Mapping the Boundaries of Human Reason

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Is rational always reasonable? Does common sense make sense at all times and in all places? Those aren’t new questions, but they have been heard more often in wake of postmodern skepticism over the grand theories that imposed meaning on reality and claimed to predict the outcome of history.

Alistair E. McGrath takes up the subject in Territories of Human Reason: Science and Religion in an Age of Multiple Rationalities. A professor of science and religion at Oxford University, McGrath sees reality as “an ontological unity” perceived in “an epistemological pluralism.” In plain English: there is a real universe out there but it’s ultimately unfathomable in its vast complexity. What portion of the cosmos we can see is often perceived through lenses fashioned by our cultural preconceptions.

McGrath calls out the ethnocentrism that was always at the heart of the European Enlightenment and its philosophical presumptions to universal truth. Europeans developed a binary concept of human society as civilization vs. savagery, the latter consisting of “cultures whose notions of morality and rationality diverged significantly” from the west.

Cultural assumptions (“the prevailing cultural narrative”) lurk behind every truth and perception in The Territories of Human Reason. The scientific method is based on available evidence, yet “such evidence is often determined by the contingencies of history and culture.” We usually can’t see evidence if we’re not prepared to look for it—and yet, there have been people who looked beyond their culture’s preconceptions and spot something new that changed the way the world was seen. McGrath quotes Einstein: “What I see in nature is a magnificent structure that we can only grasp imperfectly.” He added that a sense for “the mysterious” is the source of all true art and science and he “experience” of the mysterious, mingled with fear, is the source of religion.