Does faith inhibit the faculty of reasoning and creativity or does it stimulate them? What is the role of religion in developing all the above faculties?
The History Of Human Thought
Civilization/Religion Lesson 1: The class will focus on analyzing the place of religion among other branches of human thought, and the place of Christianity among other religions. You will have to express your ideas on the basis of carefully selected and gradually presented information, relying upon the experience you have previously collected.
1. All theories about the beginnings of religion are bound to be guesswork. Archaeological evidence about the beliefs of prehistoric men is slight; we can only suggest similarities between their beliefs and those of present-day peoples with a primitive way of life. Some scholars, influenced by evolutionary theory, have tried to reconstruct stages in religious life so as to explain the emergence of the historical religions. Some have sought sociological and psychological explanations of religion. Whatever its earliest form, religion is the expression of man’s sense of the holy or sacred, which he came to express through myths, rituals, symbols, and philosophy. Moreover, this sense of the sacred has always been closely bound up with the moral values and structure of society.
What is (are) the question(s) religious doctrines try to answer? Are all the religions utterly unpractical or do they pursue practical matters?
2. It is reasonable to suppose that man’s first thinking was severely practical. Life has to be secure before it can be improved. Food, warmth, shelter from the weather, and a refuge from danger are the first goals of the mind. The world does not always adjust itself to man’s needs. The hunting grounds turn out to be bare of game, the weather destroys crops, loved or needed people fall ill and die. In such frustrating circumstances it is natural to think and hope that what we cannot do for ourselves another can do for us, that what the father did for the helpless child someone can do for the self-directing adult. In its primitive beginnings religion must have been as narrowly practical as the rest of man’s mental life.
Even in its highest developments religion does not wholly lose this connection with instinctive needs. Men fear death, resent the injustices of earthly fortune, demand compensation for their sacrifices. To think of religion in this way is not to depreciate it or dismiss it as an illusion belonging to the youth of mankind. It was the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant – who combined great piety with great sophistication – who saw the doctrines of religion as an answer to the question, “What can I hope for?”
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What must have begun as the magical pursuit of ends that were inaccessible to ordinary means developed in time into a total and comprehensive system of ideas, giving man a conception of the nature and purposes of the world as a whole, and a scheme of principles by which to direct his relations with his fellows. Philosophy and science have emerged from the critical development of these religious conjectures about the nature of the world, the study of man and society from religious accounts of the human soul and of the right direction of human conduct.
Can the division between philosophy, natural science, psychology, morals, be justified when we speak about the development of human thought? In a broader perspective, can each of them integrate the others or do only some of them have broader implications?
3. The framework of ideas on which civilization depends grows out of a continuing interaction between, on the one hand, historical events, new social situations, and new discoveries, and, on the other hand, the minds of thinking and imaginative men. For this reason, radically new ideas rarely spring from single minds, however talented. They evolve slowly and tentatively. Gifted individuals, whom we tend to regard as the sole authors of new ideas, are normally the great clarifiers of ideas.
Darwin and Jesus, Hammurabi and Dalton, Voltaire and Einstein – to all such people fell the task of welding previous tentative ideas and practices into coherent and convincing forms. Those forms were open-ended and could therefore be developed by numerous lesser and greater minds. Dalton’s idea of atoms goes back to Democritus and forward to modern particle physics; Hammurabi’s legal code goes back to tribal custom and forward through the Code Napoleon to today’s law reformers.
These great, open-ended forms of thought are large enough to constitute self-contained systems whose every stage of development is recorded permanently in human history. And, the record shows, in any given society at any given moment, those systems are in constant interaction with each other. Some may be fairly well evolved; others may be so embryonic that only patient historical analysis can reveal them. There is thus a kind of natural selection of ideas; each new contribution must run the gauntlet of existing systems – a struggle for viability in which something has to yield in the interests of coherence. Creative intellectual and imaginative power is the rarest and most valuable of human qualities.
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Does faith inhibit the faculty of reasoning and creativity or does it stimulate them? What is the role of religion in developing all the above faculties?
4. A convenient view divides religion into three elements: creed, code, and cult. A creed is a general statement of man’s beliefs about the nature of the world as a whole. This is seen by most religions as the product of an intelligent, powerful, supernatural being (or beings) in whose purposes the ordinary features of the world find meaning and justification. A code is a system of morality, with rules of conduct laying down how man ought to behave in the light of his creed. A cult is the body of ritual practices through which men symbolize their beliefs and seek to communicate with their gods in gratitude or petition, and to inspire in themselves a right frame of mind.
The ideas in the two remaining sections – philosophy and science, and social thought – spring from the same impulse, the impulse to organize our ideas into a single system. In both cases, a contemplative, theoretical interest has been at work seeking knowledge, on the one hand, of the world, and on the other, of man and his society. Often this knowledge has been sought for its own sake and without regard to its possible utility. But often it has been sought for its practical applications, or even from dire need. Behind that seeking lies that dignified form of curiosity that we call the love of knowledge. Every human advance, every major difference between the condition of contemporary man and of his primitive forerunners, is based on ideas produced by the spirit of imaginative inquiry. Just as technology stagnates without the stimulus of pure scientific research, so in general the whole management of human life would be condemned to mere routine without the inspiration of new ideas.
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