For three months, I’ve been defending human reason in an age of irrationality. In fact, on a casual level, I have been defending human reason for thirty years. So, someone might think I have taken human reason too far, as if it were perfect. Therefore, it is time for me to set the limits of human reason.

We are living in an age of irrationality, as I have mentioned, that started to manifest itself in mainstream society just fifty years ago. In the last eight years, the Trumpian years in America, we have seen this movement go to seed. We have a total loss of respect for experts. Baseless (without evidence) conspiracy theories dominate politics, religion, and society in general because we have lost the fundamental principles of reason, or critical thinking. As I’ve been demonstrating, the Christian New Spirituality must be irrational; reason or critical thinking is now promoted by the Christian as the enemy of Faith.

The best-selling author Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens and Nexus) believes that the age of irrationality is over, or at least it better be over, because it has been a cultural disaster.  I totally agree.

Reason

I sincerely believe that, just as the creator created the stomach and mouth to eat and supply energy to our bodies, and the lungs to process air to oxidize that food as energy, the creator gave us reason as a light to find factual truth. However, because we are finite humans and reason must share space with emotions—and emotions are very good but ill-equipped for finding truth—our reason is imperfect. It takes discipline to set aside our emotional biases as we examine the evidence and reach factual conclusions. So, therefore, the most critical thinker is sometimes wrong… yes, including me.

Our reason is to mathematics as an excavator is to engineering. Do you sense the relationship? Here is a very simple example. A mathematical truth could be written as: if A=B and B=C, then A=C. I am tired, and my brain can’t come up with an equivalent in logic right now, so I cheated and asked AI to do it for me. This is what AI came up with.

Practical Example: Fitting Furniture Through a Doorway

Suppose you are shopping for a couch (A) and need to know if it will fit through your front doorway (C), but you cannot physically move the couch to the doorway.
A=B: You measure the width of the couch (A) using a tape measure (B) and find it is 36 inches.
B=C: You measure your doorway (C) with the same tape measure (B) and find it is 36 inches.
A=C: Therefore, you know the couch width equals the doorway width—without ever bringing the couch near the house.

Every standardized measurement tool in daily life (tape measures, scale weights, money values) relies on this exact mathematical truth: the benchmark (B) allows you to equate A and C across distance and time.

So, my point is that the part of our brains that does mathematical computations also does logic, or what we call, in broad terms, reason. In more than 99% of what we do, we incorporate reason into the process. It is only in the big worlds of politics and religion that reason is forbidden.

Plato observed that pure mathematics is perfect, and therefore we can say the same about pure logic or reason. However, when you put mathematics or reason in the hands of a human, it becomes imperfect. This was the beginning of Plato’s dualism (a good dualism, not the type the church invented): an upper story (what Plato called the Ether) where abstract but perfect math and reason lived, and the lower story, the material world where we fallible humans live and work. Plato gave examples that in perfect abstract math, you can have a perfect right angle. However, if you build a chair, the corners, no matter how hard you try, can never be perfect right angles… close if you are a great wood craftsman, as my son is, but not perfect.

Reason and Faith

Now, let’s apply this to faith.

Kierkegaardian faith was an irrational leap into the dark with no evidence, which led us to this disastrous moment in history. Donald Trump used the same type of “faith” to start bombing Iran, rather than talking to experts, but “listening to his gut.”

In the case of faith that God exists, we can and must address the topic rationally. This means looking at the evidence without bias and coming to a conclusion. However, despite many theologians over the centuries (including my favorite, Thomas Aquinas) offering proofs of God’s existence, no proof is certain because fallible humans are using reason to establish that truth. We can, however, arrive at high probabilities.

When I became an evangelical, we were taught that reason was of the flesh, but that it was all spiritual. God calls us, and we respond, and we do not need evidence. However, here is the rub, and this will make me very unpopular for being this honest. The nature of the human psyche and confirmation from the Bible (Jeremiah 17:9): what we call spiritual is indistinguishable from the emotional. The emotional is wonderful, the spice of life and vital for existence, but was never intended as a tool for knowing things.

So, just like when I became an evangelical, most people become Christians for the wrong reason, or no reason at all (usually it is a highly emotional meeting and psychological pressure). But if Christianity is true, and I believe it is, it doesn’t matter except for using the same emotions to reach other conclusions and some of those conclusion will be false. I will write more about this later, but this kind of conversion lays the groundwork for lifelong doubts because the faith was ill-conceived to start with. The irrational Christian will tell you that doubts are a spiritual problem, or attacks by Satan. They are not. They result from illegitimate conclusions without proper vetting.

After leaving evangelicalism, for ten years I studied honestly and found convincing evidence that there was no God, and found convincing evidence that there was a God. My reason was worked to its fullest and came up short… without certainty. This is the problem with reason. At that juncture, with an enlightened faith, I chose to believe in God and in Jesus as the Messiah, yet there is no absolute proof because reason cannot take us all the way to certainty… but faith can fill the gap. You could rightly argue that I came back to Christianity because I had a bias toward it to start with. That would be fair. But I think my greater bias, and reason for coming back was that I could not find a way to build meaning or morals in an atheistic model. But there were many other issues such as the fine-tuning of the cosmos, the existence of mathematics and music (which is just audible mathematics), and bottle necks in totally naturalistic evolution… to name a few.

Now a religious person reading this will say, as they always do, my relationship with God is therefore no good, or at least inferior to their “spiritual relationship.” Please don’t go there. If I hear that one more time I may jump off the bridge below.

Nepal is in the news this week, sadly. I did a 70-mile trek very close to the glacier collapse and flood area. I do have some acrophobia and was worried about the high swinging bridges that Nepal is famous for. When we came to the first bridge, I studied the materials and engineering and was satisfied it was safe. But my reasoning could not have certainty that it was safe. But by faith, not an irrational faith, I walked across them, some as high as two thousand feet.

I may take a break from writing Christian things for a while, but later I will expound on some of these controversial ideas.

Respectfully, Mike

Have a great week.

P.S. for anyone interested, I had my annual work up at Fred Hutch Cancer Center on Monday, and my cancer is still in good remission. The other good news was that we could not plan the next step because new things are coming so fast. By the time my cancer comes back, the choices will be new. Thank God for the rational scientists and the scientific method or removing biases and looking at the evidence honestly.