Alister McGrath on the limits of reason and on the connection between “truth” and “mystery”:
Truth is about more than logical syllogisms; it is about the meaningful inhabitation of our world.
Religious faith is…not a rebellion against reason, but rather a principled revolt against the imprisonment of humanity within the cold and limiting walls of a rationalist dogmatism. Human logic may be rationally adequate, but it is also existentially deficient. Sadly, some of those who boast of being "free-thinkers" are simply those who have imprisoned by a defunct eighteenth-century rationalism, perhaps oblivious to the radical changes in our understanding of human rationality that have been forced upon us in the last generation, so that we must leave the dreams of the Enlightenment behind us.
The Enlightenment's appeal to the authority of reason as the ultimate arbiter of reality ends up being trapped in circular forms of argument. Some assert that reason itself can demonstrate its own authority. To its critics, however, this is simply a circular and parasitical argument, which both assumes and depends upon its own conclusions. Reason judges reason. Yet if there were a flaw in human rational processes, reason itself would not be able to disclose this. We might find ourselves locked into unreliable patterns of thought, without any means of escape.
The recent rise of postmodernity is not really a symptom of cultural irrationalism, as critics such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins suggest. Rather, is a protest against the intellectual authoritarianism of rationalism, and the in adequacy of its foundations. Perhaps we have only recently come to realise the deficiencies of an approach to life that is determined - as opposed to merely being informed - by reason. Reason is a wonderful critical tool; but it is an unreliable foundation for truth. It is too shallow to meet our existential needs - or to cope with the complexity of our universe.
That's why the idea of "mystery" is so important…The great physicist Werner Heisenberg argued that scientific thinking "always hovers over a bottomless depth." We are confronted with the "impenetrable darkness" of the universe, and are forced to realise our acute difficulties as we struggle to find a language that is adequate to engage and represent this opaque world. Those of us who have studied quantum theory know how it was forced to develop its own rationality to cope with our fuzzy world, which calls into question inadequate common sense conceptions of what is reasonable, shaped by our limiting experience of reality.
Human rationality must adapt to the structures of the universe, rather than prejudging what these ought to look like, on the basis of some naive predetermined notion of what is reasonable.
Our universe is a mystery - something with so many impenetrable and uncomprehended dimensions that our minds struggle to take it in. We can only cope with such a mystery either by filtering out what little we can grasp, and hoping that the rest is unimportant; or by slimming it down to what our limited minds can accommodate, and thus simply reduce it to the rationally manageable. Yet both these well-intentioned strategies end up distorting and disfiguring the greater reality we are trying to engage…The vastness of the reality which we inhabit simply cannot be grasped in anything other than a partial and limited manner by the human mind.
http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2016/11/11/4573826.htm
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