Hopefully this isn't too redundant with other past conversations and threads. This is a more narrow question out of curiosity for the believers. It's something like whether and to what extent rational arguments for the existence of god or for the Christian god specifically actually mattered (as when you decided to believe for yourself) or continue to matter in terms of grounding your faith. Did you have to go through all of the various rationalistic arguments for the existence of God in order to arrive at a reasonably stable faith or belief? Or do things like the ontological and cosmological arguments just not matter very much and you believe for other, non-rational reasons like some personal experience?

Really, i'm curious about how decisive capital-r Reason is for religious people. My own personal suspicion is that it's not actually very important. People go through periods of certainty and periods of doubt, but that most of those shifts and resolutions of doubts are not resolved based on pure reason alone. But it's also different for each person and there are surely exceptions to everything.

Marco Esquandolas said:

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Hopefully this isn't too redundant with other past conversations and threads. This is a more narrow question out of curiosity for the believers. It's something like whether and to what extent rational arguments for the existence of god or for the Christian god specifically actually mattered (as when you decided to believe for yourself) or continue to matter in terms of grounding your faith. Did you have to go through all of the various rationalistic arguments for the existence of God in order to arrive at a reasonably stable faith or belief? Or do things like the ontological and cosmological arguments just not matter very much and you believe for other, non-rational reasons like some personal experience?

Really, i'm curious about how decisive capital-r Reason is for religious people. My own personal suspicion is that it's not actually very important. People go through periods of certainty and periods of doubt, but that most of those shifts and resolutions of doubts are not resolved based on pure reason alone. But it's also different for each person and there are surely exceptions to everything.

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I can't speak for others but I'm not sure I agree with your premise, that people believe irrationally or without Reason. That would seem to be drawing a conclusion and working backwards to ask how people got there (to your conclusion).

I'm also curious how personal experience isn't rational.

Quote:

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Did you have to go through all of the various rationalistic arguments for the existence of God in order to arrive at a reasonably stable faith or belief?

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When I first believed I barely knew anything of what the bible said or what any apologetic argument was. I simply responded to what I felt I needed to do. I was broken and the gospel was honey to my soul.

As I've grown in my faith these arguments for God have helped. But they really just help explain a little of the why and how behind what I already believed.

I think 'reason' gets you through the creation of the universe, but once we start dealing with how this god reveals himself to us you're going to have to switch to historical corroboration, examine the claims of those who claim to be god, and understand the context of those claims. It switches to a persuasive argument, still reason but not sit-under-a-tree-and-think-through-gravity 'reason'.

Personally, I view scientific exploits as the 'how' and religion as the 'why.' Some of the biggest cosmological arguments for God that I buy into are the 'first mover' explanation of how the universe was created and that it had to be something outside of our dimension to create it. Also I believe in the limited life span of the universe as there will eventually be a heat death of this universe with even entropy everywhere (trillions of years from now). An 'unexplained' beginning but a certain ending has convinced me enough that their is a god out there that set all of this in motion.

Now fast forward to how this god reveals himself to us, why, and what our purpose in life is- well then were gonna have to evaluate the claims of all the major religions that claim to be god. We can historically corroborate that a man named Jesus of Nazareth lived around the time his disciples says he did, so did Pontius Pilate.

We can infer that the Mark was written before Jerusalem was sacked in 70AD because the disciples would've certainly written about the destruction of the temple if it had happened. We can also examine ancient copies of the gospels and see they have been faithfully copied, not a tall tale of a man growing into a god over retellings.

Just some short musings.

AGC said:

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Marco Esquandolas said:

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Hopefully this isn't too redundant with other past conversations and threads. This is a more narrow question out of curiosity for the believers. It's something like whether and to what extent rational arguments for the existence of god or for the Christian god specifically actually mattered (as when you decided to believe for yourself) or continue to matter in terms of grounding your faith. Did you have to go through all of the various rationalistic arguments for the existence of God in order to arrive at a reasonably stable faith or belief? Or do things like the ontological and cosmological arguments just not matter very much and you believe for other, non-rational reasons like some personal experience?

Really, i'm curious about how decisive capital-r Reason is for religious people. My own personal suspicion is that it's not actually very important. People go through periods of certainty and periods of doubt, but that most of those shifts and resolutions of doubts are not resolved based on pure reason alone. But it's also different for each person and there are surely exceptions to everything.

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I can't speak for others but I'm not sure I agree with your premise, that people believe irrationally or without Reason. That would seem to be drawing a conclusion and working backwards to ask how people got there (to your conclusion).

I'm also curious how personal experience isn't rational.

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OK let me try to clarify what I mean. I'm distinguishing between what I call capital-R "Reason" and a sort of colloquial, minimal usage of the word reason. I'm talking about the faculty of Reason that you use to, for example, logic your way through complicated arguments about, say, infinite regress of the cosmos or something. Common reason would be, like, figuring out which of two similar routes to take when using google maps to get somewhere.

To your point, I'm not saying belief based on some transcendent personal religious experience is irrational in a common sense, i'm saying that you would be basing the belief not purely on Reason.

We believe all sorts of things in our daily lives that are not grounded in Reason. I am not in any way presuming that such beliefs are bad or wrong. I am only interested in where the justification for belief comes from, and whether and to what extent reasoning or logic-ing your way to God factors into that, relative to other factors and experiences. I suspect my framing will make more sense to Catholics because of its tradition of natural theology rooted in Aquinas and Aristotle. Reformed protestants might argue that even our faculty of reason is contaminated enough by sin that it isn't reliable.

Didn't Kant do a whole treatise on how isolated Reason is insufficient to make any real conclusions? I tried to read it once upon a time but couldn't finish. Maybe someone better read than me can clarify.

If you're looking for an ontological argument, then you could look to Avicenna, Anselm, Descartes, or Craig. However, it always seems to me that the validity of an ontological argument always has more to do with the person's prior belief than the strength of the argument itself.

ramblin_ag02 said:

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Didn't Kant do a whole treatise on how isolated Reason is insufficient to make any real conclusions? I tried to read it once upon a time but couldn't finish. Maybe someone better read than me can clarify.

If you're looking for an ontological argument, then you could look to Avicenna, Anselm, Descartes, or Craig. However, it always seems to me that the validity of an ontological argument always has more to do with the person's prior belief than the strength of the argument itself.

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None of the rational arguments for the existence of a god are convincing for me personally, either individually or as a group, consistent with my very rudimentary understanding of Kant. But I am curious about what the religious folks think about this stuff.

Marco Esquandolas said:

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ramblin_ag02 said:

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Didn't Kant do a whole treatise on how isolated Reason is insufficient to make any real conclusions? I tried to read it once upon a time but couldn't finish. Maybe someone better read than me can clarify.

If you're looking for an ontological argument, then you could look to Avicenna, Anselm, Descartes, or Craig. However, it always seems to me that the validity of an ontological argument always has more to do with the person's prior belief than the strength of the argument itself.

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None of the rational arguments for the existence of a god are convincing for me personally, either individually or as a group, consistent with my very rudimentary understanding of Kant. But I am curious about what the religious folks think about this stuff.

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The universe is weird. After careful examination of how weird yet organized the universe is, I just can't chalk it up to chance, especially not the existence of rational thought.

It was a very Reasoned search that had me leaving my faith at one point. Discovery of Barth and Kierkegaard kind of helped me out.

I would potentially be less inclined to believe if I didn't think that Jesus was telling the truth about how to live, or if alternative theories didn't include nutty things like multiverse theory or the Copenhagen explanation of quantum theory.

I believe some (who are convinced about scientific theory, evidence, evolution, and the "Big Bang") need to do their own little investigation(experiment).

Go about your day to day life as usual for a year and be the most greedy, vain person you can be; the year after, if you're still alive, be completely honest/genuine (not deceptive/crafty) for a year.

If you do this, I guarantee you will get in touch with the powers that be.



Faith is the evidence of things unseen, the calm assurance of things hoped for.





Some say experience is the best teacher.

Reason and Religion walk separate paths; intersecting only rarely.
Religious people achieve their belief through faith; absent reason or critical thought. Not saying they're wrong but faith is their foundation; not Reason.
Personally, Reason nor critical thought lead to no convincing evidence of a diety.
And, after many years of reliance on faith alone, that faith has waned as I came to rely more on Reason and critical thought.

This is just silly smugness. Reason alone can't
even tell us who we are ourselves, much less help us answer the whys of the universe.

As a young kid I heard plenty of Bible stories. I was also taught the moral law of God outlined in the 10 commandments. Children honor your parents, do not lie, do not murder, etc...
As a child, rationally, I knew that I had transgressed the moral law of God. There was a guilt that I experienced that was not imposed upon me by people but a conviction in my soul. When the I heard that Jesus died for me and paid for my sins and that He was alive, I told Him, "Thank You". He was the rational solution to my problem at that very moment.

It wasn't until later in life that I examined the evidence.