Tiffany’s Reviews > Love Your God with All Your Mind: The Role of Reason in the Life of the Soul > Status Update

God is not honored when His people use bad arguments for what may actually be correct conclusions.

Consequences of abandoning commitment to truth and reason -- A people that does not care about these will be easily led to behave in certain ways by rhetoric, image, narcissistic self-infatuation, etc... If our allegiance to Christianity is not based on the conviction that it is true and reasonable, then we are treating it as a means to some self-serving pragmatic end.

Sorokin claimed that a sensate culture will eventually disintegrate because it lacks the intellectual resources necessary to sustain a public and private life conducive of corporate and individual human flourishing. And this is precisely what we see happening to modern American culture.

Many people today, including Christians, rarely read or think deeply. When they do read, it’s often limited to self-help books or light material. "I once wrote a piece for what is most likely the top Christian periodical of the last 30 years and I was warned to keep my prose to about an 8th grade level." This highlights how far we’ve strayed from the days of Joseph Butler, when the church could out-think its critics.

A plausibility structure is the set of ideas a person considers possibly true. For example, most people wouldn’t attend a lecture defending a flat earth because it falls outside their plausibility structure (as it should) . However, if a culture excludes Christian claims from its plausibility structure, fewer people will even consider the possibility of its truth.

Colossians 2:8 Distortion. Sometimes seen as a command to avoid secular studies, particularly philosophy. However, Paul was warning against "hollow and deceptive philosophy" that contradicts orthodoxy, not philosophy as a whole. Paul demonstrated his knowledge of philosophy by understanding and critiquing proto-Gnostic philosophy threatening the Colossians and even citing pagan philosophers positively in Acts 17:28

1 Corinthians 1-2 is often misinterpreted as rejecting human reasoning, especially in evangelism. Paul’s message isn’t a condemnation of reason itself but of prideful misuse and rhetoric. Greek orators would persuade a crowd of any side of an issue for the right price. Reason still plays a role in assessing the evidence for God’s actions, as Paul demonstrates in his arguments for the Resurrection (1 Corinthians 15).