Religion and reason.(Letter to the editor)

SIR. I find myself in agreement with much of what Ian McFadyen writes (September 2008) concerning the unsupported claims of popular environmentalism. The problem is that, in comparing it to religion he does a grave disservice to the latter. Environmentalists claim that their concerns are based on scientific data. Religions do not. One cannot treat a religion as a failed attempt at science. It is something fundamentally different. This was the basis of Ludwig Wittgenstein's celebrated attack on Frazer's Golden Bough.

In order to make his comparison work and to discredit environmentalism, McFadyen portrays religion, especially Christianity, as mere superstition or magic--very much in the vein of Sir James Frazer. It is neither. Christianity, in particular, places a heavy emphasis on human reason and has done so since the time of the Apostolic Fathers. Indeed, its insistence on reasoned argument and logic was a very prominent feature of medieval scholasticism. For the medieval scholars, the belief in a divinely created world order which was accessible to human reason legitimised that scientific and scholarly research which followed later.

To say that "religion relies heavily on ceremonies which have no measurable result but provide emotional gratification" is both false and insulting to believers. I would have thought that certain religious ceremonies carried out in an upper room in Jerusalem two thousand-odd years ago did have some rather momentous results. And if religions merely provide ...