romans on Reason/Rationality

Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.

Aristotle said I am a rational animal; I say I am an angel with an incredible capacity for beer.

I do not put much stock in "believing in God." The grammar of "belief" invites a far too rationalistic account of what it means to be a Christian. "Belief" implies propos...

[The decay of Logic results from an] untroubled assumption that the particular is real and the universal is not.

You cannot reason someone out of something he or she was not reasoned into.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Seco...

When we observe evil, sinful behavior from a distance, the inclination is simply to see people as acting with malicious intent. We assume they are “bad people.” But often the motivations that lead to ...

Human salvation demands the divine disclosure of truths surpassing reason.

“Moral”…is an orientation toward understandings about what is right and wrong, just and unjust, that are not established by our own actual desires or preferences but instead are believed to exist apar...

In her book, The Next Right Thing, Emily Freeman describes the difficulty in making decisions, including the decision that would eventually lead to her enrollment in Graduate school. After a prolonged...

At a Christian high school, a theology teacher strode to the front of the classroom, where he drew a heart on one side of the blackboard and a brain on the other. The two are as divided as the two sid...

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line....

The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality, but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact.

Creeds must disagree: it is the whole fun of the thing. If I think the universe is triangular, and you think it is square, there cannot be room for two universes. We may argue politely, we may argue h...

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity..

The idea that there’s a force of love and logic behind the universe is overwhelming to start with, if you believe it. Actually, maybe even far-fetched to start with, but the idea that that same love a...

Belief doesn’t create truth. Unbelief doesn’t destroy truth. Christian faith goes beyond reason but not against reason.

One lazy afternoon day a turtle was swimming happily along a lake. As the turtle was nearing land he heard a scorpion hail it from the muddy shore. A scorpion, being a very poor swimmer, asked the tur...

Truth consists in the mind giving to things the importance they have in reality.

Justified…for what? This passage from Romans 5 sits at the heart of the Protestant doctrine of justification: Paul’s statement that “we are justified by faith” is as clear as we could ask for! The fa...

In the Middle Ages there were theologians who wrote volumes on proofs of God. Anselm (1033–1109) came up with the ontological proof of God that there exists in our minds an idea of a being than which ...

So, while the long history of religious oppression and hypocrisy is profoundly sobering, the earnest seeker must look beyond the behavior of flawed humans in order to find the truth. Would you condemn...

George Herbert Mead, an influential early 20th-century sociologist, coined the term “generalized other” to describe the vague group we consider when shaping our actions. How often do we behave a certa...

Self-righteousness is a sense of moral superiority that appoints us as prosecutor of other people’s sinfulness. We relate to others as if we are incapable of the sins they commit. Self-righteousness w...

Sometimes people are careless and speak disparagingly of all human righteousness, as if there were no such thing that pleased God. They often cite Isaiah 64:6 which says our righteousness is as filthy...

Relational congruence is the ability to be fundamentally the same person with the same values in every relationship, in every circumstance and especially amidst crisis. It is the internal capacity to ...

Jacob Needleman has been a secular philosopher and a professor of philosophy of religion for many years at San Francisco State University. Some years ago he wrote a remarkable book called Why Can’t We...

Oh the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past tracing out! For who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his ...

Dear Everybody, We have a serious problem: All of us think we’re good people. But Jesus says we’re not. Sincerely, Brant P. Hansen …PS. IF YOU THINK I’M WRONG—about how we think we’re good people...