Seeing As: Why Reason is Religious

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Seeing As

If we examine the premises underlying our beliefs and reasoning honestly and indefatigably enough, we will find that our deepest principles often consist in nothing more - but nothing less - than a certain way of seeing things, an original inclination of the mind toward reality from a certain perspective. And philosophy is of little use here in helping us to sort out the valid preconceptions from the invalid, as every form of philosophical thought is itself dependent upon a set of irreducible and unprovable assumptions.

David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, p.294

One of my doctoral supervisors used to say, “We don’t just see the world. We see the world as”. And that is quite correct. What he meant by that is that we do not just passively receive some kind of reality that imposes itself upon us, as it were, fully formed, but we organise our sensory and phenomenal perceptions into an order which becomes our interpretation of reality.

Take the notion that nature is a closed system and that matter is all that exists. Lots of people in the Western world believe this probably in large part because it seems to be the obvious state of affairs. (People may also have it in the backs of their minds somewhere that this belief can be grounded in scientific experiment or empirical observation.) After all, the material world clearly exists, doesn’t it? Whereas anything beyond nature seems fanciful.

But, as David Bentley Hart points out, ‘…we do not actually have an immediate knowledge of the material order in itself but only its phenomenal aspects, by which our minds organize our sensory experiences. Even “matter” is only a general concept and must be imposed upon the data of the senses in order for us to interpret them as experiences of any particular kind of reality (that is, material rather than, say, mental)’.

But there is something even more fundamental than this, which concerns the nature of reason in particular. The notion of reason implies that there is a coherent, ubiquitous and objective rationality embedded in the nature of reality. Beyond this, it implies that truth exists and that devotion to truth in the abstract is a fundamental value…we might even say a moral value. If the natural realm is the only thing that exists there is no reason to think any of these things. Upon that assumption - that nature is all that there is - then the concept of reason is simply an illusion that must somehow have been thrown up by the evolutionary process. There is no reason to think that, out there, in the mysterious beyond, some abstract, coherent, rational order is in some way communicated to our human intellects so that we can receive and, at least partially, understand it. It is simply fanciful to think that way.

But to come back to the first quotation, how we decide to adjudicate this matter is really our own decision. Each view of the world is, in its own way, coherent. And we might say that, each view of the world is, in a very basic sense, dependent upon faith, or, as Hart would say, a fiduciary commitment.

I was talking to James Delingpole on his podcast last week about the hypothesis - held by Elon Musk and others - that we are living inside a Matrix-like simulation. That hypothesis is neither provable nor disprovable. It constitutes a fundamental commitment to belief in a certain type of reality. As does the belief that we are not living in a simulation but that our communion with the external world is a communion with what is really there.