The Reason For Reason

“Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow” (Is. 1:18).

Scripture assumes man is a reasonable creature, and why shouldn’t it? After all, man is made in the likeness of a rational God (Gen 1:27). So when God addresses man He communicates to us in an intelligible way, and simply takes for granted that we will understand Him. He’s designed us this way—He crafted our minds to know Him through His creation and His Word.

Our abilities to think, speak, and understand—all these are His power communicated to us to accomplish our highest purpose and calling. This is not just a philosophical truth—it’s a deeply personal one. God doesn't merely want us to think clearly; He wants us to know Him personally.

Thus says the Lord: “Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches, but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight, declares the Lord (Jer. 9:23-24).

When men deny Him, they deny the very One for which they were made—He whose evidence they cannot escape:

For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made, so that men are without excuse (Rom. 1:20).

Through the observable order of creation, we understand that God is rational and purposeful. The Son of God, Christ Jesus, is no different.

When Jesus came into the world during the first century, John identified Him as the Logos—the Word made flesh, the Creator of all things: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (Jn. 1:1).

In Greek thought logos embodied reason or rationality, so by calling Jesus The Logos, John identifies Jesus as the One who embodies God’s wisdom and rational expression perfectly: “He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power” (Heb. 1:3). “He upholds the universe...”—Scripture doesn’t shy away from the biggest claims imaginable—which makes perfect sense when it’s describing the One on whom all existence depends. “In Him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28), “…in Him all things hold together (Col. 1:17), “If He were to set His heart to it and withdraw His Spirit and breath, all flesh would perish together and mankind would return to the dust” (Job 34:14-15).

I tend to think in strictly physical things when reading verses like these—I think of the cosmos, Earth itself, living and lifeless matter in general, but these passages are also true of the intangible, immaterial things that operate within creation.

The Law of Gravity, for instance, originated with the One Law Maker just as much as the rocks that He made to obey it. Also, the Laws of Logic (Causality, Non-Contradiction, etc.)—these are as real as the Law of Gravity, but they are wholly immaterial and operate within the realm of rational thought and reason. They don’t weigh anything, can’t be seen or touched, yet no one functions sanely without them. Like Gravity, they exist and operate regardless of culture, language, or individual perspective.

Gravity governs how anything with mass behaves toward something else with mass, and the Laws of Logic—authored by God—govern how we process and evaluate truth.

They are not merely human conventions as atheists claim. We have identified them, just as we have identified and qualified the gravitational constant, but it exists independently of us—we didn’t invent it, we discovered it. In the same way, Laws of Logic are outside of us—we use them every day, in all of our communication.

In every conversation it’s simply assumed that an objective truth exists apart from each person in the exchange. The reason why your idea of New York City can be truer or less true than mine is that New York City is a real place which exists apart from what either of us thinks. There is a standard by which we measure the reasonableness of our thoughts, and without that fixed framework, everyone’s conclusions are equally valid no matter how much they differ from one another or the standard.

Here’s what I’m getting at: God is the source of reason, logic, and rational thought. One could argue that framework itself is just a product of human mind, but such a claim depends on the framework NOT being the product of a human mind since the person making the claim believes it to be true regardless of what others think. This is foolishness. “The fool says in his heart there is no God” (Ps. 14:1).

Some of the most intelligent people alive today are atheists, but they’ve bamboozled themselves. They’ve denied the most basic Truth: God IS, and He is the source of reality and reason itself. We can investigate and reason about reality because our minds were built by the Source of reason and reality—God. Atheists cannot explain this from a purely materialistic worldview and, if you pay close attention you’ll find them acknowledging this, but much of the time they don’t want to talk about it. Why? I like Churchill's explanation: "We occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of us pick ourselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened."

It’s impossible to accept the existence of immaterial Laws of Logic (even human thought) from a strictly materialist perspective of the world. One will never find the Law of Sufficient Reason lying around in his garage. Logic, reason, rational thought—these are fixed, immaterial, and eternal. They would not exist if the purely material world of atheism were true.

While atheists use Laws of Logic, they cannot explain them, or should I say, refuse to explain them because doing so leads to their Source—God Himself. But rather than relinquish atheism, they prefer to relinquish reason itself, and talk nonsense about our own thoughts, consciousness, consigning the Laws of Logic to mere illusions. This is scientific?

Not only does the argument for atheism fail, if atheism is true, but all arguments for anything fail if atheism is true, because they deny what makes argumentation possible—the Laws of Logic.

At least one of them understands the implication of this position with brutal honesty. Let's hear it from evolutionary biologist, J.B.S. Haldene:

“If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true . . . and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms” (J. Haldene, Possible Worlds and Other Essays (London: Chatto and Windus, 1927).

In other words, he has no real reason to trust anything he believes, including his own atheism. Either one accepts logic is grounded in something outside the universe’s limitations and human subjectivity or not. Every law we’ve ever known comes from a lawgiver. That’s what all our experience shows us, but more importantly it’s what the Bible reveals. Whether we’re discussing physical laws or laws of logic, we must follow the evidence where it leads—straight to the eternal Mind who authored both the universe and the logic we use to understand it.

The trouble with atheists is not that they disbelieve the Truth, it’s that they will believe anything! “No one is so thoroughly superstitious as the godless man,” said Harriet Beecher Stowe.A man may claim atheism is true, but he can’t lean on reason to prove it. In the end, atheism must be taken on blind faith—because it destroys the very tools needed to prove itself.

Atheism cannot explain the origin of the laws of logic or our ability to reason because they rule out immaterial realities from the get-go. Logic is spaceless, timeless, and unchanging because it originates with the Creator.

To deny God is to deny the very Source who makes reason possible in the first place. Here’s what's even more staggering: this is the same God who manifested Himself as a man to sacrifice Himself for our sins, so that we could be forgiven of our foolishness and deny Him no longer. His invitation still stands: “He who believes and is baptized shall be saved, He who does not believe shall be condemned” (Mk. 16:16).