Is Reason Superior?

"If, now, we could find something which you could unhesitatingly recognize not only as existing but also as superior to our reason," St. Augustine asked in Free Choice of the Will, "would you have any hesitation in calling it, whatever it may be, God?"

See anything wrong with this? Note the word recognize. The word has more than one sense, and I'm certain Augustine didn't mean the sense of seeing a familiar face or hearing a familiar tune. He must mean the sense of understanding. So my question is: how could we understand that something is superior to our reason? Reason is our means of understanding; it is understanding. If something were superior to reason, reason could not demonstrate it or lead to such understanding. It wouldn't require demonstration or understanding. As someone (Richard Dawkins, I think) put it, if you make an argument that faith is superior to reason, you've already lost the debate.

But wait--we might interpret this another way (which Roderick Long does here), for Augustine goes on to say:

Do you, then, think that this truth of which we have already spoken so much and in which we behold so many things, is more excellent than our minds, or equal to our minds, or inferior? If it were inferior we should not use it as a standard of judgment, but should rather pass judgment on it.… We pass judgment on our minds in accordance with truth as our standard, while we cannot in any way pass judgment on truth.… I promised, if you remember, to show you something superior to the human mind and reason. There it is, truth itself.

 When Augustine says "something...superior to our reason" in the first quote, this might have meant one of two things: that the something might be a cognitive method (in which case I think my criticism above obtains) or it might be something other than a cognitive method. The second part of the quote indicates that Augustine meant the latter. It's not that another means of cognition is superior to reason, but that truth itself is superior reason. That's a horse of a different color. Truth presupposes whatever makes that word intelligible, specifically logic. I have no problem with the claim that the logical structure of the world is superior our reason, since reason is only possible because of that logical structure.

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