Unnatural Philosophy of Reason

Know thyself.

Theses of Faith and Reason

Humans must receive all knowledge from outside ourselves.
Any human knowledge must be received and believed by the holder based on faith in the outside source of knowledge.
Human reason is not rational or logical by nature, but rather humans must learn logic from school or other experience, and therefore human logic is based on faith.
Humans can only comprehend concepts that have been built up from what we experience with our physical senses.
Humans can only comprehend any divine or spiritual realities via physical manifestations of those realities.
Humans cannot know if a divine or spiritual force has manifested physically unless that force defies the laws of physics.
Without any divine or spiritual manifestation, all human knowledge and reason must be limited to that which can be based on the laws of physics.
Philosophical, non-physical knowledge of right, wrong, good, and evil cannot be directly, objectively known by humans based on the laws of physics.
If we refuse to believe that the laws of physics have been or can be defied by divine or spiritual forces, we refuse to believe that we can have an objective source of truth for non-physical questions of right, wrong, good, and evil.
Non-physical knowledge of right, wrong, good, and evil can only be objectively true for all creation if it is defined by a supreme being who has authority over all creation.
Any human knowledge that we receive from a source that is bigger than the human mind or that describes a truth that is bigger than the human mind cannot be fully comprehended by the finite, physically-bound human mind, and must therefore be a subject of debate and disagreement among humans any time we attempt to comprehend the whole picture.
Any description of a supreme creator that fully makes sense to the finite, physical human mind describes something that is not bigger than the human mind, and therefore it cannot be a description of an all-intelligent, all-powerful, supreme creator or ruler over creation.

Fallacies Against Faith

The Problem of Evil

Man says, “A good God would have prevented evil.”
But logic dictates:
- Starting assumption: Let “God” be defined as the supreme being: the highest authority over everything who is all-powerful and all-knowing.
- Therefore, God is the author of the definition of “good”.
- As an all-powerful, all-knowing supreme being, God acts in accord with His own standards.
- Therefore, God is good. (He asserts this Himself. See Matthew 19:17 and James 1:17.)
- If anyone attempts to accuse God of evil / wrongdoing:
  - The accuser asserts their definition of good as an authority over God.
  - Therefore, that definition is made a higher authority than God, to which God must conform if He is to be judged as objectively good.
  - But God is, by definition, the highest authority. Logical contradiction.
  - Therefore, no one can accuse God of evil / wrongdoing.
- If God doesn’t act according to my idea of good (such as by allowing evil to exist):
  - Therefore, my definition of good is opposed to God’s definition of good.
  - All opposition to good must be evil.
  - Therefore, all opposition to God must be evil.
  - If I define good and evil in a way that opposes God’s definition, then I am in opposition to God.
  - Therefore, I am evil.
Our good God is a God who destroys evil. He will burn all evil on judgment day, as He has warned. But for now He is being patient toward you, so that you can repent and be saved and share in His joy and love in His kingdom. (See 2 Peter 3.)

The Age of the Universe

Assume God made the world in 6 literal days in the way He said He did. (Gen. 1)
Assume that on the 7th day you are able to observe creation and apply a dating method to what you see.
- For example, you can apply a model that human hair grows at about 6 inches per year.
You apply your dating method and determine that the thing you observe is older than 6 days.
- You see that Eve has hair that is 3 feet long, and you conclude that her hair is 6 years old.
Contradiction: By the premise, creation is only 6 days old.
- Fallacy of assuming the conclusion: Your dating method assumes that what you observe came about gradually from the physical processes of creation.

All dating methods must assume that the entire span of the timeframe that they are used to model is influenced entirely and only by the gradual, continuous processes of physical creation. That assumption is invalidated if God created the processes of physical creation during that timeframe, or if God created the object that is being modeled as fully-formed in any way during that timeframe.

No dating method can logically claim that the creation account in the Bible is false without assuming its conclusion.

The Blindness of Faith

Some assert that:

“Faith” is believing something contrary to rational observation.
Therefore all “faiths” are irrational.
Therefore the Christian Faith is irrational.

This is the fallacy of equivocation. Each of the 3 lines above uses the word “faith” in a different sense:

“Faith” in the sense of believing something contrary to rational observation.
- This is called “fideism”, which historical Christianity rejects, though it became popular in the 1800s through to today.*
“Faith” in the sense of a religion.
- This sense of the word only rose in common usage in the late 1900s.*
Faith as “The Christian Faith”
- Christianity is the first to use the word “faith” in a religious sense. It was a secular word in Greek prior to Christ.
- “The Christian Faith” refers to the faith, the fealty, that followers of Christ bear toward Him. It is not founded on belief for its own sake (fideism), but on the testimony of rational eyewitness observations of the event of His resurrection from the dead, which proves His authority as King and God and Savior. (1 Cor. 15)

The Christian Faith is not blind. But we walk by faith and not by sight (2 Cor. 5) in the sense that, while we walk through this life, we do not focus on the present pain but on the future reward that Christ our King promised us. In faith, we believe that promise, because God in Christ has kept all His past promises and has proved that He has the power to fulfill them.

*See the book “Faith Misused” by Alvin J. Schmidt for details on the different senses of the word “faith” in English over the years.

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Against Quarrels of Bounded Rationality

The reasoning and understanding of mankind is bounded to that which can be expressed in terms derived from the created, experienced world.

Just as a person who is born blind cannot understand what he means when he talks about sight, so also humanity cannot understand what we mean when we talk about anything spiritual that is beyond or outside of our physical world and experience. We do not know where or how to draw the line between the physical and the spiritual in our self-conscious experience. We are blind to the spiritual world except in what God’s Word reveals.

Thus, for each of the following subjects, mankind provably oversteps the limits of his bounded understanding whenever he attempts to make definitive statements about them that go beyond what God has explicitly revealed about them:

The Trinity (God’s nature)
The Incarnation (how God and man are one in Jesus Christ)
The Human Spirit (any aspect of humanity that is not composed of physical creation)
Angels / Demons (non-human spiritual beings)
Activities of Other Realms (what it is like outside the creation we know, such as in heaven, hell, or the promised future new creation)
Election (God’s mind, plan, desire, and foreknowledge from outside creation or time, in combination with and His sovereign interaction, work, and influence among us within all of creation)
Baptism (how God cleanses from sin and regenerates in the Holy Spirit through baptism)
The Lord’s Supper (as with the Incarnation, how Jesus as God is present in the meal for the forgiveness of sins for the faithful and for the harm of those who abuse Him)

With each of these, to wrangle about words beyond the Word we have from the Lord is useless and leads to the ruining of those who hear (2 Tim. 2:14). The only logical approach is to trust God’s Word at face value in the words He uses to describe these and let their details remain mysteries. God sees both the spiritual and the physical; we do not.

It is then especially irrational to quarrel or create divisions about these topics as if we could apply the logic of our material world to the functions of the spiritual or of the eternal. The only acceptable occasion for such divisions is when they result from one party faithfully clinging to the face-value Word of God about these subjects in the face of a faithless other party that seeks to override God’s Word with their own (see 1 Cor. 11:19).

Unnatural Philosophy of the Faith

Know thy Maker.

Computational Exegetics

Faithfully learning and confessing God’s Word requires reason that learns and grows as a servant of God’s Word. It is essential that the teachers of the Church be trained in both natural and revealed logic:

Man reasons with sequence and patterns by nature, but those patterns of reason are not necessarily true or logical by nature. (“Logic” here shall refer to that which is true and accurate logic in its sequence of reasoning.)
For man’s reasoning to be logical, he must learn the patterns of true logic from a logical source.
Man is a creature of faith by nature. Faith is that which receives, learns, clings to, and conforms a person’s patterns of thought and deed to match the object of faith to which he is exposed. (Newborns are the ultimate image of faith, naturally clinging to and conforming to their parents.)
The True Faith is the faith that learns from and conforms with God who is the Author and objective standard of truth, and thus shapes a person to fully conform with truth.
Man by nature is not a creature of The True Faith in God, even if he does learn some truth from God’s creation, but he must be born again from above to have The Faith. (See John 3, and the surrounding context.)
Faith must precede logic, for it is that which defines our reasoning and learns logic.
The logical first principle of faithful reasoning is that reason is a servant of God’s Word, for otherwise one’s reasoning does not conform with truth. (God’s Word is truth.)
Logic is the shepherd of the faithful. Without logic, faith has little structure by which to conform to its object faithfully.
Because true logic must be learned, some will advance further or with different specialties than others, as each is equipped differently.
God made two teachers of logic: natural knowledge and revealed knowledge.
Those with with faith in natural knowledge learn natural logic: language, mathematics, and computation.
Those with faith in revealed knowledge learn revealed logic: theology (Logos of God).
Those who learn logic well can apply it to God’s Word to discern what He says more deeply.
Natural logic is necessary to learn revealed logic, just as natural knowledge is necessary to learn the language of the revealed Word. (You must learn what a tree means before you can understand the statement that Christ was hung from a tree. Likewise you must know some natural logic to understand what Paul means any time he says “therefore”.)
Those with The Faith, but without any natural logic, do not benefit from hearing the Word, for God communicates the Word with language, which communicates through natural logic.
Those with natural logic, but without The Faith, must fail to find the truth, for their logic builds and learns from false or incomplete premises.
Those with The Faith and with revealed logic, but with faulty natural logic, must err to whatever extent that they attempt to deepen their understanding of revealed logic using flaws in their natural logic.
Shepherds of those with The Faith must be taught both natural and revealed logics, or they will err and feed falsehood to those under their care, who will themselves thereby learn faulty logic.
When those with The Faith are fed falsehood by their shepherds, though their faith be pure, they will stray from God’s Way, for God’s Word and Way is truth.
When God’s logic does not shepherd the flock, the sheep must scatter from each other and from Him, for each is swayed by different false premises and conclusions.
When those who bear God’s name apply God’s Word illogically, God’s name is blasphemed among the unfaithful.
If the Faithful apply God’s Word logically, the unfaithful will revile His name regardless.
If the unfaithful revile God for hearing truth, the guilt for their downfall is theirs, but if they revile God for hearing falsehood from the Faithful, the guilt for their downfall is the Faithful’s.
If the Faithful stray due to being shepherded illogically, the guilt for their injury or downfall is the shepherds’.

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Recovering Forgotten Definitions

The following are the Biblical terms that I find are most central to understanding the narrative of God’s gospel message for us. The definitions are summarized according to their common usage in the Biblical languages:

Gospel
- Good news of the victory of the Kingdom/Kingship of Jesus Christ and what that means for members of that kingdom
- NOT merely the news that Jesus died for your sins. (Good Friday is not good if separated from Easter and Ascension and Pentecost.)
- “Jesus was going throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom…” (Matt. 4)
Law
- An assigned bond or instruction by which an authority leads its subjects
- NOT merely a formal written legal requirement.
- “By a law of works? No, but by the law of faith.” (Rom. 3)
- “So speak and so act as those who are to be judged by the law of liberty.” (James 2)
Faith / Belief
- Shameless loyalty of the heart / Mode of to whom you listen and cling
- NOT merely trust or mental assent about someone or something
- “…to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles for His name’s sake” (Rom. 1)
- “But my righteous one shall live by faith; and if he shrinks back, my soul has no pleasure in him.” (Heb. 10)
Obedience
- Submissive hearing; listening that forms a heart that willingly responds
- NOT primarily the performance of the outward act
- “So choose life in order that you may live, you and your descendants, by loving the LORD your God, by obeying His voice, and by holding fast to Him; for this is your life and the length of your days, that you may live in the land which the LORD swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to give them.” (Deut. 30)
- according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ…, according to the command of the eternal God, to bring about the obedience of faith…” (Rom. 16)
Fear
- Submission / Respect / Awe / Recognition of a greater power
- NOT dread of expected evil
- “But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared.” (Ps. 130)
- “However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects [fears] her husband.” (Eph. 5)
(Steadfast) Love
- Zealous family-bond service / mercy / devotion
- NOT a mere emotion
- “Do you love Me? … Tend my sheep.” (John 21)
Hope
- Assurance / confident expectation
- NOT a wish or uncertainty
- “…always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you” (1 Pet. 3)