MetaCatholic

There’s an interesting article at Scientific American, a conversation on faith and science between Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins. Perhaps because he’s engaging with someone who shares many of his basic perspectives, Dawkins sounds less rabid and more reasonable than he often does.

However, one quote that caught my eye was this one:

The world is not irrational. The world may be unfair but it is not irrational. The rational response to an unfair world is to recognize that we have no right to expect it to be fair. If that sounds callous, I’m sorry, but it is the business of science to understand the way the world is, not to try to derive comfort from it. All we can do is take political and other human action to make fairer that small part of the world over which we have control.

I note two things about Dawkins’ statement here:

• First, he claims that the world is not irrational. Note that he says therefore that the world  is, and not seems, nor can be construed as, but is rational.
• Second he sees that unfairness is a characteristic of the world, but that we can act to make at least part of the world other than what it is. In other words, the rationality of human morality is both different from the rationality of the world, and may run counter to it.

I would generally wish to join him in statements about the rationality of the world, although I’m perhaps more aware than he is that that claim is epistemologically more difficult than his statement assumes. With that proviso I would like to pose two sets of questions.

1. Given that the universe appears to have its physical origin in a random quantum fluctuation, with one improbability then piled on another, and where random mutations are a significant and key component of the development of intelligence, how rational is it to believe that such a world is of itself rational, or could be rational? Is it not more rational to hold that any rationality is in the mind of the observer, who imposes it on the random universe? Isn’t the idea of a creator the only philosophically certain way of imputing rationality to the universe, instead of our observations of the universe?
2. If the universe without a Creator is rational, but our moral codes of behaviour run counter to the rationality of the universe, then to what extent can our morality be rational? Isn’t a description of the universe which includes moral purpose and unifies an account of what is, and an account of how we should live in what is, more inherently likely to be rational, than one which postulates a complete divorce between “good” behaviour and “the way things are”?

For me, although it is by no means the only component of my faith, the answers to these questions mean it is more rational to believe in God, than to disbelieve. I do not think, despite the temptations to wallow in post-modern communal accounts of “my truth” and “your truth,” that we should give up wider claims to a common rationality. On that, at least, I suspect Dawkins and I would be in agreement.