It is no news because it is old news. The Secular Revolution has been going on for at least four centuries. By now, some of the tactics of Secular Revolutionaries are quite tiresome, and we’re here to report on one of the most tried and tedious: the Scarecrow argument, as though religious believers are like the Scarecrow of The Wizard of Oz wishing, "If I only had a brain."

It is the assumption that faith is entirely irrational. At most it is something of the heart, but it is nothing of the head.

This came out recently in a response by Steven Pinker to Harvard University’s Report of the Committee on General Education. Harvard, of course, needs no introduction. Steven Pinker, however, may need one to our readers.

Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard is one of our age’s chief atheists, and author of many influential books on the human mind.  You may have heard of him as an unabashed proponent of infanticide, or perhaps, as declaring that the mind is merely the brain. In either case, he makes quite clear that he is no friend of religion.

Imagine his ire, when Harvard’s Committee on General Education suggested that students take courses under a “Reason and Faith” requirement.  For Pinker, this was a scandal. “Universities are about reason, pure and simple,” he trumpeted. “Faith—believing something without good reasons to do so—has no place in anything but a religious institution, and our society has no shortage of these. Imagine if we had a requirement for ‘Astronomy and Astrology’ or ‘Psychology and Parapsychology.’”  To give such significance to religion “is to give it far too much prominence.” After all, religious belief “is an American anachronism. I think, in an era in which the rest of the West is moving beyond it.”

So, there you have it. As simple double equation: Science = Reason and 
Religion = Irrationality. What could be simpler…and more inaccurate?

Before we attend to the inaccuracy, let us meditate upon the simplicity. The simple slogan-like identity of religion and irrationality is an awfully useful tool for someone like Pinker who would have us complete the secular revolution in America that he evidently thinks has already succeeded in Europe. Who wants to be on the side of irrationality?
The problem with Pinker’s simple identity of Religion and Irrationality is that it is unreasonable.  That is (to use his own words) it is something he believes without good reasons for doing so. And that fits very nicely his definition of faith—in his case, a secular faith.

Why is it unreasonable? Because it is woefully inaccurate, both in regard to religion and in regard to science. To begin with the latter, even a quick read through the history of science makes clear that it is full of both faith and what we would now call irrationality.

Faith in science? Indeed, let us count the ways. As philosophers and historians of science have made quite clear, scientific advance occurs not merely by gathering dry and self-evident facts, but (1) by faith in an intelligible order to nature, (2) by faith in the power of the human mind to discover that order, and more particularly, (3) by faith in a particular as-yet unproven hypothesis about this or that aspect of nature.

Irrationality in science? Indeed, the instances are uncountable. Historians of science would inform him immediately that it is nearly impossible to separate Astronomy from Astrology; or to put it another way, modern Astronomy was built upon Astrology (just as modern chemistry was built upon Alchemy). Pinker’s own discipline, Psychology, has got more than its share of balderdash. What could be less scientific than Freud? Yet, he was once all the rage. 

There is one reasonable surety one can glean from the history of science: today’s spectrum of pet theories, especially in psychology, will provide its share of laughable peculiarities for history’s dustbin.

But what about religion? Is it irrational? It has been a strategy of Secular Revolutionaries for several centuries declare it so.  The truth, however, is that properly speaking faith is supra-rational.  That is, faith is something above reason, not against reason. In that, it forms a perfect analogy with science.

In science, faith that there is a discoverable order of nature, that the universe isn’t just a jumble, but a kind of unified, complex, intelligible whole, is not something that reason has established. It is something that reason hopes for, as a thing unseen, a thing above reason, that makes possible the piecemeal attempts by the various sciences to move forward in confidence that their efforts are not in vain.

In religion—and here, I will only speak of Christianity because I must speak from inside—faith in God’s Providence not only includes the scientist’s faith in the universe being a unified, complex, intelligible whole, but also faith in the revealed design of human life stretching from this world to the next. 

Christians don’t (or shouldn’t) deny the story of the universe; they simply think that it fits into a larger, more comprehensive story. Since God is the Creator, the larger story does not cancel out the smaller story. It puts the smaller into the proper perspective, the perspective of eternity, and reveals its far greater depths.

The essential problem with Mr. Pinker’s simple equation, then, is that things just aren’t that simple. They seem so simple because he is a strict reductionist who believes that he can reduce the vast depth of the human soul to the neuronal activity of the brain. Thus, for him, being rational means being a materialist, and anyone who is not a materialist is irrational—a rather sectarian definition.  Science = Materialism = Rationality. That simple equation was the declared creed of Marx.  Recall, it wasn’t too long ago that Marxists everywhere thought they had scientifically reduced all the complexities of human society and thought (including religion) to the modes of production. Happily, that bloody materialist superstition has all but passed away.

Pinker has faith that materialist psychology can replace the soul with the brain.  I wager that his faith will prove as unreasonable and unscientific as Marxism.