As iron sharpens iron,
one person sharpens another. (Proverbs 27:17)
“Our field of reasoning goes only so far as the stories take us, and no further. … the validity of any argument must, indeed, can only be demonstrated through a personal narrative. Do I believe that the healthcare profession is completely corrupt, full of greedy, lying malpractitioners? I need only share my personal story of falling afoul of poor medical care” - Ref21
“Sin has distorted all of God’s good gifts, including our intellectual faculties, so these must be sharpened and refined in the sanctification process lest we fail to comprehend and transmit God’s Word accurately. Restoring our reason is a requirement for the Christian life.” - Ken Brown
“When someone in a relationship with us does something inexplicable, then what we think about that action depends pretty much entirely on how healthy the relationship is. If we trust him, we assume there’s a good explanation. If we don’t, we don’t.” - Olinger
“One of the main reasons that Christians wrestle with doubts these days is that they bump into something that doesn’t seem to make sense.” - Olinger
“Bulverism is a toxic hybrid of two better-known fallacies: petitio principii (begging the question) and ad hominem (impugning one’s opponent’s character without addressing his argument).” - Intellectual Takeout
“What follows is a short list of some popular logical fallacies that both believers and unbelievers tend to use in support of or opposition to the Christian faith.” - Mark Farnham
“Is the gospel truly against logic?” - Mark Farnham
“Though timelessly popular, the ad hominem has found particular prominence in the current age, which combines plummeting intelligence with instantaneous, character-limited communication.” - Intellectual Takeout
“In her essay, Sayers said the disrepute into which logic has fallen is ‘entirely unjustified.’ But she offers two explanations for why it happened.”
It appears to me that one of the first things a faithful theologian needs to do is to straighten out the confusion brought about by the world’s separation of faith and reason. This relationship is so vital to a biblically fastened worldview that to neglect it will involve the believer in a host of conflicting beliefs and practices. For it is just here that the negligent Christian theologue will be attacked.1 To the average man in the street, “faith” is that “I really hope so” attitude that many people employ when their circumstances get tough. It is that blind trust that things will turn out all right in the end. Faith thus defined is the opposite of reason. “Reason” deals with the cold hard facts, so it goes, and is what we have to use in the “real world”—in business, in science, in education.
One Christian writer has put the matter in the form of a question: “Is it rational for us to believe in God? Is it rational for us to place our confidence in Him and his revelation to man? Can a person believe in God without performing a sacrifice of his intellect?”2
Discussion