On Faith and Reason

On Faith and Reason
by Bill Moyers

In a world where religion is poison to some and salvation to others, how do we live together? How do we keep the public space between reason and faith, where most of us spend our lives, from becoming a no-man’s land of constant warfare between absolutes? It’s an old debate, this discussion of belief and disbelief. On one end of the spectrum people say, “Only religion counts.” On the other end, “Only reason counts.” Well, neither wholly a believer nor wholly a skeptic, I’ve always been a fellow who falls in the middle of this one. I value democracy as a co-operative where compromise keeps the peace by enabling each of us to believe what we will, according to our own conscience while settling our political and economic differences by common sense.

There’s a moving verse in the Hebrew Bible: “Come now, and let us reason together.” But there is also a moving verse in the Christian New Testament: “I believe. Help Thou my Unbelief.” Most of us ride the seesaw of faith and reason. Yes, it’s an ancient conflict, a long-running argument, but with all the fear, violence, and intolerance that grip our times, we have to come to terms with the fact that it must be reason and faith, not reason versus faith. Otherwise, we would tear our society apart as Europe so often did — and may do yet again.

I will be talking about this subject with some of the world’s most provocative writers in my new mini-series Bill Moyers on Faith and Reason, which premiers June 23rd on PBS. Why writers? Why not ask religious scholars or people of faith to guide us? Well, stories can help us see into the truth of experience that is obscured by the different meanings each faith assigns to the same language. Through craft and conscience, writers wrestle to negotiate between black and white. Their tales of suffering and redemption, war and peace, violence and love reflect the lived experience of human beings baffled bythe language of theology and the abstractions of reason. Novelists, essayists, and poetshelp us clear a path through that briar patch of intractable viewpoints where desperate people searching for hope often get lost.

So I wanted to ask some of our most creative writers what they have discovered from their own experience about good and evil in a world where free expression can bring down the life-and-death wrath of true believers. Among them are some of our beststorytellers — Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Mary Gordon, Richard Rodriguez — who write of archetypal memories, passions and thirsts. By holding language up like a kaleidoscope and turning it against the light, they tell and re-tell our individual stories and our collective human story and very often enable us to see the world through the lens of other people's reality. What could be more salient to the discussion of faith and reason in a time of polarized passions than to ask these writers for guidance through the absolutes and ambiguities of our age? In negotiating our way into the gray world between faith and reason, we need all the help we can get.