Abstract
The relationship between faith and reason is a hot topic today. Continually, there is a certain prejudice that religion is divisive and should be looked upon with a hermeneutics of suspicion. Timothy Murphy recently published the article “In Defense of Irreligious Bioethics” in The American Journal of Bioethics, and claims that bioethics should avoid religious input in its normative analysis. This article will critique his proposal by situating “irreligious bioethics” in framework of faith and reason in bioethics. Murray’s position is an inheritance of an Enlightenment bias which considers religious input as detrimental to the well-being of society. His emphasis on irreligious bioethics as a normative approach is compared to the Catholic method of bioethics which begins with natural law reason and is later confirmed by faith. Murray has put too much reliance on reason, and underestimates the presence of rationality within religion and theology. While he is correct that reason can have a function to check the possible pathologies of religion, we take him to task of not recognizing the possible excesses of reason and how religion can help purify it.
