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.
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.