A moment’s reflection says “it ain’t necessarily so”-and is even unlikely to be so. Because we separate faith and reason psychologically, thinking of them as epistemological opposites, we tend rather uncritically to assume that they must have separate historical origins as well. This failure of synthesis may have something to do with why the old, discredited story has hung on for so long in popular imagination. What they haven’t done, however, is work out the implications of their findings in a way that gives us a new narrative explanation to take its place. Historians have been struggling to correct it for more than a century. It’s a tidy tale of two pristinely distinct entities that do fine, perhaps, when kept apart, but which hiss and bubble like fire and water when brought together.Ī tidy tale, to be sure, but nearly all wrong. The Greek tradition of pure reason has always clashed with the monotheistic tradition of pure faith, though numerous thinkers have tried to “reconcile” them through the ages.
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Meanwhile, in a completely unrelated series of events, the rationalistic paragons we know as the ancient Greeks invented reason and science. In the fullness of time, or-depending on perspective-in a misguided departure, the newer faiths of Christianity and Islam split off from their Jewish roots and grew to become world religions in their own right. The usual story we tell ourselves about faith and reason says that faith was invented by the ancient Jews, whose monotheistic tradition goes back to Abraham.
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If we could ask someone from a much earlier time, however, a time closer to that of Abraham himself, the answer might be different. Should we pose the question to most people familiar with one of the three “Abrahamic” religious traditions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), all of which trace their origins to this misty figure, and which together claim half the world’s population, the answer would come without hesitation. An angel appeared, together with a ram, letting Abraham know that God didn’t really want him to kill his son, that he should sacrifice the ram instead, and that the whole thing had merely been a test.Īnd to modern observers, at least, it’s abundantly clear what exactly was being tested. We all know how things turned out, of course. Abraham, the father, had been commanded, by the God he worshipped as supreme above all others, to sacrifice the young man himself, his beloved and only legitimate son, Isaac.
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Unbeknownst to the son, however, the father had another sort of sacrifice in mind altogether. The young man carried on his back some wood that his father had told him they would use at the top to make an altar, upon which they would then perform the ritual sacrifice of a burnt offering. One day in the Middle East about four thousand years ago, an elderly but still rather astonishingly spry gentleman took his son for a walk up a hill.