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 that belief in God is basic, when another cannot claim that belief in voodoo or astrology is basic. It is wrong to appeal to grounds that belief in God is basic since one might claim that the Pumpkin belief, that it returns every Halloween is basic.
Kierkegaard thinks that reasons are irrelevant to religious faith and that you should believe blindingly. Kierkegaard’s whole point is that this is to narrow conception of rationality; it’s too limited to have anything substantial to say abut religious belief. Again an argument against this is that truth is an objective matter, my belief in God can only be said to be true if and only if there is a God. Whether or not there is a God is something that is independent of my believing or not believing that there is a God.
These philosophers have all come up with substantial and plausible arguments for why it is “rational” to believe in God, there are two philosophers that I am going to look at next who would disagree.
Flew is an atheist and believes in falsification that you do not truly believe in something unless you are willing to agree to what is false about it, that to actually believe in something you have to see what could be false about it and not believe blindingly. This clashes with what Kierkegaard thinks as he think you should believe in God blindingly. Personally I would have to agree with Flew in this situation because to believe in something you have to understand and notice what could be wrong or false about it, otherwise you don’t not fully understand it. Flew says that there is not enough evidence for the existence of God, so belief in him is irrational or otherwise unjustified. To believe something there has to be a substantial amount of evidence saying that it is true, and in Gods case there are many plausible arguments to why he could exist but there are also many counter arguments to why it is irrational to say he exists.
The next philosopher I am going to look at is Thomas Aquinas who is an evidentialist and bases his theories and arguments on evidence. Aquinas said “reason and faith work together, one giving justification for the other” and I think that this is true, surely if you have reason and evidence for what you believe it would therefore make that belief strong as there will be no doubt in your mind as to whether or not it is true.
I think that it is clearly not rational to believe there is a God because there is too much counter evidence i.e. the fact that no one has ever 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.