The Question of the Sufficiency of Reason

I’ve been considering the ramifications of thought processes concerning the existence of God. Skeptics ask for a reasonable logical system of evidence sufficient for proof of God’s existence from the theist who maintains He does indeed exist. Moreover, the skeptic ask that this be done using reason and evidence as a starting place without resorting to a presuppositional argument of starting at the place of the existence of the Christian God. I have been pondering the possibilities regarding this request.

How can I start at a place of reason? Has reason been proven to be a firm foundation on which to build? C.S. Lewis wrote, “If the value of our reasoning is in doubt, you cannot try to establish it by reasoning.” Doing so begs the question and gets you no where. Essentially we presuppose reasoning as a stable foundation for we cannot process thought without using reason. However, if we presuppose it as stable, where did it get its stability? We know it is not infallible: we have rules of logic to judge argument. We seem to have an intuitive idea of something being reasonable or unreasonable. Some try and operate outside of the rules of logic by claiming two contradictory things can be true at the same time, yet it is easy to show them the error of that thinking for eventually they will appeal to the same rules of logic they deny to prove their point, and, thus, disprove it.

So where does this take us? We have this reason we know exist and to a certain degree we trust reason as foundational, but yet it cannot be the standard for it is finite. It can only find stability in something infinite. If reason merely rest upon evolutionary development, reason could evolve into something entirely different than what we know today and yet in human history we do not see an increase in cognitive reasoning. If anything antiquity reasoned better than modernity or rather post-modernity. So we do not have any evidence of human reason excelling into the Nietzsche superman.

If we want to use reason as a starting place we cannot circumvent it having a foundation in the ultimate reason of God. Lewis writes, “For him [the theist] reason—the reason of God—is older than Nature, and from it the orderliness of Nature, which alone enables us to know her is derived. For him, the human mind in the act of knowing is illuminated by the Divine reason.” Thus the reason we can know anything at all is because our knowledge rest on the existence of God from where we receive the ability to reason for it is designed into our being. The ability to know cannot be divorced from the ontological point of reference of the existence of God. How can I then argue for God’s existence without first presupposing His existence so that the knowledge we discuss has a reasonable foundation on which to begin the dialog?

This does not mean that by presupposing His existence I avoid giving an answer rooted in reason, but that my answers flow from this starting point to circle back around to offer some stability for my presuppositional claim. Granted this very argument is in defense of the necessity of God’s existence, but it is not exhaustive of all knowledge on the subject.

Basically I am being asked to presuppose His non-existence and from that starting place of the supremacy of reason and knowledge prove He does exist. If my readers still maintain this request, I will need them to first establish to me a defense for the sufficiency of reason and knowledge as a starting place.

Being Precedes Knowing

There always seems to be this great divide between secular knowledge and the knowledge of the things of God. Soren Kierkegaard’s philosophy lent itself to create a schism between faith (religious knowledge) and reason (secular knowledge). He posited that it was satisfactory for the two to contradict for the one need not be rooted in the other in a coherent fashion. Prior to this time period, philosophers searched for a unified world view to explain all of reality. They presupposed a unified reality and attempted to develop a worldview that corresponded to it. Yet Kierkegaard decided to divide knowledge into two streams avoiding the conflict altogether. Henceforth, presuppositions began to change. It was allowable for reason and science to diverge from faith and science began to be supreme over the religious world. Man became the measure of all things. Man’s reason was supreme and autonomous. Science was the discipline by which man could attain knowledge and that science was disengaged from God’s truth as man studied the world to learn about man and not to learn about God.

Eventually, man got disillusioned by the quest for reason and began to posit that it’s all meaningless. Man is no longer the measure of all things, for there is no measuring stick. There are no standards by which to measure. Postmodern philosophers such as Derrida, Focualt, and Rorty began to suggest that all of life is textual and can be analyzed linguistically and found meaningless. There is nothing to support philosophy, science, history, language. There is nothing behind it, they claim. Its support structure has been pulled out from under it because knowledge has nothing that it can rest upon to gain its meaning.

Unless, of course, God really does exist and as James Sire writes in Naming the Elephant, “we can understand the universe because an understanding God made it to be understood.” Or like John Henry Newman says, “Religious Truth is not a portion, but a condition of general knowledge.” Thus God must precede knowledge. Being must come before knowing. God must be in order for language, history, science, art, music, and life to have any purpose at all. Otherwise we are only blobs of matter, so to speak, as the evolutionist maintain. Or as the popular atheist, Richard Dawkins, laments we are merely “dancing to our DNA.”

We know deep in our souls that there is more to life than being meaningless collections of cells dancing to our DNA. We know that we have purpose as we are on a journey looking for that purpose. We value life, because God gave meaning to our lives. Our value comes from Him and all of our desires, hopes, and dreams come from Him. We can know this world around us because He has made it knowable. In Him we live, and move, and have our being.

Moreover, in Christ we find the fulfillment of all life. John 1:3 says, “Through Him all things were made; without Him nothing was made that has been made.” He is the author of all creation and the only way to learn about that creation is through His Truth. Faith and reason are inseparable for it is all rooted in Him and when we try and divide it is when we create great errors of thinking. All of life must be measured through Him and cannot be disengaged from His Truth. It is only possible to know anything at all because God exist. He is the one we need to know in order to see all else clearly.

C.S. Lewis rightly puts it this way, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”