Reason

I feel totally insufficient to address any of the topics I want to write about. I must accept that I am insufficient, and I might make a fool of myself, and here goes, anyway!

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I know other people who probably have more book-learning on this topic. My relationship with reason is that I can't imagine doing without it, and it seems to have been a natural companion of mine from a young age. In recent years, I've seen how much I thought about how things worked together to find out what was right and true. As a child I didn't picture myself as looking at how things worked; I was constantly berating myself for not knowing things.

(This doesn't mean I'm a 'thinker', as some say, though when I was younger, I really wanted to be a reasonable and rational person; I suppose I thought you could make it so. Eventually I poured the cold water on my head, and the cat is out of the bag.)

Reason is essential to all of life. Is it not the makeup of reality, of all that is corporeal and incorporeal? This fits with the kind of Biblical perspective I have, which proposes that God created the world according to His character, part of which is His Lawfulness.

When I was a child, I knew there is a tendency to view law as an arbitrary list of things you ought and ought not to do. So I sort of thought that way, but I also rebelled against that view of it (perhaps on an emotional level), because it doesn't make sense. But throughout my early teenage years, it all began to solidify that law ought to make sense; it ought to fit the circumstances, and that the only law that really, really matters (God's Law) must be truly right (morally and practically), or else one should not subscribe to it.

Ultimate law (in the sense of that which pertains to God and objectivity) is by its nature a reasonable thing. It is a thing of God's form and nature, this ultimate-law-ness, and the world, being created out of God's desire for it (and thus whatever is in His nature), is a reasonable world, functioning according to laws and ordinances that He gave it, according to His perfect nature. And humans, being made in God's image, have in ourselves a share of this thing that is of God more directly than His creation, to willfully use it to come up with ideas from which we can create and do things.

Perhaps it might seem far-fetched to some people to connect the moral law with reason.


And on that blunt note I'll meander off into obscurity. Thoughts to be developed further in future, most likely. Please bear with the possibly unstructured and random nature of this obviously-not-essay.