Essay on Why Faith

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Why believe? Why faith?

Arguments for God entail belief that is beyond reason. While any other belief about reality requires justification and evidence to support it, belief in God is beyond evidence. How can everything in reality be understood with reason and then have God, the author of our universe, be outside of such apprehension?

Not all things in reality are understood through reason. While we try to quantify and neatly organize reality into easily understood theorems and categories, there are some things that science simply cannot take as its object but we still understand it to be a part of reality. For example: fear. Fear is very real and only a very few with a genetic anomaly are spared it. We don’t understand fear by reason, but the opposite. We fear because we don’t have understanding of the situation or its possible consequences. Fear of death: we don’t know what’s on the other side. Fear of not making the softball team: how are your going to tell your mother? Fear is not a “reasonable” proposition, yet we do not deny its existence. This doesn’t prove that there is a God, of course. Just that not all things that we accept as a part of our reality are to be understood with reason. Evidence for God is going to be similar to evidence for fear. While we may not see fear, we see its affects on people. Hair standing on end, crying, desperate looks, etc, all indicate fear. In God we see what He moves in people, changes that He brings to lives and guidance He offers in the form of scripture and individual revelation. People testify to things about reality being revealed to them by a voice or feeling—things that they couldn’t possible know by standard methods of apprehension, and yet they know them and demonstrate that knowledge before those standard methods are able to reveal reality. This is evidence you can consider, even using reason to some degree, as to why God is beyond reason in some ways.

Using the rational that God and his commands are beyond reason, and that any claimed command must be executed by faith—even if it must suspend reason—results in any possible commands. God wants Amanda to kill her neighbor. God also says “thou shalt not kill.” Both commands could carry the same weight in the need to obey them, but remain mutually exclusive. In this way God, so beyond reality and reason, cannot only express contradictions, but can be a contradiction as in the Nicean Creed.

While it is true that faith could potentially result in such things, contradictions are not possible: regardless of what your faith is. God may have us follow in faith, but He wouldn’t give contradictory commands since He is not arbitrary. Giving commands that would result in a contradiction results in commanding the impossible. Doing so would make God a commander of the arbitrary, not a commander of the universe. If someone chooses to call God a contradiction, they misunderstand God and His connection to His creations. He is not so different that He can’t coexist with His creation.

If there is a God the way Christian theology claims, where you can say “you must take this or that on faith alone, suspending your own finite mind’s ability to judge reality,” then all beliefs about God are reasonably equal in
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