I spent last weekend at the lovely Hay literary festival – despite a day of rain, I thoroughly enjoyed taking part, hanging out, and meeting up with old friends and with some marvellous people I hadn’t met before (including my B+B hosts, who were completely fab and ended up coming along to listen to the Debate later that evening).
The “Guardian Debate” had been planned as a panel discussion on reason and religion, and I had written a little opening speech on the importance of reason in good theology, demonstrating that most people who consider religion/theology to be anti-intellectual probably have no idea what theologians actually do. On the day, though, it was decided it would be more interesting to pitch the event as a formal debate. So I tore up my speech and argued against the motion, on the basis that although reason is a vital part of our intellectual explorations whatever we do, it’s not all we make use of (there is instinct, ethics, tradition, for instance, to go along with it) and even reason, in practice, is fuelled by imagination and instinct, so while I could never argue for not using reason, it doesn’t ever work all by itself.
The debate was a tie. I couldn’t help wondering whether people had used their tradition, their instinct or their reason to decide. It would have been interesting to find out whether anyone had changed their mind.
