If you’ve ever heard a phrase that begins like this: “You can’t understand, because human reason is…” then you’re familiar with the apologetical technique I call The Reason Bomb. This tactic allows the apologist[1] to wriggle free of inconvenient lines of questioning by undermining the authority and credibility of reason—especially (the apologist hopes) his opponent’s reason. Here are some common invocations of the reason bomb:
- Human reason is finite
- Human reason is corrupted by sin
- Humans are deceived
- God’s ways/thoughts are higher than our ways/thoughts
It comes in other forms, but this gets the basic point across. The implication is that certain questions are off limits—that reason is worthless in pursuit of truth X. In other words, each of the items above has an unspoken …therefore your argument is bunk appended to it. Armed with this weapon, the apologist can pick and choose whether to engage in rational discussion, or whether to invoke the reason bomb. It reminds me of the EMP weapon in the movie The Matrix. Facing imminent destruction from malevolent, squidlike robots, the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar (a hovership) detonate a weapon that scrambles all electronic gear within miles, including their own ship, leaving them safe but dead in the water.
Does reason reserve the right to dismiss itself? After all, maybe reason is ultimately worthless. Maybe consciousness is an elaborate deception. Maybe the Earth and the solar system aren’t real, and the air we breathe isn’t real. Maybe our minds are laid bare to manipulation by devious entities. And have we explained every mystery as of today? Is our knowledge infinite? Is human thinking infallible? Of course not. Any of these could potentially be used to question reason.
The problem with the reason bomb isn’t so much that it exists as a debate option. The problem is that it doesn’t discredit only the opposing line of reasoning. It takes everybody a step toward nihilism—a Mutually Assured Destruction that, like the Nebuchadnezzar’s EMP weapon, silences all opponents. If God is beyond our ken, neither you nor I can claim to say anything meaningful about God. If we can be deceived, you are just as likely deceived as I am. If a finite capacity for reason makes all arguments worthless, why debate at all? You can’t cast doubt on reason and then plead to be personally immune from the consequences. It silences you just as much as it silences me.
And yet, apologists want the exclusive right to compartmentalize the debate. They want to zone off certain areas with fences and signs that read Warning: Reason isn’t valid here. You can condemn genocide, because that jibes with the doctrine of sin, but you can’t condemn divinely commanded genocide, because God’s ways are higher than our ways, etc. That zone is off limits to reason. You can appeal to the scholarly authority of certain esteemed theologians, but when somebody points out that, in this or that area, the prevailing view among scholars happens to contradict the apologist’s view, the academic establishment is dismissed with a blanket statement about the worthlessness of intellectualism. That zone is off limits to reason. You can build a fine-sounding argument in favor of the apologist’s position, but a fine-sounding argument against the apologist’s position is dismissed precisely because of its fine-soundingness. That zone is off limits to reason. You should be seeing a pattern emerge here.
Ultimately, this compartmentalization doesn’t work. No amount of special pleading will place the apologist outside his or her own blast radius. Alternatively, imagine a world where we agree to disarm. Imagine if we agreed that, yes, we can understand these things, and we can use our faculties of reason to come to rational conclusions about them, without resorting to statements attacking the value of reason, even if we don’t like the questions that are being asked. That’s all I ask.
[1] Note: This post isn’t meant as an all-out attack against apologetics in general, but rather an attack against tactics that are typically used in apologetics, which I would like to see not used at all. So when I speak of “the apologist,” note that I mean specifically the kind of apologist who tends to use this sort of tactic.
May 22, 2007 at 8:54 am
I believe that this is a self-refuting argument. If we cannot understand something because of “X”, then how do we know that we can even understand why we can’t understand?
It is the ever evasive “wild card” that seemingly trumps everything else without justification.
May 22, 2007 at 10:11 am
When I first started writing about this, I was actually calling it the “wild card” argument, but then I changed it to the “reason bomb” argument. I also considered some other titles, such as the “head in the sand” argument, and others.
May 23, 2007 at 10:52 am
Greg,
Excellent post. But I think every time you use the term “apologist” you should replace it with “extremely conservative apologist.”
May 23, 2007 at 11:33 am
Duly noted. I tried to say something along those lines in the disclaimer at the end, but perhaps I should make it into a superscript/footnote thingy.