To Be Reasonable

Alright, it’s finally time to get back into this series. So far, we’ve established a few characteristics of that being that we’re calling God.

God is One

God is Simple (as in having no parts)

God is Omnipresent (everywhere)

God is unchanging

God is existence itself.

Let’s explore a few more characteristics of God before we try to move forward in the conversation, just to see how far pure thought will get us.

I seem to recall a disclaimer from the beginning of the series- there will only be one assumption used in this entire series- that something (namely the Universe) exists. Looking back, that’s not entirely true. There is a second underlying assumption, but this one is critical to understanding anything. That assumption is that we are able to trust our capacity to think reasonably. Let’s take a minute and examine that assumption.

Can we trust our reason? That’s a pretty big question. If we can’t, well… There goes everything you ever thought you understood, because your mind could be deceiving you. This is something that the French philosopher and father of the Enlightenment René Descartes understood quite well. Unfortunately for the future of philosophy, Descartes was unable to answer the question very well. Why? Because he insisted that already existing structures of thought could provide no answers. Let’s take some time and examine the question, then.

It most certainly seems as though we can trust our reason. For example, if I give you this: 2+2=?, most people can usually see the answer is 4. How? Through reason, that the quantity of two, added to itself, always equals four. There’s a beautiful philosophical question hiding in there, but we’ll deal with that later. You can also say that because the ball is falling, you know it had been off the ground previously.

If, for some reason, we think we can’t trust our reason, then we have a problem. What’s that problem? Well, that we can’t trust the conclusion, that our reason is unreliable. Why? Because we can’t trust the path to get there. It’s a proof that there is no such thing as a proof. It’s a bit of a problem.

So we must be able to trust our reason. That’s the presupposition that shapes the very foundation of everything we produce, do, and are. But we must be careful with trusting our reason. Can it be trusted? Yes. Can it be deceived? This is also true.

So how can we know for sure that our reason is actually being trustworthy? How do we know that our reason isn’t being deceived? How can we tell fact from fiction? If our reason is being deceived, what can we do about it? And, above all, we still haven’t actually answered the most important question, why do we trust our reason?

These questions are all very important. But first, I’m going to deal with one tiny, but very critical, question- why does it matter?

There are some who will say that philosophy has no place anymore, because science is capable of answering any questions that humanity can answer. What they don’t realize is that by saying that, they are making a philosophical statement. How are scientific conclusions made? Experiments are conducted, data is measured, and suddenly, the experimenters are left with a large table of numbers. Those numbers by themselves mean absolutely nothing. So what happens to them?

This is where philosophy appears in science. The scientists must look at the numbers and draw conclusions from them. They must be able to say whether or not variable x has any effect upon the result, and whether or not the effect, if there is one, is significant. Conclusions must be drawn from the numbers, those numbers don’t speak for themselves.

Even in the realm of science, the necessity of trusting the human capacity to reason is absolutely critical. But it’s something that’s often overlooked. Next time, we’re going to start actually breaking the question down.

And this is where the very philosophical part of the journey begins.