McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics & Public Life

Oxford’s Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics recently held an excellent lecture and discussion on the topic “How Dangerous is Religion?” The lecturer was the Australian philosopher, Tony Coady, who argued that religion is not dangerous. He did a fine job of sorting through the complexity of the claim, including the difficulty of defining religion for such purposes, and the fact that religion can be used for both good and ill (so too with non-religious ideologies). More interesting still was the subsequent discussion. A number of those present offered the following critique of Coady’s argument: while religion itself isn’t necessarily dangerous, fanaticism and extremism are dangerous and certain features of religion make it more susceptible than atheism to those pitfalls. What are the features of religion that create this propensity? Coady’s critics suggested that religion’s dependence on ‘faith’ means it cannot be accountable to rational reflection and critique. While this understanding of faith, as an alternative to reason, is not what Christianity means by the term, I will leave that for another day. Instead I want to respond to the critics’ broader claim: Religion is not accountable to reasoned reflection.

Read the rest of this entry »