A response to David Hume's dialogues:
In
many ways, God is greater than human Reason as Philo alludes to and Demea
firmly believes.[1]
His ways are above our ways.[2]
This being said, Reason can still be useful in attempting to have a better
understanding of God. Reason is, in fact, a gift from God and a blessing. It is
something that He has given to us so that we can understand the world around
us. Yet, it is also a tool that humanity can use for His glory in attempting to
know Him.
Reducing God to anthropomorphic
categories would be a mistake. Even though He may have man-like attributes,
they are not bound by a human scale. If God truly made us and the world, he
would have necessarily been here before us. This would not suggest that God is
like us, but that we are like him. Humanity would need to be understood as
theomorphic. The Abrahamic religions may be the most accurate in teaching that
humanity has been created in the image of God and even after the Fall has
retained that image in a broad sense.
A good argument could be made
leading from the God of Abraham to a belief in Christianity. Here there is a
helpful understanding that Jesus Christ was not a superman, but a humble God.
It is not as though He had started as a man and lifted himself up to godhood
(like so many scientologists wish to believe). He began as God and, through
limiting himself, became man.[3]
One reason for Christ’s earthly
ministry was to point towards God.[4] He
did this by encouraging faith, but also through reason. He explained heavenly
things to the Pharisees many times in a logical sense. Even though these things
seem to be best-explained through metaphor, they were still told through reason
forming valid premises and heading to a clear conclusion. This same strategy
was used in the same way by Martin Luther and C. S. Lewis. It has even been
helpful in the realm of the philosophers explaining their theories in Plato and
Hume himself. Often, a better understanding of a situation or idea can truly be
best explained through an analogy.
Still, there should be a disclosure
provided in dealing with human reason. As Berkeley said, it seems as if man
kicks up dust and then tries to see. Human reason tends to come up with variant
truths. In many cases it becomes imagination disguised in logic. Even though a
belief in God or understanding of theology might be the best explanation of
many things (in an Occam’s razor sort of fashion), many people use reason to
simply confuse themselves or to avoid unwelcome results (like God’s judgment on
their sin and a need to follow the Law). Whether this is the direst work of
Satan or a side-effect of sin is up for debate, but either way it is sadly
influential.
An example that I seem to constantly
run into is speaking with someone who has read the entire Bible, but has lost
their faith. They had a drive and a yearning for the truth. They must have
wanted to believe in God. But, in the end, their Reason had gotten in the way.
Even if they acknowledged miracles and the reliability of the scripture; they
still lost faith. How? It has seemed that even though much of the actual
Scripture may be a fact in their worldview, they have had doubt towards God’s
influence in their lives. They learned the case for Christ and believed it, but
when they were tested and their faith was frail it dissipated.
Part of being able to reason effectively, especially in the matters
of theology, is understanding (like Socrates) that we as humans can never truly
know it all. Like Berkeley, we may not even be able to prove that anything
outside of our own being is true and more than just ideas. There is a basic
trust and faith that occurs so that we can be able to even begin to believe
anything else. Is it so much harder to ask that a trust and faith in God cannot
also be held? Truly, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”[5]
Reason can be used to have a better understanding of God, but only because He
is the one who has created Reason in the first place. We are not only able to
trust in ourselves and trust in the world through our common sense, but also to
trust in Him through the power of the Holy Spirit.
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