Evangelicals, Academics, and Reason

Columnist Dennis Prager has hit on another disturbing trend of the Left, targeting the condescending intelligentsia's assault on people of faith.

Academics, vain with the fatal conceit of mind as means to manage everything, have condemned religious adherents as "anti-intellectual, anti-reason, and anti-scientific."

Intellectuals, especially the vast majority of left-wing adherents, make great claims to how society "should work," promoting equality as the highest value to be achieved and maintained by mankind. This self-limiting world-view flies in the face of empirical evidence, logic, tradition, and real-life events (also history), all of which have undermined the cherished notions of central planning, personal license, and moral relativism.

As Prager argues in his piece, ideology colors the judgments and prescriptions of many academics and scholars, moved not by raw irrational notions, but rather by their extra-rational irrationality. Their beliefs are irrational precisely because they place such a blind faith, a true-believer trust in the human mind to determine and dictate to the world the way that things should be done. Notwithstanding all the evidence that flies in the face of their deeply-held dogmas and doctrines, left-wing acolytes will unflinchingly fight for their fantastic notions of equality, disdaining the precise and supportable suppositions of religion, which disdains same-sex unions (proven by empirical studies to exacerbate physical and psychological dysfunction), theft in the name of charity for the masses (the imperial failure of the Orwellian Welfare State), and power as the only value worth pursuing (From Foucault to forced equality).

Unlike left-wing warriors, religious adherents respect the demonstrable limits of reasons, recognizing the necessary role of faith and tradition in shaping man's current prosperity and future certainties. Not despising the role of the mind, evangelicals respect its capacities, based squarely on the credos handed down by learned peoples who have overcome the obstacles of times and circumstance.

To summarize the true role of the mind in relation to faith, one need look no further than Augustine of Hippo's stern admission:

"Credo ut intelligam" --- I believe that I may understand.

There is no understanding, there is no learning apart from faith, and faith is the precursor to a sound knowledge base for every human being.