Reason illuminates the core of reality--necessary truths (which include what I call axioms and things that necessarily follow from my awareness of them [2]), logical truths, and basic metaphysics and epistemology--perfectly, just as a lit candle in a large dark room lights up the space it occupies without any difficulty. But the further out one ventures from the core of reality, the illumination offered by reason diminishes, just as the light from a single candle in the center of a large room would not necessarily light up the entire room. This signifies no deficiency in reason itself; anything that contradicts reason is not possible [3]. What it does mean is that my human ability to use reason to discover reality yields results with far less certainty the further out I venture from the absolute certainty reason reveals about the core of reality. Human epistemological limitations begin to press against anyone who investigates things beyond that center, pressing with greater strength the more one tries to focus on distant things.
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| The center of reality is perfectly illuminated and what cannot be false is knowable with infallibly absolute certainty, but uncertainty enters and increases with each step away from the center. |
Many examples demonstrate this. I have absolute certainty that truth exists; I cannot be wrong about that, but I do not have absolute certainty that Jesus of Nazareth is the figure Christianity presents him as (although I have evidence that he is). It is impossible for me to have absolute certainty about the latter, just as it is impossible for me to have absolute certainty that the American Civil War occurred in the 1800s, or that the 1800s even existed (perhaps I and the universe were created five minutes ago and thus the 1800s never happened in actuality). The further one goes from necessary truths, the more uncertainty arises. I mean objective uncertainty in terms of verifiability, not merely subjective feelings or thoughts of uncertainty. It gets to where all one can prove about what lies beyond the light of the candle is that if a certain thing is true, then certain things may follow from that. At that point one is just reflecting on what is true if the unknown parts of reality are a certain way, with no ability to verify if the parts of reality in question are indeed that way.
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| It is not that there is necessarily no reality beyond the fire in this picture, but the fire does not reveal what lies outside of it. This serves as a great visual representation of how reason exposes reality to a person. The light becomes less and less able to illuminate depending on where one is looking. |
Reason illuminates, yet it cannot reveal all of reality to me in my current state. The very important epistemological distinction between our human limitations restricting what reason can reveal to us now and reason itself being false or incomplete must be made; only an insane, unintelligent, or uneducated person would mistake the one for the other. When I look out past the candle of reason and try to focus my mind's metaphorical eye on what lies in the blackness far beyond the candle's position, I stare into something that terrifies me: a realm of which I am almost completely ignorant. One of the greatest intellectual accomplishments a thinker can make is to probe where the light begins to dim and find something overlooked or denied by the masses or by thinkers of the past, hiding near the border between the illumination and the darkness. These discoveries remind us that all of reality remains itself even when people forget, doubt, reject, deny, or know nothing of portions of it.
[1]. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-fallacious-mind.html
[2]. See here:
A. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-error-of-presuppositions.html
B. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-truth-of-axioms.html
[3]. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/08/the-infallibility-of-logic.html
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