g. In many instances, such as the making of airplanes, one devoutly hopes that the physics, engineering, and design have relied on nothing but reason. But whatever the physicists, engineers, and designers might have to say about the existence of God is, to say the least, as immaterial to the functioning of the plane as it is to what anyone else's relationship with God might be.
The beginning of the rationalist project lay in the philosophy of Rene Descartes, the French philosopher who argued that the only basic truth that can be known is that one exists because one is able to reflect on (know of) one's existence by thinking about it. The thinking individual then acquired other knowledge via the sensory system. This self-reflective being had justified beliefs only insofar as its "thinking self-consciousness" provided evidence of its existence and evidence of other truths only insofar as "they could be validated by sense impressions" (Muck, 1998, p. 109). This notion did not lead immediately to a permanent, widespread split between science and rel
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