rrtulla on Nostr: If the biblical God does not exist, there are two alternatives: either there is no ...
If the biblical God does not exist, there are two alternatives: either there is no god at all, or something other than the biblical God is god. On the one hand, if there is no god at all, then all is chance, all thinking is futile, and all ethical judgments are null and void. I shall therefore call that the irrationalist alternative. Irrationalism results not only when the existence of any god is denied but also when a god is affirmed and yet thought to be so distant or mysterious (or both) that he can have no practical involvement with the world. Irrationalism, parasitically, lives off of certain truths: that man is small, that the mind is limited, that God is far above us and incomprehensible. Thus irrationalism often enters theology masquerading as a respect for God’s transcendence. We therefore described this position earlier as a “non-Christian view of transcendence.”
On the other hand, if the unbeliever chooses to deify something in the world, something finite, then a kind of rationalism results. Man’s mind either is the new god or is considered competent to discover it autonomously, which is the same thing. This is what we earlier described as a “non-Christian view of immanence,” and it too masquerades as biblical truth, trading on biblical language about the covenant nearness of God, about His solidarity with the world.
Both rationalism and irrationalism are futile and self-defeating, as sin must always be. If irrationalism is true, then it is false. If all thinking is the product of chance, then how can it be trusted even to formulate an irrationalism? Rationalism flounders on the truth that is obvious to everyone: the human mind is not autonomous, not suited to be the final criterion of all truth. We are limited. The rationalist can defend his position, then, only by limiting his rationalism to certain truths of which he thinks there is no question—that we exist, that we think, and so forth. Then he seeks to deduce all other truth from those statements and to deny the truthfulness of anything that cannot be so deduced. But the result of this is that the mind turns out to know only itself or, more precisely, to know only its thinking. Thought is thought of thinking. Only that can be known for certain. Once some more specific content is specified, certainty disappears. Thus the consistent rationalist will deny that there is anything, ultimately, except “pure thought,” “pure being,” and so forth. All else is illusion (but how is that illusion to be explained!?). But what is a “pure thought” that is not a thought of something? Does that idea have any meaning at all? It is a pure blank. The knowledge of which rationalism boasts turns out to be a knowledge of … nothing!
On the other hand, if the unbeliever chooses to deify something in the world, something finite, then a kind of rationalism results. Man’s mind either is the new god or is considered competent to discover it autonomously, which is the same thing. This is what we earlier described as a “non-Christian view of immanence,” and it too masquerades as biblical truth, trading on biblical language about the covenant nearness of God, about His solidarity with the world.
Both rationalism and irrationalism are futile and self-defeating, as sin must always be. If irrationalism is true, then it is false. If all thinking is the product of chance, then how can it be trusted even to formulate an irrationalism? Rationalism flounders on the truth that is obvious to everyone: the human mind is not autonomous, not suited to be the final criterion of all truth. We are limited. The rationalist can defend his position, then, only by limiting his rationalism to certain truths of which he thinks there is no question—that we exist, that we think, and so forth. Then he seeks to deduce all other truth from those statements and to deny the truthfulness of anything that cannot be so deduced. But the result of this is that the mind turns out to know only itself or, more precisely, to know only its thinking. Thought is thought of thinking. Only that can be known for certain. Once some more specific content is specified, certainty disappears. Thus the consistent rationalist will deny that there is anything, ultimately, except “pure thought,” “pure being,” and so forth. All else is illusion (but how is that illusion to be explained!?). But what is a “pure thought” that is not a thought of something? Does that idea have any meaning at all? It is a pure blank. The knowledge of which rationalism boasts turns out to be a knowledge of … nothing!