It goes deeper than that, dear brother hosepipe: Reason would have no reason to trust itself, absent faith. In this case, faith in reason.
But what constitutes reason? Is it as man defines it? Or is it as God defines it, in giving it its root principles in the first place -- that is, logic and experience?
Just as there would be no reason at all to rail against and deny God absent the tacit admission that God "exists." Why would anybody want to spend so durned much time and energy fighting a fiction??? As some folks around here seemingly are wont to do, in their own imaginations at least??
Yet it also seems clear to me that in our own times we are "snorkeling in troubled waters." Surrounded in murk, vision is lacking.
Hence it is now that those who are in the spiritual affection of truth have an internal acknowledgment of it. As the angels are in that affection they utterly reject the dogma that the understanding should be kept in subjection to faith; for they say, What is it to believe a thing, and not to see whether it is true? If any one declares that still it must be believed, they reply, Do you think that you are God whom I ought to believe, or that I am mad to believe an assertion in which I do not see any truth? Cause me therefore to see it. So the dogmatic one retires. Angelic wisdom consists solely in this, that angels see and comprehend what they think.
Yet it also seems clear to me that in our own times we are “snorkeling in troubled waters.” Surrounded in murk, vision is lacking.
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So sadly true.