Category Archives: Rationality

HOW ADAM SMITH CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE

How Adam Smith can Change Your Life is wise, insightful, entertaining, and well-written. How much more can you ask of a book?

I learned much about Adam Smith. If you think of Adam Smith as the fountainhead of capitalist greed, you will be surprised by his clarion call to virtue.

As a Christian, I believe Smith’s Deism and glad embrace of the Enlightenment made him too optimistic about the potential of humans to do good. I certainly believe all humans, irrespective of religion, can do good because all people are created in the image of God. And Smith believed that humans do very bad things, but I think he was a bit naïve about the penchant of all us to do things that are destructive and yes, irrational.

How Adam Smith can Change Your Life is a great read and one that I highly recommend!

EMOTIONS, RATIONALITY, AND GENDER

Tim Savage is the pastor of a church back in my hometown of Phoenix. I vividly recall Tim telling me that Morna Hooker, his doctoral supervisor at Cambridge, seemed to understand the pathos of Paul better than many male, Pauline scholars.

Hooker can hold her own intellectually against any male New Testament scholar, but it does seem many (not all) women may have a bit of an edge in picking up the less than rational components.

Allow me to clarify a few things, but please know my thinking in this area is provisional and partial. Not much is set in stone.

“Less than rational components” does not equal anti-rational. Like Pascal, I think “the heart has its reasons that reason knows not of.” This certainly does not make these “less than rational” things irrational.

As to an example, perhaps we could look at Paul’s affliction which resulted in despair (II Cor. 1:8,9). We don’t know for sure, but perhaps some of that affliction was not physical in nature. And maybe a female scholar might be more sensitive that the non physical affliction of the “concern for all the churches” could’ve contributed to Paul’s despair.

As a male who has a strong gift of discernment, I still find my wife (a summa cum laude graduate of seminary, so plenty capable on the “rational” stuff) picking up clues, especially with our sons, that I miss at times. I must add though that I also pick up clues that she sometimes misses, which is why I said my observations are “provisional and partial.”