Is Al Gore 'Reasonable'?

I just read an exerpt from Al Gore's new book The Assault on Reason over at Time Magazine's website . In it he expresses a deep concern for the future of our country due to the many problems he sees in our culture. I cannot disagree with the notion that we should be concerned for the state of our country, nor can I deny that many of the problems he points out are real and serious. For example, he bemoans the lack of respect for truth in the public arena, clearly a problem we face from the federal level down to the local school board.

My disagreement with Mr. Gore would be with his identification of the root cause of these problems. It is our having abandoned 'reason' according to Gore that has lead to our troubles. He says we must have more "faith in the power of reason" if we are to save ourselves. He says:

Our Founders' faith in the viability of representative democracy rested on their trust in the wisdom of a well-informed citizenry, their ingenious design for checks and balances, and their belief that the rule of reason is the natural sovereign of a free people.

Perhaps Mr. Gore is not a student of history, but it occurs to me that a nation once tried to build itself on this concept of the sovereignty of reason and the result was that during the French Revolution the streets of Paris ran red with blood. "Reason" was literally the god of the French revolution but without the God of the universe in the picture, it was a disaster.

The missing element in our culture is not reason it is a desire to respect and honor the one true God of the Bible. Gore's assertion that reason was viewed as the 'natural sovereign' by our Founders is laughable. The sovereign our Founders looked to was the God of the Bible and without His influence in our culture, no amount of man-centered reason can save us.