Why We Have Good Reason to Believe in God

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Rationality of Beliefs
True and Justified Belief in God
Conclusion
Works Cited

Introduction

The question of the validity of belief in God, no matter how it may seem beaten at first glance, is very actively discussed in the modern analytical philosophy of religion and the related sciences. It might be assumed that the perspective, according to which we have good reason to believe in God, has an epistemological foundation. The below discussion will be focused on proving the latter statement.

Rationality of Beliefs

It is irrational to adhere to all beliefs because there are strong counter-arguments against them. Suppose there are no arguments against the existence of God or the basic Christian dogmas outlined in the Nicene Creed. It seems that for 2,000 years, no one has succeeded in proving that Jesus Christ did not exist as a historical person or that he did not rise from the dead (Moser 20). It is hardly reasonable to expect such evidence to appear in the future. However, the absence of arguments against certain views does not mean that they should be taken on faith. Imagine a small china teapot revolving in orbit between Mars and Earth, or that an invisible pink unicorn lives at the other end of the universe. No one can prove or disprove these judgments. Still, it would not be wise to believe in them.

True and Justified Belief in God

To qualify for rational agreement on our part, the judgment must not only be true but also justified. For example, one likes the number three, and therefore they are convinced that in the stack of instant lottery tickets, the third from the bottom is the winner. They ask the saleswoman to sell this ticket, erase the protective layer and win a large sum of money. Thus, their judgment “the third from the bottom ticket is the winning one” turned out to be true. However, from this, it did not become justified – after all, they came to it in a completely random way, with the help of a chain of arbitrary associations that have nothing to do with the development of true judgments about the winning of lottery tickets.

At this point, the main epistemological aspect of God should be stated. It can be formulated as follows – if the Christian faith is true, then it is also justified (Plantinga xii). For many other beliefs, this is not so: even if the pink unicorn exists, then the belief in it, is true and does not become more justified. On the contrary, if God – God in the Christian sense – exists, then faith in Him is certainly the result of the processes of generating true faith provided for by Him and, therefore, can be considered justified (Plantinga xii). Of course, one cannot exclude the possibility that there is no God, and then the belief in Him is only the fruit of a bizarre, albeit very widespread, aberration of human consciousness. However, if one is endowed with faith in the unknowable God of revelation, then the point for them to arbitrarily replace it with an equally unfounded belief in its nonexistence is uncertain. Especially since the latter proceeds from the erroneous assumption that the limits of our knowledge coincide with the boundaries of all existing reality. Thus, if one finds a belief in the truth of revelation, then they have every right to consider it justified.

Nevertheless, it may be said that the above position simply pushes the problem of evidence aside instead of solving it. Assume that a person cannot come to know God by proof, but only through faith in revelation, and we find it in ourselves. However, according to Moser, it might seem that there is no evidence that this belief was inspired by God (265). The problem with the latter maxim is that it is self-contradictory – proofs in its favor have not yet been presented (Goldman 360). Therefore, it may be proper to deny it. In addition, belief in revelation is by its nature much closer to a set of framework beliefs inherent in every person, to which there is no reason to extend the requirement of evidence. For example, we believe that the world we perceive is actually about the way it appears to us. Still, how can it be proved appropriately? Perhaps, things-in-themselves have nothing to do with the phenomena provided to us in the sensory experience. Given the evolutionary origins of our cognitive abilities, such doubts are not unfounded. Natural selection encourages adaptive behavior, but there is no guarantee that it is always accompanied by true representations of the world.

Conclusion

It is impossible to prove that our ideas about the world correspond to reality adequate to them. In any case, this is as unprovable as the fact that God is really behind the religious revelation (Plantinga 190). However, if we believe in the former, it is acceptable to take the latter on faith. Moreover, the Universe, for the adequacy of ideas about which we claim, is filled with cold indifference to man. The Universe does not care what a person means and represents it. On the contrary, the concept of God assumes that He cares what we think of Him and that He will not allow us all to be mistaken about Him. Therefore, our knowledge of God may be generally the most reliable of all the straws that we can grab onto in that shaky ocean of doubt.

Works Cited

Goldman, Alvin. “A Causal Theory of Knowing.” The Journal of Philosophy. 1967, vol. 64, no. 12, pp. 357–372.

Moser, Paul. The Elusive God: Reorienting Religious Epistemology. Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Plantinga, Alvin. Warranted Christian Belief. Oxford University Press, 2000.

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