I have had two visits of interest lately; one to the Creation museum near Cincinnati; and a medical conference involving a speaker we heard 11 years ago; and whom the Pres. of CMDA has called a "medical C.S. Lewis."
Un-coincidentally, I picked up a book by Dr. Jason Lisle--a small handbook on logic and faith--at the museum; which turned out to be quite useful personally, at the conference, and beyond. Dr. Lisle asserts that, on most sides of any given debate, proceeding logically is a lost art--and that Christians have to use reasoned argument for the Christian faith, when dealing with matters on a fitting level. Not a consumer-friendly approach, but it is Biblical, see 1Peter 3:15.
The scientific researcher turned metaphysician is always a risky switch. Very often people long to go beyond the materialism of our age and all previous ages, so much so that they venture onto ground upon which they are ill-equipped to stand. A recent example would be Richard Dawkins, who is a skilled propagandist/teacher but a very amateur philosopher; and of course not a theologian at all by his own admission. And yet because he is from Oxford and has done some reasearch, we are not allowed to question his greatness or even methods. He actually believes, at some level, that he is so brilliant that he is not only competent but ultra-competent in the most ill-defined areas of human endeavor. An example of someone who was very literate and widely read and more honest and humble both was Stephen J. Gould, an opponent of not only creationists but ill-tempered scientists who publish and self-promote in unseemly ways.
I say that not only for its face value but to point out that I commit errors in logic all the time, as do we all. The foregoing would be a combination of ad hominem and appeal to authority errors--which most debaters violate with impunity because they have so little else to offer in the way of independent reasoning...I was on the debate team, I know how it's done--via a "quote box," and whoever had the best quotes, won. These are just barely contests of rhetoric, albeit using someone's else's out-of- context rhetoric; and our civilization is all about rhetoric and Sophism now; there is so little else left.
As a physician operating out of a scientific worldview, and I can pretty well conclude that, first, man is more than any animal or world or imaginary universes we'll ever know. But secondly, classic definitions of reason and logic are observed by us largely by their absence; that is we use it as a name-calling exercise rather than as a tool for self-evaluation, or even a comparative evaluation of abstract ideas and psuedo-pragmatic proposals. And third, the ability to reason is only a small part of us, it's a gift but rarely exercised and subject to rapid decay, and the most important decisions of life involve a great deal beyond reason. Those who have and use such a gift have many more reasons to be humble and to be humbled than those people in many other callings (perhaps.) As God said to Gideon in Paddy Chayevsky's (sp?) play of the same name, "Sometimes, Gideon, love is a little unreasonable." Not a Scripture but a hint about a Much Larger Love that we cannot earn or deserve.
I would like to investigate this a little more, and I probably will be appalled by my/our "strange devices" of thought in a post modern mileu. Maybe our de-vices will be like Screwtape's; vices indeed and more akin to addiction (idolatry) than we have dared to think yet.
In any event, the Bible is not threatened and I fail to see how it can ever be. God's Word has on the surface suffered severe mangling and a continual 60-cycle hum of, "Yea hath God said?" for millenia, and still comes out cleaner or more durable than anything in history. More later on its standing and "nothing works unless everything works."
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