Reason and Intuition

Gary Wills, the historian, was being interviewed by Charlie Rose. I think the year was 2004, and though my memory may be faulty, he was speaking on his recent biography of St. Augustine and translation of the Confessions. Rose put a question to him about religious knowledge being discredited in a day and age of reason and science (a familiar old sawhorse) and Wills pointed out that knowledge comes to us through more than reason. "Poetry is a form of knowledge."

I remember that quote well. It was an 'a-ha!' moment for me, because it expressed for what I had been feeling and searching. Science and religion, many religious apologists try to express, are complimentary modes of knowledge which, taken together, present a complete (or "completer," if that's a word) picture of reality.

That's not a bad way of thinking about it, but it leaves the hermeneutical question wide open. Is it reality that science and faith give us together, or is it that reality is being interpreted by science and religion? If the interpretive tool of science is applied to reality, it gives us one picture. If religion, a different interpretive tool is applied to that same reality, we will have a vastly different picture. In the end, perhaps they are complimentary. But there is also a certain rub that will not allow them to sit as easily next to one another as religious apologists would like.

This is what bothers the Richard Dawkinses of the world about the claims of religion: they see, rightly so given their perspective, a rival account of reality. To a certain extent, it is true. But what they fail to do is account for the value of intuition in giving us purchase on a valid interpretation of reality.

Broadly, the claims of science can be thought of as "reason" and the claims of religion can be thought of as "intuition." Many a hard-headed scientist expresses frustration at the dreamy musings of the poet (a form of religious reflection, after all) but Dawkins waxes perfectly poetic himself while describing the cosmos in The Blind Watchmaker. Likewise, the poetry of John Donne, whether his more bawdy rhymes or his religious poetry, is the work of an intellect which was the rival of any 17th century scientist.

Perhaps we are getting back to the idea of "complementary windows on reality." That might be all I'm saying, but I think expressing it that way fails to render some of the richness of intuition's ability to render reality. Scripture, read proscriptively, is more of a "reasonable" book (in any religion); but read more poetically (regardless of one's belief), we begin to see it attempting to intuit the reality which lies beyond the measure of science, however the concept of "science" might have been rendered at the time of the scripture's writing.

John Ralston Saul's book Voltaire's Bastards put to bed exactly why reason plagues us: not because it is bad, but because one tributary of knowledge, he says, has swollen to become a river. Hence the rise of the bureaucrat, the technocrat, the expert, etc. (Perhaps John Lennon was intuiting this when he sang, "Expert, textpert, choking smoker, don't you think the Joker laughs at you?" The specter of Death (the Joker) hanging just beyond the "expert," laughing because he realizes that reason ultimately fails at the moment of passing...anyway, just a thought.) Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue posits a similar argument.

To move forward in this debate, religious thinkers need to acknowledge the interpretive validity (and sometimes dissonance) of science, and scientists likewise need to allow for intuitive expressions as providing a unique and valuable interpretation (also sometimes at loggerheads with science). Compatibility is a chimera, but that doesn't mean that work can't continue in an atmosphere of mutual respect.

Robert Duncan, a poet whose religious thought turned towards gnosticism, writes in his poem "The Structure of Rime VII": "The Rime falls in the outbreakings of speech as the Character falls in the act wherefrom life springs, footfalls in Noise which we do not hear but see as a Rose pushd up from the stem of our longing." Although probably only Duncan knows exactly what he meant (actually, probably not even him), the idea of poetry - of speech, and all that comes with it - being connected to the murky origins of life, noises that we see, longing - all these are areas which, like it or not, are veiled somewhat from our rational perceptive powers. It takes the individual with a mind's eye view to "peer" into the dusky elements of existence and make connections that are perhaps far too tenuous for the rigor of the scientist, but can still rise to his intellectual heights just the same.

Do the poet and the astronomer peer at the same reality from their different perspectives? I don't know, but I'm not about to discount the value of what both of them see.