Human Reason and the invention of God - atheist claims that refuse to die
For Christian writers, religious faith is not a rebellion against reason but a revolt against the imprisonment of humanity within the cold walls of a rationalist dogmatism. Logic and facts can only ‘take us so far; then we have to go the rest of the way toward belief’. Human logic may be rationally adequate but it’s also existentially deficient. Faith declares that there’s more to life than this. It doesn’t contradict reason but transcends it. It elicits and invites rational consent but does not compel it. Sadly some of those who boast of being freethinkers are simply imprisoned by a defunct eighteenth-century rationalism, unaware of the radical changes in our understanding of rationality that have emerged in the last 50 years. Many New Atheists will quite reasonably want to protest at this point. From a New Atheist perspective, it’s not that human reason discovers God by reaching beyond reason, but that naive human beings invent God. More than that: they invent a nasty God.