Natural Order and Science

[Neo-Scholastic]

Merely taking the world as intelligible is a leap of faith. Believing that we can know anything is a leap of faith. There are no 'purely' rational positions.

There are leaps of faith which occur in the absence of rational support and those that occur with the presence of rational support.  Just because there are no purely rational positions does not mean that we can't rank positions according to their reasonableness.  Some leaps of faith are larger than others.  The leap to belief in an entity unlike any that has been observed to occur in our everyday world is surely one of the largest.

I do not disagree. I was thinking of the fundamental approaches people can take when confronted with their own existence and also have a sense of something(s) other than themselves. Your example reveals the unavoidable circularity of first principles. One must first take a "leap of faith" affirming the efficacy of reason before one can say whether that leap is reasonable. Most participants of AF do accept the efficacy of reason, but I have noticed a sharp division between those who take the stance that reality is actually intelligible versus those who consider it apparently so.