2.) Honestly, I would hope your friend would be confused. Confusion and rejection was mostly the response that the apostles received when they preached the scandal of faith. That is the point. The movement of faith is not “apparent” or “understandable.” It is a trans-rational, inexplicable embrace of that which is “other-than” whatever is germane to human knowledge and experience. It is not something that can be explained, defended, or established on the basis of human reason (hence my antipathy for the spurious field of apologetics). It is an existential reality that can only be “realized” in the living of it. The moment it is (supposedly) established within human reason, it has become perverted and is nothing.

And regarding the rest of your point on #2, I would simply respond that you are imposing categories that I am not assuming. Just because you believe that reason cannot be divorced from faith does not mean that such a scenario is true, nor that those who disagree somehow have to argue along the lines that you are assuming. It goes back to the absurdity of the absolutist mocking the relativist…but all the while the absolutist is just as ridiculous in the epistemological foundations from which he is arguing.

3.) I’m not interested in what some arbitrary selection of materialists think that you believe corroborate your point about the origin and nature of reason. I’m simply stating my opinion that it seems reasonable to conclude that because the human mind, in its inherent, bounded subjectivity, is “of” the universe (e.g., material), it would also follow as a matter of course that the outcomes of its processes would occur within–and only within–the domain in which it occurs. Since the material universe is “what is” from an epistemologically investigable perspective, it seems reasonable to conclude that materialism is a natural outcome of thinking.

While reasoning certainly doesn’t discount, out of hand, the notion of something other-than the universe existing, the existence of that which is not “what is” is not a terribly meaningful concept to the subjectivity and material-boundedness of human reason.

And regarding particular tenants of Christian orthodoxy, I would agree that reason certainly aids in understanding them. But understanding them is not faith, and has nothing to do with faith. An atheist, an agnostic, and a Christian could have identical understandings of these tenants, but this shared understanding does not mean that either has faith.

But let’s say that reason does somehow “aid” faith. Precisely how does that happen? How does reasoning about God aid faith? What, precisely, is the nature of this “faith” that is supposedly undergirded by human reason?

4.) I would say, then, that you have terrifically misread Scripture. Yes, I agree, that Jesus spoke against the self-serving agendas and the hegemonies of power that he encountered. But on a deeper level, I see in the Gospels (and in the apostles’ writings) and undercutting of the false pride of the human mind. The way to God that Christ and the apostles described was not through the avenues of knowledge and wisdom; but through the scandal of the way of the cross. It was against those who were “in the know” that they preached. They each, in their own way, came to end of their reason (look at Paul), despaired of it, but miraculously found illumination not in the way of rationality, but rather in the existentially transforming encounter with the living God.

1. You are within your right to claim that I am playing some game. But two things strike me with that response. One, the inference is yours, not mine. I re-stated what you had said and demonstrated that you too relied upon reasoning. Two, that’s fairly uncharitable of you. You insist that “Appealing to rules to one-up a rhetorical opponent is a very juvenile approach, not to mention tremendously unproductive.” I think it is far more juvenile and unproductive to dismiss what your rhetorical opponent, me in this case, has demonstrated to be a weakness in your position and simply call him juvenile and unproductive. Why not try to engage in my actual words and lines of reasoning? Notice that nowhere in my previous post did I call you names or call into question any of your motivations. I simply re-stated your opinions. Notice in your response to me are the words “juvenile,” “unproductive,” “cockily,” “self-deluded ignorance,” “pointless games,” and so forth.

2. Say if I accepted what you just responded. If I were to be convinced by what you said and turned my life around in response and threw off the alleged shackles of reason to embrace a more authentic faith, and if someone were to ask me why I had done so, how shall I respond? Perhaps I would respond by saying a gentleman nicknamed existdissolve explained to me the real meaning of faith, demonstrated to me why it is superior to a reason-aided faith, and I inferred then that it was wrong of me to continue in my present course. Would you not think that my hypothetical friend would be deeply confused at this point? Perhaps this hypothetical friend would then point out to me that I had embraced the conclusion that a reason-aided faith is an inferior one because I had assessed the evidence and reasons for it and found them compelling. See, in your rejection of a reason-aided faith, you are appealing to reasons in order to elicit that conclusion from the rest of us. So if anyone embraced your portrait of a more authentic faith, we would have done so by means of reason–your argumentation would have sounded convincing in our ears. So you too cannot avoid a reason-aided faith either.

3. You have an unusual idea of what reasoning is. Twice now you have referred to reasoning as being more akin with a materialist worldview. This is ironic, as there are materialists who confess that it is very difficult to account for how it can be the case that something like the laws of logic–immaterial, universal, obligatory rules–can somehow exist in the world if all the world was merely molecules being arranged and re-arranged. Where in any of that physical soup would there be immaterial stuff like logic?! In fact, some atheists are coming to see how logic may accord better with theism than it does with materialism. You claim that it is a necessary consequence that reason would conclude that God does not exist, for anything that is not of the universe is absurd. You have a strange idea of what reason must be, for reason is about inferences. Inferences cannot stand alone; it requires data to begin with. There is nothing about the concept of the universe that immediately discounts the possibility of God existing, unlike the concept of a square immediately discounting the possibility of the square being a circle at the same time. Further, I don’t think faith is the product of reason. Reason aids faith, but does not commandeer it. Reason alone cannot yield some of the deepest and richest pieces of information we have about God, but nonetheless reason can help us understand it. I subscribe to an Anselmian view of faith seeking understanding. Left to my own intellectual devices apart from the Bible, I could not have dreamt up the Trinity or the Incarnation or the atonement or that God loves me and wishes for me to be a part of his people. But having learned these things from the Bible, I think reason can help me understand them better.

4. And this will be my final point. You speak of faith being the ultimate crisis, the existential calling away of the person from the shackles of human
reason into the darkness of the unknown and the unknowable God. The crisis of faith that I see in the four Gospels is not away from reason, but away from self-serving agendas. Jesus used plenty of reasoning with his opponents. The crisis they faced was not that they were rational and needed to stop being rational. Rather, the crisis was that of power. They had it and wanted to keep it. They had riches and wanted to hold onto it. They had prestige and wanted to maintain it. To submit and follow Jesus as the true Messiah, one in which the Kingdom of God would be brought about by peace rather than by sword, was not their idea of what they wanted. You may, if you wish, continue to dispute me on any of these points. I would welcome it. But as long as you continue to dispute me on these points, if I ever agree with you on any of them, I would have reasons and evidence to believe in the conclusion that a reason-assisted faith is a bad one. But how did I get to that conclusion? By reasons and evidence. Your project is in jeopardy. Either you must stop providing reasons and evidence in hopes of convincing us, or you must do something entirely different.

No games are intended.

1. This is an instance of the law of excluded middle, which states that a proposition cannot be true and false at the same time in the same sense. It serves as one of the primary bases for reasoning.

2. This is an instance of a logically valid deductive argument.
Premise 1: e is D
Premise 2: All D is O
Conclusion: Therefore e is O
Let “e” be an instance of engaging in reason to aid the faith
Let “D” be the class of dishonest imitations of a thoroughly materialist worldview
Let “O” be the class of things that ought not be done.

Given that this are re-statements of your opinions, in order for you to convince us to discard reasoning for a more authentic faith, you must actually engage in reasoning itself. So either your conclusion that we must relinquish reasoning for a more authentic faith is false or otherwise you must resort to some other means other than inference to convince us that we must relinquish reasoning for a more authentic faith.

I have two questions for you.

1. Would you say that it is true of the Christian worldview that one ought to throw off the shackles of human reason in order that the person might embrace the fullness of the divine-that which is ineffable to human reason and that it is false of the Christian worldview to embrace human reason?

2. Would you affirm the following thoughts: Engaging in reason to aid the faith is a case of engaging in a dishonest imitation of a thoroughly materialist worldview. Whatever engages in a dishonest imitation of a thoroughly materialist worldview ought not to be done. And therefore engaging in reason to aid the faith ought not to be done?