Anthony J. DeBlasi has an interesting article at the American Thinker today entitled Can Reason Change Reality? that touches on topics that have occupied volumes. Indeed, if you want to hear more about this topic, watch the three part video series of conversations between Pastor Bryan Wolfmueller and Dr. Gregory Schulz. But be prepared to spend around 4 hours, so have a cup of coffee or two or three ready.
What is being discussed is the "enlightenment" (and I put the term in scare quotes for a reason) notion that reason trumps the word of God. Reason and intelligence are necessary to discern the meaning of the Word, but they are supposed to be subordinate to it. On the other hand, when we place reason above the Bible, thereby placed ourselves on the Throne of God. I do not exclude myself from this, but I have repented of it. The hard part about properly using our reasoning abilities is that we have been living in a culture of shaped by the enlightenment. It is like a fish swimming in water, that is unaware of the water.
During the Age of Reason, men began to think that they knew better. As DeBlasi notes, it was and is an awful failure.
DeBlasi starts with the Acceptance prayer:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.
It is a prayer I first heard maybe ten years ago or so. But as I have lived with it, and prayed it many times, the meaning of it keeps getting deeper, for I realize that there is very little I can control or can change. Indeed, the only thing I really can change immediately is my own attitude. That is the wisdom of the prayer.
DeBlasi then goes on to explain the simple Acceptance prayer in more detail
Scrawled upon a college blackboard before the start of class, back around 1950, I saw the words “Damn the Absolute!”
I wondered if this was the outcry of a soul lashing out at evil or the condemnation of the objective reality from which we draw our very existence.
How do you separate yourself from the generating principle of life without condemning yourself to a dark and lonely limbo? How does anything form or function without constants? And how can anything form or function when destructive variables are included?
How do you win a game with no rules? How do you get from A to B when both A and B are moving? How do you separate yourself from your body (e.g. “trans” mania)? How do you have a life if you meddle with its fundamentals?
Perhaps I misread the message. But if banishing what can’t change did not mean turning against even the source of life, what did it mean? I suspected that this was a desperate effort at “doing something positive” about the ills of the world by invoking Reason.
But is it “reasonable” to reject or condemn the creative force that forms and sustains life because it appears incapable of bringing about a perfect order? Is it the Absolute that needs to be indicted or is it the abuse of Reason?
The emphasis above is mine. Rousseau got this whole notion going with romanticism. Then the French Revolution and Reign of Terror that turned churches into Temples of Reason. No doubt the devil was laughing hilariously at us. Then there was Kant, and Hegel, and finally Marx. Marx of course divided the world into the owning class and the worker class and then set them against each other. Our identity politics is just taking this idea and dividing us even finer. Then there are the theories of Jacques Derrida that nihilistically teach that a text can mean whatever the reader wants it to mean. Stupidly, Derrida writes a lot of books trying to convince us of theory of deconstruction, though if he is correct his writings have no meaning.
The logical end of this line of thinking is nihilism, the belief that life is meaningless, coming from nothing and going nowhere. In such a world, we have no hope, and nothing we do really matters. In search of something to give our lives meaning, people adopt "woke" causes to stave off self-destructive behavior.
Besides dividing people and setting them against one another, Marx was a materialist, and all who follow him are similarly materialists. One can apply reason to the material world, but what about the spiritual world. Materialists, of course, don't acknowledge that there is a spiritual world. Therefor their prescriptions for human happiness do not recognize human nature. Materialists always think they can change human nature with enough laws, threats, and ultimately killing enough of us. They are always wrong.
Diehard materialists scoff at such “spiritual stuff.” Objective reality has no place in their brains. Unwittingly they have settled for a game of chance as their default method of action in life, top choice of hardened gamblers, with one big difference: for hardened materialists, the game is won by changing the rules.
This inevitably knocks on the door of relativism. I suspect this is what the author of the blackboard indictment against the Absolute did. But making everything relative is an ever-shifting non-position about what in fact may really be best. In the game of relativism, just say “who’s to say,” and the answer instantly becomes “whoever’s on first.” And the player holding most of the chips wins.
Recently, we have been treated to yet another bit of technology called Artificial Intelligence, or AI. We have seen media try to scare us with the though of computers becoming self-conscious. And yet nobody knows what our consciousness actually is, nor why we have it. May I suggest that machines will never achieve human consciousness. If we read the Bible, God created man, and breathed life into him, such that man can have a relationship with his creator. Why is a mystery, that the Creator, who is Holy in himself, loves us a desires such a relationship, but that is what the Bible as a whole says.
Please read DiBlasi's piece and contemplate DiBlasi's point: that we have been fooled into placing our reasoning ability above the Word. But doing so limits our persecective to the material, and to understanding ourselves to be no better than the other animals. Perhaps if we understand what the Bible is trying to tell us, we will have a greater appreciation of human life.
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