How the West became Rational

And how only the Bible can make us rational once again

“In sacred Scripture let us hear the voice of Him who is the wisdom and power of God the Father, and let us learn the true knowledge of all things that are.”
— John of Damascus, 675–749 AD

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I write the following in the wake of two contradictory and amazing events. The first was the safe return of four astronauts from a ten-day flight to the moon. The second, performed recently by a member of Canadian parliament, was a recommendation to add more letters to the LGBT acronym. As it stands, the alphabet will soon be upgraded to MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+.

And, yes, I had to copy and paste it.

I said that these events were amazing because, although the former far surpasses the latter, both are astonishing in their own right. I noted they are contradictory because they also go together about as well as milk and vinegar. The first requires rationality, consistency, and a willingness to rigorously submit oneself to the constraints of reality. The second requires the suspension of those things, along with demanding the cruel thugs of logic and reason please wait outside until they’re needed.

Thus we begin to see our problem. A chasm yawns like Tartarus between these two worldviews. One moves with the grain of reality; the other against it. One submits itself to the world and its limitations; the other defies it. One sees there is a rational order to the universe; the other sees only an amoral landscape within which to indulge one’s perverted fantasies.

These two positions, in other words, are completely irreconcilable.

In a rational society, this divide would be obvious, but herein lies the issue: we no longer live in a rational society. We think we are rational because we can send men to the moon. But the truth is, many of the same people who laud the voyage of Artemis II will turn around and praise “gender advocate” Leah Gazan for her courage and advocacy. They will gaze in wonder at images from the heavens and then shout slogans that completely undermine the science they claim to adore.

What are we to make of a society such as this? We can only conclude that, despite our platitudes, reason is dead. Truth has perished. There are some who will protest this claim—they may point to any number of technological gizmos as evidence of our collective knowledge. But, as Socrates once said, having a Meta VR headset is not the same thing as possessing wisdom. At the end of the day, we are still engaged in a vain attempt to embrace both sanity and insanity. Such a culture cannot, in any meaningful sense of the word, be considered “rational.”

Instead, we are far closer to those whom C.S. Lewis described in The Screwtape Letters — men who have grown accustomed to having a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing inside their heads at any time.¹ Who regard “true” and “false” to be outmoded and oppressive categories. Even by our own admission we are a “post-truth” society.

What can be done about the present situation? Is there any hope of ever recovering our reason? The answer is yes. The West was rational once and it can become so once again. But the recovery process will have to go deeper than general appeals to “common sense.” Such appeals ring hollow in a world that has lost almost all degree of commonality, and consequently, almost every shred of sense.

We need a new foundation. Or, rather, we need to return to the foundation that propelled the West into becoming a thinking civilization in the first place. We need to return to the word of God.

A Walk Down Memory Lane

Already I can hear some unhappy heckler raising his voice from the back of the room. Don’t you know the Bible was written by men? Don’t you know it’s full of mistakes? Why do we need some archaic, superstitious book telling us what to do? To our imaginary interlocutor, I will respond both historically and theologically.

With respect to the historical, let’s begin by stating the obvious. The Bible, regardless of one’s opinion of its credibility, lies at the very root of Western civilization. This is simply a fact of history which, if denied, amounts to an embarrassing proclamation of ignorance. But we must go further than simply acknowledging the Bible’s cursory influence on Western culture. It isn’t merely that the Bible influenced Western thought so much as it created Western thought. That is to say, God’s self-revelation, communicated by His Spirit through the written and incarnate Word, was sole responsible for the West’s understanding of what it means to be rational — what it means to know truth and pursue it.

This point has been made very ably by Indian philosopher and public intellectual, Vishal Mangalwadi. Writing on the subject in his book The Book that Made Your World, he notes that the West, in contrast to other cultures of the ancient and medieval period, became a uniquely “thinking” civilization precisely because of the understanding of truth it derived from the Christian Scriptures:

“If God is Truth, if He can speak to us in rationally understandable words, then human rationality is really significant. The way to know the truth is to cultivate our minds and meditate on God’s Word. These theological assumptions constituted the DNA of what we call Western civilization.”²

As Mangalwadi goes on to argue, the biblical understanding of truth and its relationship to the human intellect was truly unique. Other cultures had books and printing long before the West but failed to make use of them in any profitable way. Why? The reason was religious and philosophical. Eastern views led people to believe that the universe was fundamentally irrational, and that the purpose of life was thus to empty one’s mind rather than cultivate it.³ In the West, men had been taught to view Reality as fundamentally rational, and that the eternal Word had been revealed in the person of Jesus Christ.

The Western mind was therefore awakened by the burning conviction that truth could be known. A thread had emerged between the heavens and the earth; a tether established between the mind of man and the secrets of the universe. And the engine that drove the whole revolution, gunning forward and gaining steam with every passing century, was the fact that God had spoken.

The Bible, more than any other influence, made man a truly rational animal.

The Ultimate Tether to Ultimate Truth

Okay, so what if the Bible helped our ancestors back in the day? I guess I’m glad for that, if that really is the case. But why do we still need it now that we have things like science, good government, and decent morals? I don’t see why we can’t get along fine without it.

Here we come to the theological answer. I have argued that the Bible played a pivotal role in shaping the Western mind; indeed, it created the Western mind. But my aim in bringing this to light has really been to make a further point—namely, that the Bible’s historical usefulness is not an accident but is owing to the fact that the Bible is exactly what it claims to be.

To state the matter clearly, the Bible made men rational because it is in itself the source and ground of rationality. It is the written expression of the mind of God. It is the window through which we perceive the universe as it truly is. Consequently, it is our ultimate tether to Ultimate Truth; the point of contact between the mind of the creature and the mind of the Creator. Without it, we are left only with our perceptions—shadowy slivers of the world that are subject to misinterpretation, contradiction, and change. This is why modern man’s confidence in ever being able to know anything truly has been so shaken: he has no ground upon which to stand.

With the Bible, however, this problem is resolved. For truth has been revealed by the One supremely qualified to know it, the omniscient and eternal God, in whom all knowledge ultimately resides.

This is why the Bible is necessary for the maintenance of things like “science, good government, and decent morals.” Not simply because the Bible describes these things for us, but because a fixed point of reference is necessary for the existence of knowledge at all. Without some point of contact between our minds and the truly Real, all claims to knowledge simply collapse into a soup of subjectivity. One person claims that socialism is fair, just, and equitable; the other that capitalism is the only good economic system. Another comes along and wonders what “good” could possibly mean, right before the State steps in and responds, “Why, a 40% tax rate, of course.”

This is the chaos of our modern world. At some point there simply needs to be a “Thus sayeth the LORD.”⁴

Conclusion

The question of which we have been in hot pursuit has been whether or not our culture can ever recover its marbles. Presently, they are scattered abroad like a 12-year-old’s LEGO collection and the prospect of ever getting them back in one place appears relatively grim. Indeed, the situation is grim—impossible, in fact—unless we retrace our steps and get busy repenting.

What this repentance will look like is a whole-hearted embrace of the inspired, infallible, and inerrant word of the living God. Not simply as a helpful guide for spiritual matters, but as the authoritative revelation of the Almighty concerning every matter under the sun. From politics to ethics to government to science to epistemology—everything must be measured against this Rock, because there is no other.

And the church must lead the charge. In a world that presently lies under the power of the evil one, she alone remains the “pillar and buttress” of the truth (1 Tim. 3:15; 1 Jn. 5:19). Once upon a time the church knew this, with the result that human culture was slowly lifted out of darkness and made to walk by the light of divine truth. We have since turned from this light to our ruin and destruction.

But this need not always be the case. Wisdom cries aloud, ever-willing to grant understanding to the humble fools who will heed her call.

“But the LORD gives wisdom; from his mouth come knowledge and understanding; he stores up sound wisdom for the upright; he is a shield to those who walk in integrity, guarding the paths of justice and watching over the way of his saints.” (Prov. 2:6–8)

1. C.S. Lewis, Signature Classics, 185.

2. Vishal Mangalwadi, The Book that Made Your World, 82.

3. Mangalwadi puts this point rather candidly: “Printing and books didn’t reform my continent because our religious philosophies undermined reason.” (Ibid., 78)

4. It’s also helpful to note that there will be a “thus sayeth someone.” This is simply unavoidable. All claims to knowledge must rest on something for their justification if they are to carry any weight or authority. Modern man is very comfortable with simply having this “something” be an authority of his own choosing—science, the State, himself, etc. But to not have an authority is impossible. Thus, what I am arguing is that God Himself and the revelation He has communicated in Scripture is the only truly trustworthy foundation for our knowledge. Everything else is fallible, and thus inadequate as an ultimate standard for knowledge. God’s word, on the other hand, is not, and consequently stands forth as the best and brightest source of truth accessible to the human mind.