(10) Rational thinking

The nature and status of human rational thinking is a central theme of philosophy, and we can certainly agree with the claim that philosophy has to do with thinking and a special kind of thinking at that.  It is correct to see in the birth and development of philosophy the beginning of science also since we find here the discovery of the power of theoretical thinking for exploring and explaining the world around us.  Anaximander, for example, attributed thunder storms to the compression of wind within a dense cloud rather than to the activity of the gods.  If our human task is to develop and cultivate the potential God laid in creation then the discovery and development of theoretical thinking was a great achievement.  Unfortunately, two less-than-positive developments are found together with the discovery of theoretical thought.  Firstly, the positive ability of theoretical thought to give us new perspectives on the world by mentally splitting up reality to permit a focused analysis of specific isolated elements was uncritically taken to give us a truer picture of the world than that given in our everyday experience.  This signalled the beginning of a reductionist spirit in which theory becomes the correct way to make the world comprehensible as it reduces the rich, multifaceted character of reality to only one or two basic elements.  In consequence, the number and nature of the factors used to explain reality was severely limited even while there appeared to be a number of options available; some chose water, some air, some fire etc.  While this may not have been so serious at an early stage of the development of theoretical thought, the prejudice, very much alive today, that science is necessarily reductive and that physics will soon give us a single true unified picture of the world, is a serious misconception.

The second negative development set philosophy more immediately off-track.  In the absence of a proper recognition of the Creator, this gift of theoretical thought was soon elevated to divine status.  Xenophanes (c.570-475 BC), admiring what he took to be pure and universal in us, projected consciousness (life, sensitivity and thought) on to his idea of the One god, supreme above the others.  Something that God had made for our good got turned into an idol (Romans 1:25).  This god is conceived as pure consciousness, “complete he sees, complete he thinks, complete he hears”.  The notion of “completeness” that Xenophanes uses would set off a powerful tradition that sees god as a motionless thinking, as a simple (as in not being made up of parts) spiritual being.  This idea of “divine simplicity” was unfortunately adopted by some early Christian intellectuals and has since caused havoc in Christian theology, putting a road block in the way of understanding the reality of the covenanting God who meets us in the Bible.

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