Soyeong
Well-Known Member
- Mar 10, 2015
- 12,416
- 4,598
- Country
- United States
- Faith
- Messianic
- Marital Status
- Single
I tend at times towards fideism, ie just believing in God without valid reasons, something like what Francis Schaeffer described as an "upper story" leap. If one "just believes" does it not end up in subjectivity - or faith in faith if one has no reasons for believing? However postmodernism and the idea there is no objective truth or reality also dogs my thinking.
Kierkegarrd is probably best known for fideism - and rejecting proofs of God existence. "I reason from existence, not towards existence."
Søren Kierkegaard, "God's Existence Cannot Be Proved"
Pascal also proposed his famous wager - that if one believes in God and lives accordingly and it turns out God does exist one gains eternal life - and if he doesn't one hasn't lost anything - but if one disbelives and lives for oneself - and it turns out God is real - one loses everything, ends up in hell - something like that if I recall it correctly.
Kant as far as I understand ended in agnosticism as regards knowledge of God by pure reason. He seems to however have regarded God as a necessary postulate of practical reason.
What path is there back from postmodernism, or (if that is the wrong term) a rejection of objective truth and reality - back to reality - this has really dogged me for years - I had a breakdown some years ago because of the whole question of reality and how it seemed the world was completely absurd. How does one connect with reality? If the world seems completely absurd how does one live? I can see how if one doesn't believe in God one could come to the conclusion of absurdism - and that belief in God would keep one from reaching that point - but what if through not believing you reach that point of thinking everything is absurd - how does one get back from that place?
A belief without what someone considers to be a valid reason is a belief without cause, which is not humanly possible. Someone might not be able be able to be able to do a good job of articulating a reason why they believe that something is true and they might not be able to convince anyone else that it is a valid reason, but if there wasn't a reason for why they considered it to be true, then they would never have formed the belief that it was true. Someone might reason from existence rather than towards existence, but would still be using what they considered to be a valid reason.
There is an argument that everything that begins to exist has a cause and that the universe began to exist, therefore it has a cause. Someone might challenge whether the form of the argument is valid or whether the premises are true, but if someone considers the form to be valid and the premises to be true, then that proves the existence of the cause of the universe, which is a being with a property commonly attributed to what we call God. If an argument has its conclusion built into the premises, then that is not logically valid, but that doesn't mean that there aren't valid arguments for the existence of God.
Upvote
0