I say that maybe we all have a word that is attached to the feeling of God. Is "reason" this word for some people. Is "Reason" for some people a halo? A connection to the sacred? Do we make a religion of the intellect? I suggest that this religion exists.

---------- Post added 12-20-2009 at 04:52 AM ----------

But I think there are many words/roles that we can associate with god, halos, the sacred, the ideal. All paths lead to same sense of grandness, peace, love, etc. except there is a dark side to myth/religion

I think if you go back to the Greeks, there is the idea that reason corresponds to the divine in man, and that the intellect (=that which perceives by way of reason) is what sets man apart from beasts and is therefore distinctively human. This became 'nous' in Plotinus, 'the rational part of the soul'. However I think 'rationality' and 'reason' had a rather more esoteric meaning in the ancient world than it does today. Going back to Plato's idea of intelligible realities, those 'higher forms' which could only be discerned by the philosopher. This was developed in neoplatonism as the idea of 'nous', which was like 'the image of the divine in man' and also that by which the divine was known (cf Eckhardt 'the eye with which I see God is the same eye by which God sees me')

The very idea of 'ratio' in pythagorism was mystical insofar as it sought to intuit the ratios by which everything was arranged (as exemplified by geometery, music and the sacred arts.)

In that context, the idea of reason was connected with the sacred, but I don't think this is any longer the case in the modern world. Also, note, that in many religious traditions, human reason is regarded as subordinate to other forms of spiritual intuition, gnosis, jnana, etc and to revelation by which truths innaccesible to human reason are revealed.

I wouldn't be at all suprised to find it in Hegel; in fact he might have been one of the very last to hold this type of view. As for Nicholas, he was among other things a Catholic cardinal in the medieval times, so his idea of reason would have been largely Thomist, but he was also a mystic and possibly steeped in some aspect of the hermetic or pythagorean mathematical philosophy (I read in Wikipedia that Kepler thought him 'divinely inspired').

But 'natural philosophy' so-called, and its exclusive concentration on material phenomena and forces, must abandon any such medieval or ancient ideas of reason and concentrate on its application as described by Galileo with regards to the measurement of material bodies. I'm not sure, but I suspect that this also had to do with the ascendancy of William of Ockham and Francis Bacon, the triumph of the nominalists over the realists and the empiricists over the rationalists.

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Are philosophers more prone to God-ship?

Because if reason itself no longer has a foothold in the Divine Order, where does it have a foothold? Why, that must be on the slippery slope of scientific rationalism. But wait - there is no secure foothold here, either; only hypotheses, which by their nature must be falsifiable. "Objectivity' is certainly no longer what it used to be; it too often seems as much a matter of consensus as do religious edicts.