The Reason of Reason: How Reason, Logic, and Intelligibility Together are Evidence for God (Self Evident Things)

The naturalistic/materialistic worldview questions or denies the existence of God. The self-evident existence of reason, logic, order and intelligibility are strong evidence for Intelligent Design, specifically the God of the Bible and the Christian worldview. Reason is an undeniable human faculty that defines humanness and points to a rational universe, which in turn points to the divine principle of reason, or the Logos spoken of in the gospel of John. Further, reason only works because of corresponding and complementary things: logic, order, and intelligibility. All of these overlap as aspects of language, and complement each other in ways akin to speaking and listening. Mutual communication works because of reciprocity, which is also why intelligibility works. This is the structure or Order which is best explained by appealing to the divine Mind who exists eternally in reciprocal communion within the Trinity. It is Order personified. This, then, is an exploration of the role of the Logos principle in the human experience and the condition which we often refer to as Reality, or Order. It is an attempt to answer these four questions and others related to it: Why do reason and logic work? Why do we believe and trust in them? Why do we expect things to make sense? Why does anything make sense at all? First we will talk about Reason as a major subset of the Logos and an indispensable part of every person's daily life. It is a vital element of human functionality and part of what defines humanness. Many of us value education and spend a lifetime trying to expand our powers of reason, but nobody deliberately tries to decrease them, not even people who say that they rely on faith alone. The first part of this discussion will touch on the relationship between reason and faith, but we are concerned primarily with reason, and logic, a closely related subset of reason. Humans depend on reason every day to function in life in both basic and complex ways. We cannot see reason, of course, but we don’t have to. We can know reason is real when we observe its functionality —or the lack thereof—in ourselves and in others. We can hear reason in action when people talk and relate to each other, when they study and discuss things aloud. We can easily observe people making decisions (good and bad) and living out the consequences (good and bad). We can see this happening when people are doing their jobs and every manner of task. On a personal level, we can easily be aware of and reflect on our own reasoning-in-action when tackling life’s problems and their possible solutions, comparing the options and their possible outcomes. In short, we can reason about reason and I’m doing it right now. I can reflect on the quality of logic about things. I think that’s cool. This is a simple enough proposition so far. But the next proposition will be tougher to swallow for some: Because reason exists, therefore God exists. By this I am not saying that through our powers of reason we can be certain of the existence of God (though that is a possible implication). Rather, I’m saying that the existence of reason and its corollaries are very strong evidence for God. Even in the sphere of religion and theology, reason is an essential tool for thinking about faith, especially at scholarly levels. Simply put, religious thinkers think seriously about faith, which is reasoning. This is contrary to what some non-theists believe about theists, but they are simply wrong. Contrary to a popular but false notion, faith is not the suspension of reason, nor is it blind. I assert that at the ground level even simple faith has reasons attached to it, and anything that has reasons involves the use of reason, sound or unsound. Faith, at least in part, is the application of reason to metaphysical questions. Therefore theists must still apply reason when thinking about God, even if he doesn't really exist.