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The limits of reason, with regrets.  Reuters reported today that humanist and atheist groups around the world are going to be gathering in an effort to offset the energies expended by recent religious fundamentalism. First there will be the World Atheist Conference to be held this month in Vijayawada, India, and then the Swiss-based International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) will meet at UNESCO's Paris headquarters in July. "We must work hard to combat the encroachment of religion on public policy and on the rights of non-believers everywhere," said IHEU executive director Babu Gogineni.[1]

If tolerance were the only issue here, their meetings should be welcomed as forward-thinking and progressive, but the real issue, according to IHEU president Roy Brown, is that there has been such a "religious onslaught on Humanist values" that "we have to speak out and get our message over."[2] So we are looking at more clashes of world views ... and on it goes. If only the reasonableness of humanist morality could save us, redeem us, fix our problems—that would give us all the kind of comfort that social engineers have pined for. Alas, it is really the trigger of reason that sets everyone thinking about what the other person is doing and not what we ought to do.

What I mean is this. Reason, like science, is formidably a closed system. No matter how hot our brains get, or how many collaborative supercomputers we get to working on calculating our way around this fallen world, we can't get beyond it. We can't get God out of the project and we can't get to our real obligations as human beings. The most we can do is get to puffing until the balloon of reason looks big enough to impress us. And religious fundamentalism, where the most toplofty of us get together and reason about what God really meant, ends up puffing up its own balloon, ignoring the bitter reality of our true obligations. We may talk and confer and dialog all we want about God's words, but we can never run from the bare fact that our true moral duties—what our Lord commands us to do—are often not what reason would in the end recommend.

1. Reuters, January 9, 2005.
2. Reuters, January 9, 2005.