“The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” (Chesterton, Orthodoxy 34)
In the effort to end the slave trade in Great Britain, William Wilberforce and his allies “looked to the heavens” for help because in the late 1700s and early 1800s, “science was not as advanced as it is today.” That’s what I read in a student paper last week.
This student obviously sees faith in God as outdated. He solidly resides within the realm of reason and excludes the possibility of a non-material world, and finding faith in the “heavens” unreasonable.
What he misses is how Wilberforce, outside the context of his Christian faith, could have come up with the idea that slavery and many other ills of his time were evil. Continue reading “Reasonable and Reasoned Faith”