The flight from reason.

• Author: Kreyche, Gerald F.

THE U.S. came about largely through the influence of the European Age of Enlightenment, also called the Age of Reason. Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and many signers of the Declaration of Independence were steeped in its ideas and ideals. One of those was the advancement of science, which had broken away from medieval myth to extol reason and observation. The guiding motivation for advancing science was the realization, as philosopher Francis Bacon put it, that "knowledge and power meet in one."

It was Aristotle who first defined man as "the animal that has reason" and the Athenians who brought about democracy on the basis of reason. Yet, despite all reason has done for humankind, we seem to be fleeing from it in everyday life.

A player in a recent Powerball lottery (which combines betting in several states) faced odds of 11,000,000 to one. Is it reasonable to place hard cash on such a remote chance? Compounding lottery foolishness is the fact that the larger the prize, the more people participate, thereby lessening their chances! The height of irony was reached when an unemployed Brazilian woman won the lottery and then, because her minister said that gambling winnings was the money of the devil, burned the ticket.

The charge is made by sociologists that one person's religion is another's superstition. Still, one is hard-pressed to understand the plethora of religious cults that stress blind faith (instead of intelligent belief) in a charismatic leader, rather than what they offer for rational consideration. The James Jones cult in Guyana and the Branch Davidians in Texas both terminated in terrible death tolls. How can people surrender humans' highest gift, reason, to frenzied fanaticism? It should not be too much to ask that creeds be credible.

With all due respect to religious sensitivity, even mainline religions occasionally offer what appear as contradictions to the order of reason. For example, Westerners traveling in India can not comprehend sacred cows roaming the streets, dropping disease-carrying dung everywhere. The same is true with the worship of rats by some of the populace.

Some Catholics might ask themselves that, if the sun really jumped up and down at Fatima, wouldn't the solar system have been affected? Any course in experimental psychology proves that, if someone stares at a source of light for only a few moments, it seems to bounce around. Along similar debunking lines, astronomer Carl Sagan argues...