Reason, if there is such a thing, can serve as a court of appeal not only against the received opinions and habits of our community but also against the peculiarities of our personal perspective. It is something each individual can find with himself, but at the same time it has universal authority. Reason provides, mysteriously, a way of distancing oneself from common opinion and received practices that is not a mere elevation of individuality... not a determination to express one's idiosyncratic self rather than go along with everyone else. Whoever appeals to reason purports to discover a source of authority within himself that is not merely personal or societal, but universal... and that should also persuade others who are willing to listen to it.

The ordinary charge of "rationalization," like the exposure of errors in reasoning, does not question the claims of reason itself but rather presupposes them. It contrasts the sources of belief in this case with an alternative type of ground that would actually justify them, or demonstrate their truth.

Jeffrey Jay Lowder, founder of the Internet Infidels, offers a welcome clarification of the term 'feethinker,' in his article, "Is 'Freethinker' Synonymous with 'Nontheist?'" He ultimately agrees with Bertrand Russell that what defines a freethinker is not the content of his beliefs, but because "after careful thought, he finds a balance of evidence in their favor." In principle, then, Lowder concedes that a theist could be a freethinker. His unremarkable conclusion is noteworthy because it demurs from the pervasive opinion of many skeptics that the defining characteristic of religious people is their unthinking credulity. Consider, by way of contrast, the Freedom from Religion Foundation's 'nontract' (sic), "What Is A Freethinker?" Still, Lowder rejects the possibility that an Evangelical Christian could be a freethinker. Considering Lowder's familiarity with the recent flowering of excellent Christian scholarship, his denial of Christian "free thinking" is surprising.

What were these presuppositions? The basic one was that there really are such things as absolutes. [The last generation] accepted the possibility of an absolute in the area of Being (or knowledge), and in the area of morals. Therefore, because they accepted the possibility of absolutes, though people might have disagreed as to what these were, nevertheless they could reason together on the classical basis of antithesis. They took it for granted that if anything was true, the opposite was false. In morality, if one thing was right, its opposite was wrong. This little formula, "A is A" and "if you have A, it is not non-A," is the first move in classical logic. If you understand the extent to which this no longer holds sway, you will understand our present situation.