God Has Given You a Rational Mind - Use It!

A great majority of people actually believe that to deny the law of non-contradiction is to embrace truth and appear rational and scholarly at the same time. But nothing could be further from reality.

People only deny the validity of this law when it suits them and when they want to avoid a conclusion that they do not want to embrace. When a person denies the law of non-contradiction, the argument is over. If a person chooses to think in irrational terms, then at least they affirm that their response to theism is irrational. In the area of apologetics, this is what Christians should primarily be trying to show. You can think about God in any way you so choose, but in doing so, come to terms on whether your reasoning is rational or irrational, it can’t be both.

Today, in liberal universities and churches, there is a triumph of irrationalism, not over the secular mindset, but over the Christian community. Existential philosophy has pervasive impact into Christian thinking. So many students in Seminary are convinced that truth can be irrational and that the Bible can be contradictory and still be seen as the Word of God.

Carl Barth and Brunner got much of their thought from Kierkegaard who used subjectivity to formulate reason. Aristotle was a Greek and he helped to state the rules of logic.   Since then, many philosophers wanted to try to liberate Christianity from Greek thought and live outside somewhere else on its own. Aristotle did not invent logic. He merely discovered the rules that were already there and built into the human mind.

He asked the question, “What are the necessary conditions of the human mind to carry on meaningful discourse?” He discovered such things that have been built into your mind by the Creator Himself – who is not irrational or the author of confusion. God made His Word to be understood and the necessary condition for understanding His Word is through rationality.

Barth said that the mark of Christian maturity is when a person is able to affirm both sides of a contradiction (Commentary on Romans).  Brunner said that “contradiction is the hallmark of truth.”

So then, let’s apply this to the Bible – specifically the account of Adam and Eve.

God commanded, “From any tree in the garden you may freely eat, but from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat, for in the day you eat from it, you shall surely die” (Gen. 3:17-18).

Let’s use simple logic –

“From all the trees you may eat. But from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, if you eat, you shall die” – If A then B

But then the serpent comes along and says, “You surely shall not die” (3:4) – If you A, then non-B

Let’s say that both Adam and Eve were schooled in one of today’s liberal seminaries or universities.   Their reasoning would go something like this:  “If we eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, my Creator said that we would surely die.  To do so would be a direct contradiction.   But we have learned from classes in seminary that contradiction is the hallmark of truth.  To therefore embrace both truth and contradiction is a mark of maturity.  Since the serpent speaks words of contradiction, then the serpent must be an ambassador of the truth. He must be a representative of the truth.  We therefore, should not only eat of this fruit, but we must eat it in order to be an obedient mature Christian.”

This is absolute absurdity. When you can embrace both the truth and the lie and put them on equal footing, then you have a mindset of irrationality and a life that will follow. Nothing chips away at truth itself than to believe that the opposite end is also true. This would imply that truth and error are the same, and error and truth are the same.

The law of non-contradiction has no content to it. When you embrace logic, you are not embracing any content or premise. All logic does is to measure the relationship between propositions and premises.

Here is a simple example:

All men are mortal (if. . .)
Socrates is a man (if. . .)
(Then) Socrates is mortal.

You cannot have anything other than logic in order to be rational. The truth of your conclusion is determined by the validity of your premises. Logic is like a policeman that God has put into the mind of every person. It blows the whistle whenever it comes across a lie.

Though the content of the bible goes beyond what we can fully understand, the revelation of God is not package is absurdity. The Word of God is not irrational.  It is addressed to people who have been given minds that operate according to the principles of logic and rationality.