For human beings the spiritual and the practical are, and should be, inseparable. Alone, practicality becomes dangerous; spirituality, alone, becomes feeble and pointless. Alone, either becomes dull. Each is the other’s discipline, in a sense, and in good work the two are joined.

—Wendell Berry, “Preserving Wilderness” in Home Economics (1986), p. 145.

Openness emerges when two or more individuals become willing to suspend their certainty in each other’s presence. They become willing to share their thinking and are susceptible to having their thinking influenced by one another. And … in a state of openness, they gain access to depths of understanding not accessible otherwise.

–Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (1990), p. 284.

Teachers and students of literature and philosophy don’t learn how to be good and wise; they learn how to analyze literary effects and to distinguish between different accounts of the foundations of knowledge.

–Stanley Fish, “Will the Humanities Save Us?“

Life comes to us whole. It is only the analytic lens we impose that makes it seem as if problems can be isolated and solved. When we forget that it is “only a lens,” we lose the spirit of openness.

–Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (1990), p. 283

A theory which explained everything else in the whole universe but which made it impossible to believe that our thinking was valid, would be utterly out of court. For that theory would itself have been reached by thinking, and if thinking is not valid that theory would, of course, be itself demolished. It would have destroyed its own credentials. It would be an argument which proved no argument was sound—a proof that there are no such thing as proofs—which is nonsense.

–C. S. Lewis, Miracles (1947, revised in 1960), p. 22.

What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience. It is therefore useless to appeal to experience before we have settled, as well as we can, the philosophical question.

–C. S. Lewis, Miracles (1947, revised in 1960), p. 2.

We have become a society of wimps and complainers … because we are genuinely unhappy. The fact that our external conditions of life have improved immeasurably is irrelevant. Unhappiness is produced by internal, not external, conditions.

–Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (UK Edition, 2004), p. 46

Plantinga argues in the last talk that a naturalist cannot trust his own mental facilities. That might be true, but that is why methods like the scientific method exist and are used — it takes something out of the mind in order to test if something is really predictable and testable (and thus, scientifically “true”).

So even if we doubt our facilities, the fact is, we can test our deductions. That will help us determine if our minds our reliable in their deductive abilities. It doesn’t matter whether it is probable or not that we can trust them — the question is, can we?

For instance, we may hypothesize that every time we drop a large stone, on earth, under normal conditions, it will fall. We could doubt that it is true – our minds could be tricking us – but that is why we test it. And we find that every time we test it, it happens. So that would lead us, after thousands of years of testing and theorizing and philosophizing, that our faculties are not all that bad after all, which allows us to put more trust in ourselves for higher levels of thinking. (And thus understand and debate on the concepts of mind and reason and truth!)

So I think the naturalist/atheist has every right to trust their mental faculties just as much as a theist. Both the theist and the atheist can be mentally tricked and lead astray, and both have explanations on why that can happen. And both recognize that and seek to minimize it through methods.

In the end, the theist believes that man is able to reason. So does the atheist. And the atheist believes the theist can reason, and the theist believes the atheist can reason. So, ultimately, they can start at the same place to begin building methods, which is why theists and atheists can both (for instance) be scientists and come to the exact same conclusions when running the same test. (And why they are able to argue about it if they come to different conclusions!)

Greatness has no reality in nature, but is a creature of the fancy, a notion that consists only in relation and comparison…. There is, in truth, no rising or meridian of the sun, but only in respect to several places: there is no right or left, no upper hand, in nature; everything is little, and everything is great, according as it is diversely compared.

–Abraham Cowley (1618–1667), “On Greatness” in The Art of the Personal Essay by Phillip Lopate (1994), p. 121