by Scott Cherry
To this I fully expect to encounter objections and very strong attempted refutations. These will most expectedly come from non-theists such as atheists and agnostics. From this group any argument that ends with, “…therefore God exists” will be met with skepticism at best. But some objections will also come from theists, I suspect, and even from some Christians, the group to which belong. For some of my own stripe any argument that claims reason as an evidence for God will bristle. So I’m aware that my very first claim must attempt to satisfy both non-theists and theists.
For the purpose of this chapter, and this book, I take full responsibility for the burden of proof. But I’m not going to prove God deductively, or try to achieve certainty with you. Certainty is a hard thing to achieve on any subject, I admit. But I am going to try to make a strong case for God, inductively. That means that, like a trial lawyer does, I will try to try to stack the evidence in favor of God’s existence, and I will to appeal to your powers of reason to consider it. That’s what an inductive argument does. It tries to make the strongest case possible for one’s position, and then asks you to use reason to consider its reasonableness. Based on the strength of the evidence I present, my case will land somewhere on a scale of reasonableness, say from 1 to 10, but if you are an ardent skeptic I do not expect to hit a 10 on your scale. I will certainly try but sometimes even the best arguments fall short.
Turning Reason on Itself
Now let’s go back to my first premise. In a book about self-evident things, reason is the most reasonable thing to start with. At the risk of stating the obvious, that’s because we are all going to use the faculty of reason to analyze my argument, to think it through, to decide if it’s reasonable. We will turn reason on itself, because there is no other option. The irony is that if you find flaws in my argument you will have done so by using the faculty of reason, nothing more and nothing less. If you are a theist of some kind you will probably not pray about it, you will think about it. But even if you do pray about it, you still will not suspend your reason, because you can’t, and you would not want to.
So part of my argument is that reason is a lot like the beating of your heart and the circulation of your blood (except when you’re sleeping or perhaps in a hypnotic state). We need our powers of reason for most of what we do, both small and big things, and we would be hard pressed to turn them off. To do so we would have to shut down our brain if we could, but then we would be dead. We can act contrary to our reason, but even that is a kind of reasoning. We often call that foolishness.
Reason is always thinking, in the most fundamental sense. It is a subset. By the same token, thinking is usually reasoning. (Whether they are actually synonymous is inconsequential.) Simply put, the faculty of reason is the cognitive ability to rationally/logically process existing information and ideas that enable us to acquire more and/or better information and ideas, which in turn leads us to still more of the same, and which at certain points we call conclusions. The fact that this process works and humans can do this is called intelligibility and is an essential idea in this book. (This is not meant to be a precise definition, just one that adequately captures the idea.) Since we’re thinking whenever we are awake (and possibly sometimes when we are sleeping) we are also reasoning, at low or high levels. Reasoning involves many kinds of thinking skills which all fully functional humans use, some of which I have already mentioned, including induction and inference. Good reasoning also entails logic which is likewise self-evident, the capacity for which is also innate to human beings. Like the natural laws, there exists a defined set of logical laws which will be important to this discussion. Later, we will give more attention to logic itself; it is the very heart of reason.
Reason and faith are complements.
The capacity to reason is ‘hardwired’ into the human makeup and at the core of all things that define humanity, as we have been considering. So also is the capacity of faith, which is largely a reserved for a separate discussion. But it’s important to state a few things here: First, even in the sphere of religion and theology, reason is an essential tool for thinking about faith by all religious thinkers, especially at scholarly levels, objections notwithstanding. Simply put, religious thinkers think seriously about faith, which is reasoning. This is contrary to what some non-theists believe about theists, but they are simply wrong. (By the way, most if not all believing involves reasoning). Contrary to a popular but false notion, faith is not the suspension of reason, nor is it blind. I assert that at the ground level even simple faith has reasons attached to it, and anything that has reasons involves the use of reason, sound or unsound. To present a glimpse of a later chapter, faith, at least in part, is the application of reason to metaphysical questions, those related to invisible Realities. Therefore theists, like everyone else, must still apply reason and logic when considering the metaphysical. Yes, reason is that indispensable. There can be no thinking and believing about God without having reasons and reason.
If you are a non-theist you will have no objections to the priority of reason in this exercise, and for you perhaps reason should have a capital ‘R’. If you do not believe in any human spiritual qualities like faith, or any metaphysical realities that require faith to perceive, there is nothing left besides Reason. Reason is your sole means of making sense of the world around you. If you believe in pure Reason alone, as some philosophers do, then you may even reject the validity of the senses.
From the golden age of Greek Philosophy and especially since the era of the Enlightenment, reason, and rationalism with it, has been elevated to a lofty place in Western thought. Consider these words by Immanuel Kant from his work, Critique of Pure Reason:
“All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason, beyond which nothing higher can be discovered in the human mind…”
That there is nothing higher than reason is open for debate, or disputation using reason and logic. I for one both agree and disagree with the last sentence by degrees. Certainly reason is very eminent in our temporal experience of reality, and if there is no supernatural dimension and no divine revelation, then it has to be true categorically. There could be no intelligent debate, I think. But if there is, that could be a game-changer. So that is the core question, the sticking point, or the ‘wild card’ as it were, to which we shall return. But setting that aside for the time being, Kant’s last statement stands. We hardly need to prove the value of reason, and again, the very exercise of trying would suffice to prove it. Trying to prove or disprove anything requires reason. Making and understanding any argument at all requires it. For that matter, so does the formulation of any theory, any position, any opinion, any proposition, any assertion, any question, any statement, and any idea. Nearly any and every thought requires reason, and every sentence of every page of every piece of writing, including the sentence you just read. I used reason to write it, and you used reason to read it. You can analyze the ideas in this paragraph and every paragraph to decide if you think they’re, reasonable. My own reasoning could be good or bad, sound or unsound based on certain rules and principles, also called logic. Yes, reasoning requires logic, and they always go together. To analyze my ideas you’d be using your powers of reason with logic.
Using Reason to Determine Truth
With your powers of reason you can determine whether my reasoning is flawed or not. That’s how it works, which we have all experienced. If you decided my reasoning is faulty, or invalid, you could be right—or you could be wrong. The existence of reason implies rightness and wrongness (i.e. truth). Its very purpose is to find right information and distinguish it from wrong information. Ideally, this leads to corresponding conclusions, applications, verdicts, judgments, methods, systems, treatments, strategies, and so on. But if nothing were either right or wrong in the world, reason would be superfluous; it would have no meaning. Therefore, even when you think you’re using your very best reasoning, you can still be wrong, and someone might call y
ou out on it. And they should, because rightness is better than wrongness. We all know that intuitively. We can say there’s no right and wrong about some things, perhaps, but not everything. In math and science, for example, there is obviously rightness and wrongness, or why do them at all? We do them because our reason tells us it’s possible (and desirable) to discover what’s right, or true, about reality. It is reason that helps us to do so, but not only reason. It’s also something we call intelligibility, a very helpful condition indeed, to which we will return. If some things are false then some things are true, so there is truth. Therefore, truth exists because reason exists, or we should dispense with reason entirely. This, it would seem, is our necessary Reality.
Again, there is also such a thing as being wrong, but only because there is such a thing as being right. Of course, we could be wrong due to bad reasoning, false information, or insufficient information, etc. But when the necessary ingredients are part of the mix, it is possible to be right, which is the goal. We know this from experience and reason. In the human experience we are wrong about many things but we are right about many things as well. When we are wrong it’s often possible to discover this and then make corrections to change our wrong ideas into right ones. And it should happen; we say that’s good. This is precisely what happens so much in science, which depends on reason. Indeed, science is no more than a broad category of reason that combines all the rules of reason and laws of logic, including math. We have discovered many right or true things by the exercise of science, due to the fact of intelligibility. But often even our best minds are wrong before they are right. From experience we know that arriving at truth about anything can be hard to come by, and usually is. But it is not impossible or we would not even bother—something that should strike us as odd on both counts. Thankfully, there are rules of reason by which we can usually verify what we suppose is true such as the principle of repeatability which is critical for verification or conformation. In experimental forms of science, an outcome that is not repeatable cannot be verified, so it is not necessarily true. So verification through repeatability is itself an important rule of reason, not only is science but also in experience.
All reasoning is not equal.
So not all reasoning is equal because it does not all lead to truth. Again, I hardly have to defend this statement. In math, in science, in engineering, in language, in politics, even in relationships, there is good reasoning and bad reasoning. I don’t mean this in a moral sense, necessarily, though there are moral implications as well. I mean it in a more philosophical or logical sense. Math is a great example because it is so “concrete” within its own terms, its own sphere of meaning and functionality. In math, you either do a problem right and you get the right answer, or you do it wrong and you get the wrong answer. Opinions, values, feelings, and beliefs don’t matter at all. Math is uncompromisingly rigid in which one’s reasoning has to be dead on. If not you are likely to fail the exam, or your bridge could collapse. (A certain kind of faith, however, does matter—faith in math.)
Again, a person uses his or her reason to determine whether someone else’s reason is reasonable or unreasonable, valid or invalid, sound or unsound, coherent or incoherent, consistent or inconsistent, wise or foolish. (We recognize that all of these types of disparities are real.) That’s possible because there are certain laws and principles that govern good reason, collectively called logic. So in some ways reason and logic are synonymous. What are these laws? Where do they come from? Why do we call them “laws” and who decided they should be laws? Zooming out again, since reason exists, why does it exist? Why is there such a thing as reason? Is it a human invention? Is it something that developed by natural selection? Or must we consider an outside source? Those are the million-dollar questions. In this next section we will delve into them. And as always, we will be using reason to do this.
Chapter 4
The Complementary Nature of Reason
“Come now, let us reason together…”
—The Biblical prophet Isaiah, from his book named after him, chapter 1:18
Consider the quote above. Do you know who said it, or at least to whom it is attributed? Hint: It wasn’t Isaiah per se. Although he purportedly wrote it, he was quoting somebody else (at least he seems to have believed he was). If you’re still unsure it will become clear to you as our discussion develops. For now just ponder it with me, i.e. use reason to reflect on it. First, at face value, whoever said it was making an appeal—or perhaps a challenge—to reason with him (or her), that is to use the assumed faculty of reason to consider something. That much should be plain. But what does that tell us? It would seem that the Appealer had some regard for the benefits of reason, and that he himself had the ability to exercise it. Entities without this ability do not make such appeals. As to the recipient of the appeal we can make some reasonable assumptions. 1) It was probably a living thing, because nobody in their right mind makes such an appeal to a rock or a puddle for obvious reasons. 2) It was probably not a plant either, for quite the same reason. 3) Perhaps it was an animal. After all, some people believe that animals can reason. But something should not sit right about that option; animals are not usually invited to reason by humans, at least not on the same level. We would view such an appeal to an animal with suspicion at best. We have lower expectations of animals, and rightly so.
Let’s be reasonable, shall we? As far as we can tell (by reason) only rationally intelligent beings are invited to use reason, by other intelligent beings that also use reason. Usually this means that, in the temporal world at least, only humans invite other humans to reason with them, never animals or plants, rocks or puddles. Now, many people believe that there are other rational beings besides humans, as I do, and if there are they could be higher or lower beings. But I assume that an ‘extra-terrestrial being that could communicate with a human would have to be a higher being. Is that fair? By “higher” I am necessarily referring to rational intelligence. In this case, a being’s position on the ‘higher-lower’ scale of rationality is a measure of its rational intelligence made by other beings of sufficiently high rational intelligence that we often call ‘sentience’. Therefore, whoever it is, the being making the appeal in the quote above is a rationally intelligent being who expects the recipient of the appeal to be able to use reason in a rational exchange. It is the only way to make sense of it.
Now to identify the two parties: the Appealer is God and the recipient is Isaiah the prophet. Or, more precisely, the recipients were those in Isaiah’s audience, specifically the people of Israel at his time (c. 740-681 BC). But more broadly they are everyone who has ever and will ever read the writings of Isaiah. If you are not a theist you need not believe that God exists to appreciate the value of this appeal. I only ask that you grasp its obvious lesson: We humans are inextricably rational beings who exercise reason. If we allow for God on his own terms (or Isaiah’s) even He expects this of humans. I make this point because some people seem to think this is not the case, that ‘God’ is a being who expects only blind submission and obedience. (I have had several philosophy courses in which the professors said this.) But with respect to Yahweh, the God of the Bible, this is not the case. In the temporal realm of everyday reality, then, reason is manifested in humanity, between individuals and within communities. Assuming a closed system, or a world without God, reason would exist only because humans exist or there could be no reason at all. But if we allow for God in the equation, in an open system, reason can exist in both realms, the temporal and the celestial. But it would not have to be this way.
It is conceivable that only God would be rational but not his creatures. By definition, God could not be non-rational. So certainly reason would exist necessarily in the celestial realm even if it didn’t exist in the temporal realm. My argument is this: Since reason does exist in the temporal realm it is likely also to exist in the celestial realm that would necessarily have preceded it. In this scenario rationality/reason would have been ma
nifested in the mind of a rational God and infused into the order of the universe. Not only that, but from the one biblical verse in focus it is clear that the God who is depicted by Isaiah expects humans to engage him with reason and has endowed us with this capacity. If one allows for these assumptions, at least for the sake of discussion, it would follow that we derive our powers of reason from a rational God who values rational communication with us. But this is only hypothetical for now.
In summary, the Isaiah passage is illuminating because it succinctly sheds light on the mutuality and complementary importance of reason between two rational beings, divine and human. 1) If this is an actual revelation and actually the voice of God conveyed by Isaiah the prophet then it shows that this God, at least, is an advocate of reason and invites humans to reason with him. 2) If it is merely sacred literature that Isaiah made up and attributed to God, even then it still shows that Isaiah believed or imagined the aforementioned of point 1. Both options are fascinating prospects, and the second is just as interesting as the first because it shows Isaiah’s esteem for the role of reason in the realm of faith.