Two Hemispheres

I've been meditating on a quotation from C.S. Lewis as he struggled to come to terms with his budding interest in believing in God in Surprised By Joy. Lewis struggled with becoming a believer, finding himself restricted by the influence of a materialist culture around him. 

“The two hemispheres of my mind were in the sharpest contrast. On the one side a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth; on the other a glib and shallow ‘rationalism.’ Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.” C. S. Lewis

Partly, this is a science-faith question. It's often where we're left when we take in the natural world that science describes in purely physical terms (which is what it's designed to do) and try to bring that together with our subjective experience, which so often includes non-physical concepts like love and beauty and meaning and, for most people, includes a search for God.

By the way, the quotation was brought to my attention by an Alister McGrath book I'm reviewing on Albert Einstein. McGrath brings together insights from a variety of Einstein's comment like "the eternal mystery of the world its comprehensibility." In other words, why should this world make sense if it is really is just facts and numbers? Einstein's understanding of religion was idiosyncratic, preferring to to hold to Baruch Spinoza's god of the mathematical equations and order in the universe, a deity that certainly didn't engage in human affairs and thus present individual lives' with answers to question of life's meaning.

McGrath then considers the physicist and Anglican priest, John Polkinghorne, who also appreciates science's profound ability to discover the stunning interconnected complexity of the natural world:

"Theology can render this discovery intelligible, through its understanding that the Mind of the Creator is the source of the wonderful order of the world." John Polkinghorne

Does that bring bring together the mind's two hemispheres in a satisfying way? Lewis found his resolution through belief in God. And though not a scientist, he would probably have agreed.

Faith, Dogmatism, and Other Atheistic Cavils

I've been reading and/or listening to Sam Harris (for example here) with some Richard Dawkins and a measure of Jerry Coyne thrown in. It doesn't take much time to realize that one of their biggest beefs with "religion" is that it relies of faith, which to them means resolutely believing something when there is no evidence. In fact, many of the arguments of scientific atheists like these three lean heavily on this assertion. 

For them (and in service of their atheism) faith equals blind, dangerous dogmatism. 

May I point out that this is a rickety foundation for their arguments? And that since I actually teaching comparative religion as a profession, that their scholarship is noticeably lacking?

Certainly there are religious people who believe based on no evidence--that I won't deny. But there are dogmatisms of those who have no religious faith as well. Stalin and Mao's purges for the glories of atheistic communism come to mind as do much more mundane examples (like memes on Facebook and Twitter).

Even more, these leading voices misunderstand faith, which is essentially "fidelity, reliance, or trust" exemplified in the key New Testament Greek word pistis and its cognates. As C.S. Lewis wrote--certainly one who has a right to speak thoughtfully about Christian faith--it means trusting in God based on good reasons and then holding on even when times are tough. In this case, faith actually is grounded on rational reflection and open to conversation. At least that's the kind of faith I see among mature Christian believers and the kind I seek to live out.

Oh, why can't atheists be more rational?