"Now we Reformed Christians are wholly in earnest about the Bible. We are people of the Word; Sola Scriptura is our cry; we take Scripture to be a special revelation from God himself, demanding our absolute trust and allegiance. But we are equally enthusiastic about reason, a God-given power by virtue of which we have knowledge of ourselves, our world, our past, logic and mathematics, right and wrong, and God himself;..."
I have to admit here that I’m a bit confused. I whole-heartedly agree with Plantinga that we Reformed Christians place the highest value on Scripture, holding tightly to the inerrant word as our standard for truth- or at least we should. I'm less sure about what follows. How can we be “equally enthusiastic” about reason? What does Plantinga mean by this? I love reason- but I'm not sure I can hand over my absolute trust and allegiance to it, not even my own reasoning. I don't take Plantinga to be advocating something that extreme, but then again I'm not sure yet how he means for his readers to take what he is saying. Maybe this will be cleared up later on in his argument.
If you've seen the Cohen Brother's masterpiece "O Brother Where Art Thou?" you may remember this scene with Clooney and Turturro:
After Pete discovers Everett stole from his brother...
Pete: You stole from my kin!
Everett: Who was fixin to betray us
Pete: You didn't know that at the time!
Everett: So I borrowed it til I DID know
Pete (confused): That don't make no sense!
Everett: Pete, it's a fool who looks for logic in the chambers of the human heart...
Hidden in this hilarious scene is something philosophical to chew on. Is there something about us that goes deeper than reasoning itself? Something that defies logic? Or something that can ignore logic? I tend to think that there is. And if you happen to be Reformed you may also think so too.
I believe Scripture teaches that our reason, which Plantinga has defined, can be powerfully shaped by something else- the heart. If we want to put it in simple, non-philosophical terminology the heart is the core of every person where desires are born, fed, and brought to flower (I'm just throwing an ad hoc definition out here). I haven't decided whether this is part of our being is purely "spiritual" and therefore an "immaterial" aspect of who we are as people. Whether it is or it isn't may not be relevant for this topic. What does seem to matter for this discussion is that there is such a thing and that it affects how we reason.
I also tend to believe that thinking and reasoning also in turn affect this place of desire, making their relationship with one another fluid. If this is true then it gets kind of murky to navigate just where things start and end. This complexity may just be another confirmation that we are indeed made in God's image. When we set out to uncover just what makes us who we are we are often left scratching our heads. Sure it can be frustrating but would we really want it any other way?
I'm probably already in way over my head on this one...
But then again, that is philosophy in a nutshell- for the most part.
