Introduction
We live in an age where it seems that anything that has to do with the Christian faith is under attack by Atheists and their prophets of reason.
I recently saw an article about another prophet of reason prognosticating that religion would be dead by 2041.
I felt that it was time for me to address this issue and remind everyone that this is nothing new.
The questions concerning the reasonableness of Christianity have gone back for centuries.
Man has always wanted to view himself as the final authority in all things and to set himself up as a God.
German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche stated in 1882 that God was dead. In 1900, only 18 years later, Nietzsche was dead and the followers of God still flourished.
Nietzsche’s reason failed him for he was wrong.
Understanding The Age Of Reason
The term “age of reason” was first coined by Thomas Paine after the American revolution. Paine advocates reason in the place of revelation, leading him to reject miracles and to view the Bible as an ordinary piece of literature rather than as a divinely inspired text.
In a nutshell, Paine and his later disciples replace the immanent and supernatural attributes of God with faith in the human intellect.
God becomes detached and removed from the affairs of man and man becomes supreme in all he does.
This is still the same theological and spiritual premise that the modern-day prophets of reason espouse.
They claim that God is dead, fictitious, and unreasonable and that man is a god unto himself and must live by the understanding he has in life by his own ability to reason.
How Do We Live A Life Of Faith In An Age Of Reason?
The first thing we must understand is that there is a difference between something being unreasonable and something being beyond reason.
When something is unreasonable it is something that is impossible based upon the facts that we know.
For instance; a pig cannot fly. It is an unreasonable expectation to place upon a pig the demand to fly.
However place a pig in a crate, take him to the airport and place him on a plane, and all of a sudden it is reasonable for a pig to fly because of an action by a higher authority that was initially beyond reason.
Understanding the difference between something that is unreasonable and something that is beyond reason will help you live a life of faith in an age of reason.
Reason depends upon 2 things.
It depends upon the ability of our 5 senses to pick up all the information that there is to know about our world and it depends upon the ability of our intellects to process that information correctly.
The decision to trust those 2 things completely is what I would call faith. It is a faith in self vs. faith in God.
I would even venture to say that it is blind faith since they continue to do so even though they have been presented with evidence that plainly shows that the 5 senses are not always correct in what they perceive and are limited in what they are able to perceive, and they have been shown that not always does the intellect process the information correctly and that it is skewed by psychological, emotional, and personal historic bias.
Thus the trust in reason is actually an act of blind faith.
As believers in Jesus, we live a life of faith in an age of reason by understanding that there are some things that are beyond reason.
Just as the higher authority enabled the pig to fly, so we believe that there is a higher authority that is beyond reason that enables us to see and experience a life that is beyond the 5 senses and human intellect.
It is that higher authority which we call God, that enables us to be born spiritually with a born-again experience.
It is God that enables us to experience His presence.
It is God who heals miraculously.
It is God who takes slave traders and makes them into hymn writers.
It is God who loves and pursues man enough to be willing to intervene in the lives of everyday individuals.
Is Living A Life Of Faith Reasonable?
Both Atheists and Christians acknowledge that there are things in life that are unexplainable.
Atheists would call them unreasonable and say that there is a reason for it but we don’t understand it yet.
Believers would say that they are beyond reason and that reason is not the ultimate test for everything in this world.
From my perspective, it is more reasonable to trust in God who is beyond reason than to trust in the flawed and skewed instruments of our 5 physical senses and our own limited intellect.
Pastor Duke
