Reason vs. religion

Overview

Beryl Baptist Church, Vilonia, Arkansas

Although reason can coexist with religion to some degree, they are each fundamentally different ways of looking at the world and essentially hostile to each other.

If religious belief is subjected to analysis through reason, it is shown to be be based ultimately on blind trust in the authority of a piece of scripture or in a person who is choosing to interpret that scripture in a particular way – in other words, all religious argument is argument from authority, which (within the realm of reason) is considered a logical fallacy.

Defenders of religious thought therefore came up with the idea of "separate magesteria", which is the idea that religious thinking is simply inaccessible to reason whilst still being somehow "true" because religion and reason are somehow in different realms of thought ("magesteria"). What remains unclear is:

• How it is that these defenders know what they know about religion if they can't use reason to figure it out
• Why we should trust them to be right and for rational analysis to be wrong
• Why we would want to protect religion from being rationally analyzed

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Related Pages

• atheism vs. religion
• religion vs. science