Hi niku and thanks for stopping by to comment. I think we are in agreement, except that I think that many people do exercise fine reasoning when it comes to building theologies – some of them are beautifully internally consistent – but without questioning their axioms. I also am hesitant to directly oppose faith and reason, because I think they may also be functions of two different ways of thinking, like poetic and rational truth. I think faith may be what we need to use when reason and experience don’t supply enough information for us to choose based on what they reveal. I don’t think faith necessarily has to be completely blind, or stupid. People who live by faith also have a type of experience to draw on and I have met some whose past positive experience of faith-based choices gave them the confidence to choose a similar route in the future, which is not illogical. However, this is really faith-in-action, when it’s actually necessary to make a choice. I don’t see any point in “taking on faith” any absolute description of the universe or of God, because our actions can be just as effective without this. That kind of “faith” is just laziness, enabling people to avoid big questions, I think. Keats’s negative capability is much more difficult, but also much more rewarding because of the possibilities it recognizes.

Hi niku. I haven’t anywhere said that the theologies are “equal” to science. I suggested that the “fine energies” (a mystic-poetical term) of the poetry in the Bible may attract people capable of “fine reasoning”. And I believe, like Keats, that erroneous reasoning may be “fine” in the energetic sense and does not necessarily imply lower intelligence. Every human being (including you and me) suffers from blind spots which are sometimes due to simple ignorance, sometimes to a worldview that affects how we interpret what we see and that we do not have the tools to challenge, and only sometimes due to pigheaded refusal to see the truth. Many brilliant people over the ages have quite sincerely led mankind up a jumble of garden paths. For this reason, I don’t agree that the holy texts were written “just to silence the urge to know”. Sometimes, they represented the pinnacle of the knowing that was possible at the time, and many thinking people have built a theory of life on them and lived life successfully as a result. Of course, the capacity to do this often depended on the consensus around them and so doesn’t prove that the scriptures are “right” or “true” in any absolute sense, but it does prove that what these people have done has not been illogical or unreasonable for their context.