“Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.” – Richard Dawins, The God Delusion

Rationalists like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins often seem very contemptuous of religious belief and while their arguments are usually well made and entertaining they don’t seem to persuade many believers to recant.

Why is that the case centuries after the enlightenment and in an age dominated by technology, a world that couldn’t exist without the scientific method, evidence based rational thinking?

The strength and passion of the arguments put forward by Dawkins and others suggests they think the argument just hasn’t been presented well enough or strongly enough, and that it is a matter of time before their view prevails.

Perhaps that is true, but then again perhaps they would do well to consider The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám.

Omar Khayyám was a 12th century Persian scholar. He was a mathematician and astronomer, but his best known work is The Rubaiyat, a poem translated into English in the 19th century by Edward Fitzgerald.

The Rubaiyat is a philosophical piece of work that follows the writer’s journey for truth about life and it’s purpose. A journey and a search for truth by a scientist.

Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same door where in I went.

Despite his quest he found no answers, no certainty.

There was the Door to which I found no Key;
There was the Veil through which I might not see:
Some little talk awhile of Me and Thee
There was-and then no more of Thee and Me.

It is hard not to see The Rubaiyat as presenting an agnostic view at best, which makes it an even more remarkable work when you consider when and where it was written. If the argument against religious certainty dates back to the 12th century and beyond, why hasn’t it succeeded?

Many argue that it is poverty, a lack of education, a lack of challenge and stupidity.

The problem with religion, because it’s been sheltered from criticism, is that it allows people to believe en masse what only idiots or lunatics could believe in isolation – Sam Harris

What they fail to adequately take into account is that a truly rational position leads not to a new certainty, but to uncertainty. People hate uncertainty in all walks of life, especially over the big questions of life’s meaning.

If you want to wean people off false certainty, you need to show the alternative, how you live with uncertainty. This is what The Rubaiyat attempted to do.

…for those who for To-day prepare,
And those that after some To-morrow stare,
A Muezzin from the Tower of Darkness cries
“Fools! your Reward is neither Here nor There.

You know, my Friends, with what a brave Carouse
I made a Second Marriage in my house;
Divorced old barren Reason from my Bed
And took the Daughter of the Vine to Spouse.

Yesterday This Day’s Madness did prepare;
To-morrow’s Silence, Triumph, or Despair:
Drink! for you know not whence you came, nor why:
Drink! for you know not why you go, nor where.

Omar Khayyám’s answer is to live not for memories or for an unknown future or for the pursuit of pure reason. The answer is to live in the present, to experience all that life has to offer. Reason will take you on a journey from a false certainty to uncertainty. Being open to experience, and drinking all that life has to offer, will make that uncertainty worthwhile.