Redeeming Reason: An Introduction

In my short tenure as a student of UT, I am quickly perceiving a source of tension between culture and the Church. Science and reason are viewed by most of culture as being antithetical to faith. This divorce between God's love and our mind has created a vacuum. And yet, it isn't as though science elbowed it's way between us and our Father. Rather, we as a community of faith in history, tossed science to the curb like a toy Rubik's cube, too complex to understand and thus best left alone.

I won't pretend there was some time when science and faith existed in harmony. Since the earliest history the reasoning, knowledge based approach to understanding the world has been in direct conflict with those who cherish faith.

I have yet to see in history who struck the first blow in this long waged war, but if I were to make my first of many potentially disagreeable claims I would lay blame at the foot of the church.

I don't see a time in history when men of reason, motivated by their belief in science, set out to unravel faith (at least before they had been first attacked by the faithful, but more on that later). Sadly, Christians have more often than not been in a position to defend their tradition, often with violence.

Where we began as the persecuted purveyors of truth, through a series of sad events the roles were reversed and we became the boot pressed on the neck of all we perceived false. If you look at men of history who made great discoveries in the sciences you will often see a common theme of persecution from the church.

That in our current culture men of reason are seeking to eradicate religion and more specifically Christianity is only a natural reaction of self-defense.We deserve to be in their sights, and unless we repent in humility, deserve to be shot.

I'd like to write a little about how that repentance and ensuing redemption may come about, not by building a bridge from one side to the other, but hopefully, with a lovingly applied swift kick in the pants, to knock both sides into the water and force them to swim together once again.