Can reason be an idol? Certainly. The philosophy of rationalism puts human reason in the place of God as the source and standard of all truth.

The whole point of building theoretical systems is to explain what humans know by pre-theoretical experience. That is the starting point for any philosophy. That is the data it seeks to explain. If it fails to explain the data of experience, then it has failed the test. It has been falsified.

An idol is anything put in the place of God as the ultimate reality - the eternal, self-existent, uncaused cause of everything else.

The gospel is like a caged lion,' said the great baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon. 'It does not need to be defended, it simply needs to be let out of it's cage' Today, the cage is our accommodation to the secular/sacred split that reduces Christianity to a matter of personal belief. To unlock the cage, we need to become utterly convinced that, as Francis Schaeffer said, Christianity is not merely religious truth, it is total truth- truth about the whole of reality.

Many people operate as though the definition of faith were, Don't ask questions, just believe. They quote Jesus himself, who taught his followers to have the faith of a child (Mark 10:15). But I once heard Francis Schaeffer respond by saying, "Don't you realize how many questions children ask?"

Mitchell claimed that her materialist view leads to “humbleness.” But it is not humbling; it is dehumanizing. It essentially reduces humans to robots.

Because humans are capable of choosing, the first cause that created them must have a will.