Image for The Nature of Reason: <br/> Objectivity, Morality & Faith

In our cultural moment, society’s justifiably high regard for modern science too often comes with a corresponding sense that questions of morality, religion, politics, and meaning are merely “subjective,” in comparison to the objectivity of scientific experts. Some even think that the merely “subjective” world of morality and politics doesn’t count as real knowledge and is nothing more than power dynamics. If that’s true, what is the role, if any, of human reason in those aspects of life that give meaning and value to our existence as persons, such as faith, community, tradition, art, morality? Is reason confined to the space of the math and quantitative natural sciences, or can reason be expanded to include all the questions which matter to humans? Do the worlds of philosophical reasoning and empirical analysis speak different languages? Can these languages be meaningfully brought into conversation with one another?