Assessment of the View that it is Rational to Believe that there is a God

Assessment of the View that it is Rational to Believe that there is a God

Rational: To be rational is to think logically and within reason. To

base your thoughts on evidence, and then use that evidence to come to

a "rational" conclusion.

Motivation: To be motivated to do or think something, normally the

motivation will be because it will benefit you in the long run.

Many philosophers use theses types of words when talking about whether

or not it is rational to believe in god. Pascal for instance thinks

that you should believe in God as you will gain more from it when you

pass away if he does exist, i.e. going to heaven, whereas if you don't

believe in God and it turns out he does in fact exists you will lose

more. This is often referred to as Pascal's wager and Pascal is a

prudentialist, which means believing in something because it's in your

own interests.

Another argument for the belief in God is Fideism, this is where you

believe in God because it is absurd not to. You take a leap of faith,

e.g. if you wanted to jump from one cliff to another you would just

jump because you would believe that God would help you and not left

you fall, as appose to talking a bridge and only jumping half way.

Plantinga is another philosopher who believes it is rational to

believe in God, as he thinks that God is a belief that ends all other

beliefs, it cannot be justified by other beliefs and it is in its self

self-evident. Plantinga thinks that you can start with a belief or

convictions and then argue from them instead of always looking for

evidence to enable us to argue to conclusions. This theory can be

questioned as how can one say tha...

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... seen him, you cannot check religious experience to see if

that person is actually experiencing God or its just a hallucination,

there fact that there are many more conceivable arguments for how the

world begun that have a lot more evidence behind them. There fore I

agree with Flew and think it is absurd to believe in someone who has

so much evidence to say there not true. How can you believe in

something that could be a myth? How can you believe something that has

so much evidence against it? I think that Kierkegaard, plantinga and

Pascal have come up with very good and reasonable arguments but they

are missing a lot of evidence and rational thought, because they

believe in God them self's there belief could be getting in the way of

them seeing the amount of counter evidence there actually is to say

God doesn't exist.