the exact spoken words. If you want to hear what was actually said, you can listen to sermon visit our website at www.uurockford.org. © Matthew Johnson-Doyle, 2010.

Last spring we agreed on a new mission statement,
and I want to spend the next few weeks,
as we begin the new church year,
thinking out loud with you
about what it means to say what we have said about who we are.
And I want to start with that first phrase:
guided by reason.

What does it mean to say,
we are guided by reason?

What does it mean, in your own life,
to say, I am a reasonable person –
I am a rational person,
a person who thinks things through?

What does it mean to have faith in reason?

Well, let’s start with Karl Popper’s answer
from our reading:
to have faith in reason means to be open to the wisdom of others,
to hold it possible that we are not the smartest person in the room.

This is important.
To be guided by reason does NOT mean
that you think you are smarter than everyone else.
You do not get to say, I’m reasonable,
therefore I’m right and everyone else is wrong.
This is the opposite of reason,
though a lot of folks don’t believe it.

This is an old debate, of course.
Back in the day – I mean, waaay back in the day,
that old troublemaker, Socrates, got into trouble for exactly this:
asking questions of people who already thought they knew all the answers,
exposing people’s so-called reason as slippery platitudes,
or post-facto excuses for their gut reaction.

That’s what a lot of supposed reasoning is –
thinking of excuses for why we feel the way we do.
We learn ideas from our parents, our friends, the wider culture,
and we just accept these ideas as true.
But when someone asks us to explain these ideas,
to make logical sense of them,
well, things start to fall apart.


Think of Socrates as a 3-year old with a beard and a toga –
why? why? how come? why? how come? why?
It’s annoying.

And the generals and the politicians and the powers that be,
they got pretty annoyed at Socrates,
accused him of corrupting the young –
encouraging them to question authority, how rude –
and sentenced him to death.

Reason is dangerous.

Socrates described the activity of thinking with three metaphors –
he talked about thinking as a midwife,
as something which brings new life into the world,
which allows us to imagine new possibilities,
to create new realities.
When we do the work of science,
when we plan for a future,
when we make art,
when we put the pieces together,
our thinking is helping the new be born.

He also talked about thinking as a stingray –
something that would paralyze you,
make you, as the saying goes, “stop and think.”
You would be arrested, perhaps confused and disoriented,
and have to reconsider old assumptions.
When our best friend comes out of the closet,
when a study disproves our assumptions,
when you see a picture of the earth from space for the first time,
well, thinking – reason – makes time stand still.

And Socrates talked about thinking as a gnat,
as an annoying buzz,
as that voice of conscience which tugs at us,
which is trying to get our attention.
When you have to say, “I don’t know” to your three year old,
when you have a foggy sense that something doesn’t add up,
when you wonder if anyone else has tried to figure this out,
that is the gnat of reason, buzzing at you.

I love these metaphors because I think they are very descriptive,
suggestive and flexible,
also because they are organic metaphors, playful even.
Though the centuries after Socrates,
philosophers understood reason to have this multi-dimensional character.
Sometimes reason was about study, logic, investigation.
Sometimes it was creative, insightful, unexpected.

Different schools of philosophy emphasized different ways of reasoning –
the British thought more about step-by-step inductive study,
while the continental Europeans thought more about deductive insight.
But everyone knew that, yes, you could use reason to understand,
but also reason would sometimes guide you –
it would take you somewhere you didn’t intend to go,
didn’t know was possible.

It is in this sense that the early Unitarians and especially the transcendentalists
spoke about reason.
Typically, it was a word they capitalized – Reason.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, both a Unitarian and a Transcendentalist,
is the key figure here –
Emerson believed that Reason was how we came into contact
with the universal natural laws and beauty of the universe,
with what he called the Oversoul and sometimes called God.
Reason was, in his view, different than Understanding.

Reason was what you gained through intuition,
through insight,
through sublime living,
while Understanding was more pedestrian,
it was what you learned from others through tuition,
rote facts and figures.
The responsive reading from Channing gets as this distinction perfectly –
that the free mind is “not passively framed by outward circumstance”
but, instead, “discovers everywhere the radiant signatures of the infinite spirit.”

Reason is thus the activity of thinking new thoughts,
of thinking for yourself,
of following your conscience,
of challenging assumptions.

And Unitarians, and Universalists too, we loved Reason.
We put it in our pocket and took it everywhere.
When reading the bible, we said,
God gave us reason as a gift and we should use it.
When dealing with social injustice,
we used our reason to look at the root causes and structural questions.
When living our lives, raising our children, eating and working,
we tried to do everything in a reasonable fashion.

Lots of folks thought like we did,
but some where skeptical.
Some believed that Reason was not, in fact, a gift from God,
but a product of original sin – the poisoned fruit of the tree of knowledge,
an invitation to rebelliousness, defiance, and idolatry.
The French Revolution began with cries for Reason,
and ended in bloodshed and violence,
and a lot of people feared the same would happen here.

As the West entered the industrial age, however,
the definition of reason started to change –
it became more scientific, more mechanical, more managerial.
The arts became sciences – economics, psychology, sociology.
Reason became more instrumental,
about how things got done,
about the latest thinking, the fads.
As this happened, more folks embraced the ideals
of this reason,
they believed in progress, the growing light, all those values of liberalism
that we still cherish.

And just in the moment – the 1910’s or so –
when reason seemed ready to win the day,
it came under attack.
The devastation of the Great War made many question the idea of progress.
Neo-orthodox theologians attacked liberalism and reason as forms of hubris.
In the last generation, reason has been challenged
by relativists and by others who say that there is no truth with a capitol T,
who say that so much of how we think depends on our culture,
our language, the tradition we inherit –
and the idea of Reason is some kind of cultural imperialism,
or a fantasy, or, once more, an invitation to rebellion.

Even we religious liberals, we’ve come to question
our faith in reason.
For some, it seems to have lost its power –
it seems cold, distant.
We recognize that culture matters, that,
outside of the hard sciences,
it’s very hard to still believe in universal truth,
or, more importantly, our ability to access that truth.
We’re not so sure about progress,
not so sure that the great problems of the day can be solved by reason,
by clear thinking and rational discussion.

Yet, for all our doubts, part of us still believes –
still has faith in the power of reason.
We remain committed to the enlightenment ideals,
that people are capable of thinking,
of coming to a conclusion different than their cultural teaching,
that we can search for truth –
that we never stop, we never say we have all the answers,
but that the search is worthy,
not a waste of time or effort.

What we mean when we say Reason has changed over time,
and maybe it’s time for reason to change again.
To restore, in some sense,
Emerson’s sense that reason was not mechanical or systematic logic,
but that it was flashes of insight,
sublime consideration of ultimate principles.

What might reason mean in our time?
Let me make some suggestions, then –
just things for you to consider.




Suggestions because essential to reason,
as Popper says, must be a humility and tentativeness –
we make a case, but remain open, willing to be convinced,
we have faith in the ability of others to reason,
even if they don’t currently seem to be exhibiting such ability,
the method of science is well recommended –
we advance a theory,
and we test it,
and we listen to others, especially experts and those who think clearly,
we care more about getting it right
than proving our righteousness,
we know that we are finite, and that our culture might get in our way,
and so pay particular attention to divergent views,
we try to understand the values and priorities of others,
we stay open,
and this is the first important thing about reason:
there are no final answers –
the activity of reasoning is an invitation to conversation,
to keep learning and growing.

Second, and related to the first:
reason calls us, in our time, to turn from fear, prejudice, and knee-jerk reactions.
I see it – we all do – over and over again –
people are reacting out of fear,
out of prejudice and stereotypes –
they don’t take a moment and pause,
they don’t encounter the stingray that stops still the rushing movement.
People don’t really seem to care about the facts,
they just have these gut reactions.
So what if the folks trying to build the Cordoba Mosque
were called upon by the Bush Administration
to be ambassadors to the Muslim world,
because they are so anti-extremist and pro-American,
so what if we could hand no greater propaganda tool to Al Queada
than to exclude Islam from the protections of the first amendment,
people have fear, they have pain, so who cares about facts.
This, to me, was what was most disappointing about the statement
that came out from the Anti-Defamation League,
who said, yes, the opposition to the mosque is irrational –
they used that word, irrational –
but we should respect those feelings.
But racial, ethnic, and religious prejudice is always irrational –
and if you can’t insist that public debate obey the standards of reason,
well then I fear there is little hope for us.
Reason makes us reconsider our assumptions,
it challenges us to think, to exercise empathy,
to take facts seriously, to avoid lumping people together
because they look alike, speak the same language,
or claim to be members of the same religion.
Just because you feel something to be true,
doesn’t mean it is –
and that goes for liberal feelings and conservative ones,
and everything else –
your feelings are important clues to what you value,
and they might correspond to the facts,
but your feelings, by themselves, do not a persuasive argument make.

Third.
And this – I suggest – balances but does not contradict the second –
Reason is also, as Emerson meant it, about wonder and awe,
about the transcendent appreciation of life, the universe, and everything.
It is about “holding [your]self perfectly still to listen
fixing [your] gaze
just here
wondering.
and this is [our] prayer.”

Reason doesn’t have to be cold to be thoughtful,
it doesn’t have to be cynical to be skeptical,
it doesn’t have to be dead, it can be life giving and beautiful.
To look upon the stars,
to know they burn from millions of years ago,
that we are made of the dust of such stars,
this is both reasonable and wondrous.
To hear a strain of music,
to know that it is the vibrations of air,
that it can be counted and follows a set of rules,
and to be moved, lifted up, calmed down, made joyful,
by the sound of that music in our heart,
this is both reasonable and beautiful.
To look into the eyes of another –
a stranger, a child, a lover, a friend,
and to see there the spark of life,
to know that they are our brother, our sister –
not in metaphor, but though millennia of evolution, in fact –
to know that our destiny is bound together,
that the other person, like us, loves and hopes and feels,
this is both reasonable and transformative.



To feel a sense of awe, a sense of dependence and grace,
for we are so small and the universe is so large,
and yet we are part of it, and connected,
to feel loved by powers we can’t name or control,
to use, tentatively and without certainty,
the language and rituals of faith and reverence,
this is both reasonable and spiritual.

Reason, thinking, gives birth to the new.
It stops us in our tracks.
It annoys us, and makes us reconsider.

Reason, in our time, invites us to genuine conversation,
it calls us away from prejudice and challenges our assumptions,
and it invites us to wonder and awe.

To be a person guided by reason, or a church that is guided by reason,
then, is to be a person, a people,
who listen well, who think before speaking,
who embrace learning as a life-long joy,
who make suggestions and try things out,
who are filled with amazement at all of life,
at the great diversity and unity and beauty
that surrounds us and includes us.

And, of course, reason is hard.
We should say that.
Reason is a discipline.
Like all good habits, it doesn’t come naturally to us.
We have to learn,
we have to practice it, day after day, year after year.
The more widely we read, the more conversation we have,
the better we get at it.
The more assumptions we challenge, the more we turn from gut-feeling to facts,
the better we get at it.
The more we stay open to wonder and insight,
the more often wonder and insight seem to come to us.
You have to work it.
Reason is counter-cultural –
people expect you to make up your mind, already,
but reason says, wait a minute, can’t we learn some more about this first?
Reason is hard work.
But a life guided by reason is the better life –
more honest, more beautiful, more just,
it is richer and deeper, as we discover more about ourselves
and the world we live in together with others,
it is, as Socrates said, the life worth living.

It is my hope and my prayer, then,
that we will be guided by reason –
by conversation, by openness, by investigation,
that we will be midwives to creativity,
that we will be stingrays of wisdom,
and, yes, that we will be gnats of conscience.
For truth is waiting to be born,
and people, rushing everywhere, need to stop and think,
and assumptions need to be annoyed and disturbed,
so let us be people of reason,
reason robust, uncertain, and beautiful,
reason worthy of our faith and our practice.