Madness Replacing Reason

Indictments From the Common Lawyers

What does a Christian society look like?  What might be some of the key features of the Second Christendom when it emerges in redemptive history?  There are many.  One central feature will be the grounding of civil and criminal law upon the higher law of God.  This, of course, is not novel.  It is the way it used to be in the First Christendom.

F E Dowrick describes how biblical law (both written and inscribed in the creation itself) was deeply embedded in the English legal tradition.  He writes:

Vapid Dogmatism

Spurious Claims of the Age of Reason

Materialism is not a fact of experience or a deduction of logic; it is a metaphysical prejudice, nothing more, and one that is arguably more irrational than almost any other.  In general, the unalterably convinced materialist is a kind of childishly complacent fundamentalist, so fervently, unreflectively, and rapturously committed to the materialist vision of reality that if he or she should encounter any problem--logical or experiential--that might call its premises into question, or even merely encounter a limit beyond which those premises lose their explanatory power, he or she is simply unable to recognize it.

Richard Dawkins is a perfect example: he does not hesitate, for instance, to claim that "natural selection is the ultimate explanation for our existence."  But this is a silly assertion and merely reveals that Dawkins does not understand the words he is using.

Modernist Myths

 Sweet and Sour Reasoning

Rationalists constantly mock Believers as being anti-rational.  It is a dishonest slur--on two levels.  At one level the slur represents a confusion of categories as happens when one confuses medicine with poison.  Both alike are pharmacological, but with entirely different outcomes.  Rationalists believe in a particularly noxious kind of reason--that human reason is the ground of all truth and the highest and final court of appeal. Rationalists believe in human reason as master.  Christians believe in human reason as helpful servant. 

At another level the slur seeks to conceal a dirty secret (one which makes rationalism self-contradictory and at root irrational): rationalism is grounded upon a foundation which cannot itself be verified by human reason.  Try establishing rationally the premise that human reason is the ground of all truth, without arguing in a vicious circle (that is, irrationally). 

Here is David Hart's exposition of the matter.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

The Ultimacy of Right Reason

Goo-Mongers - Postmodernism
Written by Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, January 25, 2012

I want to expand a bit on what I said about logic and the character and nature of God.

First, the problem. If logic is external to God, and is something that He obeys or conforms to, then we are saying that there is another God, senior to Him, whose dictates He must somehow obey. That is obviously out for the orthodox, on the basis of being ridiculous.

But if we say that logic is a created thing, fashioned as a could-have-been-otherwise sort of thing by God for this world, then absolutely anything goes, and God Himself becomes absolutely unknowable. I will explain this further in a moment.

This leaves the option that the font of all logic is somehow an attribute of God, like His love, like His holiness, and so on. More on this in a moment also.