Reason is confounded not by faith, but by faithlessness

Does faith in God confound reason, as atheists argue?

Not at all. Far from confounding reason, faith is the foundation of reason.

The very idea that reason can help us discern the truth rests on faith – the faith that there is a rational order to things in nature, so things that are not rational can be deemed as incorrect or unreal.

If everything is simply the debris blown apart by a primeval explosion, then why do lumps of such debris obey laws, and laws of mathematical precision?

This faith begs the question: why does such order exist?

If everything came about by chance, why did things arrange themselves in a rational order? If everything is simply the debris blown apart by a primeval explosion, then why do lumps of such debris obey laws, and laws of mathematical precision – all the more so when both the concepts of law and mathematics are, according to the atheistic worldview, nothing more than patterns of electrochemical signals in our brain cells, which too are nothing but lumps of that same debris?

Regarding the origin of mathematical laws, Eminent mathematician Roger Penrose in his book The Road to Reality quotes approvingly his colleague Richard Thomas: “To a mathematician, these things cannot be coincidence; they must come from a higher reason. And that reason is the assumption that this big mathematical theory describes nature.”

Gita wisdom identifies the source of that higher reason: the highest being, Krishna. The Bhagavad-gita (10.08) indicates that he is the source and sustainer of everything, including whatever order we perceive in nature.

What confounds reason is not faith, but faithlessness. Without faith, we couldn’t presume that nature had a rational order and so couldn’t use reason to study nature. And even after reason is granted a role, it would have no validity if a higher intelligence hadn’t infused nature with a rational order.

Thus, reason far from being confounded by faith, is confounded without it.