We live in the Age of Reason. And that’s a pretty good thing. The Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution have made so many things better in so many ways. We should love reason. The thing is though that reason is not a virtue, it is a faculty. Reason basically just means cognition. The ability to think. It’s a tool. It has zero moral significance until it is used to impel action. There is no human behavior other than physical reflexes that occurs without reason first being employed. I think our culture has some very distorted and simplistic views about reason. I believe we are witnessing playout what happens when a culture elevates reason to the status of the highest virtue and basically elevates this human faculty, this tool, to the status of a god. Indeed, there are many in modern society who would like to completely replace God and faith in general with reason. This is an ignorant and catastrophic mistake.
I was visiting a dear friend last night and we got to
talking, as is our custom, about some of the deepest possible questions known
to man (in my opinion). You see this friend and I both suffer from severe,
treatment-resistant mental illness. Mainly depression in my case and panic
disorder in his. He’s been suffering for almost 20 years now. We are both very
well acquainted with suicidal thoughts, and we have talked many, many times
about why we are still on this earth. Why in the hell, after two decades of
relentless torture would you not give up? It turns out that is a really good
question. The answer has been obvious to my friend and I for a long time now.
You see, when you’ve felt so awful for so long you want nothing more than for
it to just stop. That’s pretty reasonable right? So, when it really comes down
to resisting the temptation to make it stop, what prevents you from doing that?
Well, every time I’ve asked my friend what has prevented him from doing it he
gives the same answer, “I can’t do that to my girls.” He loves his family too
much to ever hurt them like that. He is willing to suffer day in and day out
until the end of time because of Love. And I just nod my head and say, “I know
man, I know.”
For a long time now in our culture the conversation about reason has been framed so that it is placed in opposition to faith. And the only problem with that is that it’s absurdly wrong. As I said, reason is a universal human faculty and to say that it is absent or flawed in the thought process of people of faith is just ignorant. Especially when the category of “people of faith” includes every person who has ever lived. Just like reason, faith is a universal human quality, it is embedded in your brain. Regardless of what people believe, everyone exercises faith. We are all acting on faith every minute of every day. We act with the faith that our action will produce the desired outcome. We act in faith or not at all.
Now, for all of the flaws that religions have had throughout history, and there have been a lot, they have figured out some things that I consider to be undeniably true. The most important of these truths in my estimation is found in the New Testament in 1 John 4:8 where it says “God is love.” This is a statement that reason and science simply can’t touch. If you ask a scientific rationalist he would say God doesn’t exist and love is just a bunch of neurotransmitters and hormones. To me this is evidence of the existence of a category of deep truths that are hopelessly beyond the reach of science and that is nevertheless true. We know the depth of love that we feel for our families and other loved ones, but we cannot explain rationally how much we love them and why and it certainly can't be quantifiably measured and yet we KNOW that it is real. Reason and intellectualism can't save us. Only love can do that.
Love, not reason is the highest virtue. Love is the ultimate
reason to go on living. A wise man once taught me that Love is the Motive and Faith is the Power and I think he was right.
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