There’s a type of person who thinks religion is a debate club. You know the type, these smarmy, or entirely too self-assured types; they are not particular to any one ideology, but they are always repellent wherever you find them.
Often these types are myopically convicted of their own rationality, or to be more specific, they are convinced that their own beliefs rest not on any kind of irrational moral sentiment but rather on a bed of pure unassailable logic and rationality.
As Christians, they are usually enamored with Plato, they know the names—the Latin names—of all the logical fallacies as if you couldn’t look that up in a book, and they’re so proud of it.
I don’t have much love for Keegan’s stages of social development, but as a shorthand it wouldn’t be wrong to say these are grown men who never evolved passed Keegan stage three.
This is to say: such people never developed the ability to understand why someone might believe a proposition which contradicts their own map of the world.
You meet these types who have memorized 100 arguments that supposedly establish the truth of their faith; ontological arguments, teleological arguments, cosmological arguments, moral arguments, and so on.
And you sort of have to wonder, if any one of these arguments were so convincing, then why do you need more of them?
There’s a perfect example of this, you might almost say God created him as a parable, to show us what is wrong with this approach.
This man’s name is Matt Slick, and you’ve probably heard of his daughter. Matt raised his daughter in exactly the way I’ve described, he thinks he has placed his faith in God, but no, he has placed it in logic.
And logic makes a terrible God, because logic will take you wherever your heart wishes to go, it will bend any perception into the necessary shape to affirm whatever you already believe in your heart.
And when we look at Matt’s daughter, who goes by the name of Aella, What do we see?
We see in fact, that he has perfectly transmitted his faith to his daughter, she has apprehended the shape of his God not from the names that he prayed to, but from the functional understanding that he modeled for her in his integration with being.
She has become a bay area rationalist—a pious atheist—a (wo)man who memorizes all of the arguments which supposedly disprove the existence of god.
They are exactly the same person. They are the same ideology. When you try to reduce your religion to propositions and mechanisms of logic, there is no longer space for the divine.
This type of man thinks a single contradiction is enough to undermine an entire philosophy, or at best it is something to be excised, but he’ll never be able to understand how a contradiction becomes a source of strength.
He can never truly have faith in anything, not in Jesus or anything else, because the only space on the altar in his heart is occupied by his sad little god named logic. That’s why he collects so many arguments that supposedly marshal his faith, because he doesn’t actually believe in the first place.
And I have a particular contempt for these sorts of people because I see in them a tendency which I possess myself. It’s only when you finally perceive the treachery of logic—the way it never truly leads, the way it is only capable of following—that you learn to move beyond it regarding matters of the heart.
The man who traps himself in his little cage made of logic will rage and rage against his own deeply-felt desires, always trying to bind them, always trying to geld them. This is why he clings to his little god named logic:
Because he doesn’t have the courage—the moral courage—to plunge headfirst into irrationality, which is where all greatness, and all glory, and all faith, and all heroism are found.
