REASON
AND LOGIC
It was St. Thomas Aquinas who
formulated a theory that out of all the aspects of mankind, the only one which
was not tainted by Original Sin was Reason. One sees what he meant . . . . but
he was wrong, and obviously realised it when at the end of his life he implored
that his books should be burnt so that they could do no more harm. They were not
burned, of course. Instead they were venerated both by the Roman Church and the
Anglican Church of succeeding generations.
Why do I say he was wrong?
Because as a draughtsman, as a design engineer and later a computer dabbler I
found masses of evidence that my reason lets me down time and time again. And
time and time again I have to cope with the consequences and put things right.
The recent explosion in computers
and computer programming (I did a certain amount of the latter both in machine
code and in Basic years ago: the programme I used for conference bookings and
accounts was one result of this) has proved conclusively to me that Reason is
tainted. Any programmer will tell you that despite all his intelligence, care
and skill, an enormous amount of time with any programme is spent on debugging -
that is discovering the many faults of logic, the inaccuracies and the just
plain mistakes that infest everything that was ever written, and putting them
right. The big commercial firms like Microsoft spend years in the process
employing hundreds of programmers - nevertheless every new programme announced
with fanfares of trumpets is released a year or more late: lists of bugs are
circulated almost at once, and patches (temporary cures) with them. Finally in
six months or less out comes the Second Edition, with most of those bugs
cured and a whole lot of new ones!
If all their care and oceans of
money, time and manpower have this result, how come that a handful of
theologians have the idea that they can produce theological theories and
treatises off the top of their heads, without a single logical error? In fact
they can’t: their work is riddled with them. But the fact is that they don’t
have any way of test-running them; they don’t have any method of finding bugs,
never mind dealing with them. And they wouldn’t try because that would be to
admit they could be wrong!
Anyone who trusts to Reason alone
to do such work is sitting on a two-legged stool (ever tried it?). Something
more is needed. And what is needed in fact is the practice of Logic, where the
products of Reason large and small are subjected to ruthless dissection and
criticism. Only people who have long been subjected to this sort of discipline
have any right to consider their Reason as anywhere near faultless - and they
are too wise to do so.
In science also this applies.
Nothing at all can be demonstrated and proved by reference to Reason alone.
Every tentative theory must be rigorously tested, often to destruction. And only
after this process is complete is anything offered to engineers and others so
that they can build bridges, design aircraft and make machines. Even then, as I
know to my cost, these products themselved must be ruthlessly tested in working
conditions and proved to be reliable. Then inevitably, after testing and
certification and release for quantity manufacture, some customer or other is
bound to return one of them with a plaintive report of a fault that nobody had
ever imagined could possibly exist. I speak from experience!
In matters of theology and
doctrine it is absolutely necessary that theoretical structures should
be rigorously tested in the light of human experience - and not
experience edited to leave out the awkward bits (that is, awkward for the
theologians). In practice this is rarely done because authors of such theories
tend to start out from preconceptions which by definition rule out resurrection,
virgin birth, miracles and the rest, even though much practical experience time
and again turns up examples of such things happening today.
So never accept the results of
Reason unverified by practical, personal experience. You won’t find Truth
there! Though of course the same thing applies to Unreason . . . You can’t
win!
And go looking for people who are
able to say with their hands on their hearts, “This happened to me! I saw it:
I felt it; I touched it. And it was real”. Someone like Thomas, who
swore he would never believe in the Resurrection unless he saw it, spoke with
it, touched the wounds. And if you want to find people like this, there are
still plenty of them around. Hard-headed, logical people - not dreamers or
incorrigible optimists, but people who can (sometimes reluctantly) tell you what
they saw and felt and heard.