Although They Claimed To Be Rational, They Became Irrational

C.S. Lewis wrote in The Abolition of Man of the man who has never been able to conceive of the Atlantic as anything more than so many million tons of cold salt water as he quiped about the person who interprets his world strictly from a material perspective. Any feelings of awe that might be experienced by a man standing next to such a vast body of water are simply explained away by that man as nothing more than electrical currents shooting around in the brain. His feelings are then meaningless, just as is his existence.

God has granted man with this ability to reason, but man has taken that ability and applied it in ways that are… well, unreasonable. It would seem that as man’s knowledge about his world increases, so does his willingness to believe that his world is all there is. Using his increased knowledge as a springboard he attempts to make a leap from his increased knowledge about his physical world to determining how man ought to be, but in so doing he falls into the chasm of the irrational, for it does not follow that merely because man learns how his world works, that he also knows why his world works-or why it exists either for that matter-for his conclusions about what he ought to do or be are based, not on what he has learned, but instead on the mere fact that he has learned. It is not reasonable to conclude that "survival of the fittest" would in any way suggest that we ought to “save and protect the weak". It is irrational to be shocked and appalled when, after mandating that “survival of the fittest”, be taught exclusively to the next generation in our educational institutions as the only rationally acceptable bases for our existence, when that generation conducts itself as if it is true.

The irrationality of man's attempted leap can also be seen in what we are told ought to be legislated, educated, and sacrificed in our lives. From seemingly every cultural institution and corner we are flooded with an ever increasing array of causes that involve everything from feeding the poor to saving the planet.  These causes are begging for our participation and the realignment of our society. Never is an explanation as to why we ought to devote and sacrifice our lives to these causes given beyond the end for which the causes exist. All of these irrational causes seem to have one thing in common. They seem to be herding humanity toward some ultimately irrational utopian vision; the hope, one might suppose, being that those utopian ends will one day finally be achieved for some future generation before the sun burns out.

But then the sun burns out.

Yet we are told that belief in the existence of a creator is irrational. But by denying the existence of a creator, we have also denied any rational bases upon which to conclude that man ought to do anything at all except eat, drink and be merry through any means available or necessary during his short time of ultimately meaningless consciousness, for these are the very things his evolved mind tells him to do; and the grave is his reward weather he does them or not. It would only seem rational therefore for the rational mind to say, why not? For this reason, it should be no surprise that man’s “causes” ultimately begin to look and feel more and more like the religions that are so despised for being irrational.

This may also explain the abysmal success rate for many such causes as well, for staying true to the materialism that animates the causes; success is judged solely by material. Success is seen then as the spiritually-impoverished wealthy successfully mandating that material wealth be taken by force from other spiritually-impoverished wealthy for the purposes of divvying the booty for the exaltation and enrichment of the takers and pittances for the spiritually and materially impoverished. Never mind the long term ramifications of lost dignity, destroyed families, drug abuse, illiteracy, suicides, fatherlessness, hopelessness, lawlessness, and dilapidated and deteriorating inner cities where the recipients of this kind of guilt-assuaging materialistic pittances are retained. That such maladies are the result of spiritual problems that ever more material cannot alleviate is lost on those who are themselves spiritually-impoverished. The rational mind might would want to stop and consider the results of the materialist’s crusade, but then again, that would be a rational thing to do.

So round and round the irrational vortex society spirals in its irrational denial that man is the handy work of his creator God. And with its denial that it is reasonable and rational to think that there is more to life than our small minds can grasp, so goes the denial of our only hope, a hope that can ultimately compel the hearts and minds of men to real and true greatness and goodness, the hope that we were all created for a purpose, and that there is way more to life than mere material gratification can fulfill.