Why Religion Shouldn’t Be Rational
And why we should search for a viable religion anyway
Should religious beliefs and practices be rational? Should they be backed up with scientific evidence and sound philosophical arguments? Or would that be as wrongheaded as asking whether a scientific theory should, above all, be emotionally uplifting so that it can hold society together?
Scientists and philosophers want to know the objective facts regardless of the social consequences. Their primary tool is reason (logic, conceptual analysis, and the testing of hypotheses with experiments). What, then, would religions have to be for them to be rational in anything like that modern sense?
The Purpose of Religion
Religion is surely supposed to be a way of life, not just a dusty old abstract creed. Religion is a mythos that showcases an ethos, a set of myths that explains and justifies an ethnicity, a history, a civilization, a culture, and an ultimate purpose in life.
For example, ancient Egyptian society was saturated with religion. Temples were everywhere, celebrating the deities and stories that explained how the world worked and why Egyptian society was set up as it was. The Pharoah’s job was comparable to Osiris’s, to that of the god of fertility, death, and resurrection: they…
