Try as he might, the religionist can’t defenestrate reason
Some religious believers assert that if there is a conflict between a passage of the Bible (or another sacred scripture) and human reason, one should defenestrate reason. The reverential motivation of this claim is understandable. But the claim is false, and its claimant is likely naïve on this issue.
You can’t dispose of reason in this way, nor can you suspend it for the sake of accepting some scriptural proposition. For the passage of scripture must be communicated to you. In other words, you must read it, have someone read it to you, explain it to you, etc. Then you need to construe the proposition conveyed to you. What does it mean? Such interpretation is inescapably a job of reason. Hence, you can’t dismiss reason in favor of scripture. And since you can’t do so, it is false that you should do so.
In short, the passage of scripture filters through your reason, and thus, though it might sound shocking to the pious ear, reason is an indispensable judge and not a courtroom outcast.
Here is another consideration. The claim that reason should be dismissed if it conflicts with scripture comes too late. You are already engaged in the reasoning process. It looks like this:
If scripture and reason conflict and the standoff is mutually exclusive, both cannot remain. Hence, either scripture must be rejected, or reason must be rejected. But scripture should not be denied. Thus, reason must be abandoned.
Now, regardless of whether this is an acceptable piece of reasoning (I don’t believe that it is), the fact is that it is a case of reasoning. One cannot coherently forsake reason and yet at the same time keep the very reasoning upon which one builds one’s disowning of reason.
Moreover, one’s recognition in the first place that a line of scripture seems inconsistent with reason is itself an act of reason. I.e., the use of reason is a necessary condition for obtaining such a recognition; if one recognizes an apparent logical inconsistency, one uses one’s reason to achieve the recognition.
In sum, you cannot coherently use reason to disown it. If you disown reason, you disown all uses of it, including those applications you are employing in your disownment.