No argument.
By what reason (*cough*) should we suppose there is anything else?
Or perhaps more fundamentally: Can there be truth apart from the observable external world and the logically self-consistent rational internal world of the mind?
Perhaps that is true. I wonder though how one justifies the idea that "there is something else" when no method of measuring such a thing exists.
You'll forgive me, I hope, but your post sounds a lot like "This is my religion therefore I believe it." If you are convinced, it sounds like you just want to be. Please, please elaborate if this is not the case.
I was intentionally leaving the question open-ended, largely, because I don't think this is an affirmative argument. But rather because I think it is an open-ended question--something worthy to ponder, but which does not have a concrete answer. Hence, I think, how we respond to the question ultimately depends upon our own individual biases and beliefs. It's not something that can be answered in the definitive, as though there were an empirical answer.
I suspect you may be at least partly correct when you say that it is my religion, therefore I believe it. Or, at the very least that is almost certainly how it will always appear to the one standing on the outside--and thus can't find fault with it.
That isn't, however, quite the full picture for the person standing within; perhaps it is delusion, perhaps it is mere cognitive dissonance, but from my vantage point it is not mere will to believe it is so. I don't think that explaining the experience is going to make much sense, but there is something deeply extrinsic about it--at least within the experience of faith. This may not, in fact, correspond to objective reality and may simply be mental delusion; but the experience remains, and largely remains inexplicable to the one experiencing it. That is a lot of wordiness (perhaps needlessly so, but I am aiming for precision in language) to state that beyond reason there is, or seems to be, a something. A something which is compelling, more than mere wishing, but compelling. Closer to drive or instinct. I believe in spite of myself, I believe in spite of my own will.
I regard that external-compelling-something to ultimately be Divine. The working of God which creates faith.
Maybe there's nothing at all. Maybe it's all delusion, a form of cognitive dissonance--wanting to neither abandon rational thought nor the irrational faith. It's all in my head, and I've simply been primed by environment and there's nothing more to it. I'm not going to begrudge someone who regards this to be the case.
Neither am I going to attempt to use my experience to try to argue another person into faith; not only because of the inherent contradictory nature of trying to use argumentation to argue the unarguable but also because core to what I believe is that faith is something
extra nos, from outside ourselves. Faith is, as St. Paul says in his epistle to the Ephesians, a gift of divine grace apart from ourselves. More simply, as a Lutheran I believe it is impossible to believe apart from the external working of God to create faith; and thus it is neither in my ability, nor my responsibility, to make converts--for that's not possible. I can speak boldly about what I believe, but I cannot make another believe. I only bring this up because I usually anticipate the question, "Why then do you try and convert others?" Or similar sorts of questions. Since most people are more familiar with Evangelical Protestantism, which borne from the Revivalist traditions of the 19th century and the "
New Measures" approach of people like
Charles Finney, promotes certain strategies in order to try and win converts.
-CryptoLutheran
