Reason and Faith

C.S. Lewis says that if you want to know whether or not the cat is in the linen closet, reason is of no help at all.  You must go and see for yourself. He is using the analogy to explain that reason cannot tell us much about God; it is a matter of "Taste and see the goodness of the Lord."

I think that is so true; those who rely on and stop at reason will never know the Goodness of the Lord.  The Scribes and Pharisees would not go to Jesus because they stopped at reason:  Can this man be the messiah?  After all, we know where he came from, and isn't he the son of Mary and Joseph, the carpenter?

And when Philip found Nathanael, he said, We have found the one Moses wrote about in the law, and whom the prophets wrote about too--he is Jesus, the son of Joseph from Nazareth.  Nathanael said, Can anything good come out of Nazareth?  That was reason speaking; it would be akin to saying, "Can anything good come out of Petal, Mississippi?

Nathanael, according to Jesus, was a "true Israelite, in whom there is no guile."  Nathanael was cautious, conscientious, and reverent; he would not accept anything on hearsay.  But Nathanael did not stop at reason; he went along to see Jesus for himself.  But after meeting Jesus personally, and after Jesus told Nathanael that He had seen him under the fig tree -- maybe when N. said, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" N. had a different reaction: Rabbi, you are the Son of God; you are the King of Israel!  Nathanael's reason gives way to joy and wonder.

It is joy and wonder, amazement, that tells us the truth about God.  But we cannot get there if we refuse to meet Him face-to-face, to have a personal relationship with Him.  If we rely on reason, we will never discover for ourselves whether the cat is truly hiding in the linen closet or not.

Contrary to popular opinion, "faith" is not "blind."  Faith is knowledge that reason cannot give us.  No one can "explain" a personal relationship; we "know" the other person from the heart, not from the mind.  The same is true of God.  Unless we know Him from personal encounter, we will never know Him at all.