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Why Belief In God Is Rational

by James Barringer  
1/11/2011 / Christian Apologetics

The existence of God is one of the fundamental questions in all of philosophy. The sheer quantity of people involved guarantees this; if God does not exist, the most basic assumption and decision-making paradigm of roughly 90% of the world (Christians and Muslims alone comprise more than half the global population) is completely invalidated. If God does exist, though, then his existence will have implications across every field of study that conducts itself as if God does not exist: science, philosophy, economics, politics, and ethics, which would mean a complete retooling of the entire way that the academic and scientific establishments think about the universe. It's a pretty high-stakes question.

Unfortunately, I can't put to bed the issue of whether God exists. The thing I want to address is whether belief in God is rational, and unsurprisingly, I believe that it is.

If you begin to debate God with a truly dedicated atheist, as I have several times in my life, one theme that emerges very quickly is the idea that you require some sort of proof or support in order to believe in God. A rational belief is one which is grounded by an appropriate amount of evidence. It's perfectly natural for an atheist to begin, then, by pointing out that you've never seen God, and you would probably struggle to come up with any kind of religious experience in your life that doesn't have another (sometimes simpler) explanation. So on what grounds do you believe in God?

Believe it or not, the only answer you need to give is, "Somebody told me."

This drives an atheistic scientist nuts, because his whole belief system is founded on the idea that only empirical evidence, that which you can take in with your five senses, is valid evidence for making something rational. I completely disagree. If you are talking with a sane and rational human being whose statements are usually reliable, you are entirely within the bounds of rationality to believe him when he makes a serious statement. The testimony of a sane person is, itself, rational evidence for belief.

There are some cases where it is not only rational to believe on that kind of authority without waiting for empirical evidence, but it is actually the wiser course of action. If the manager of a movie theater comes running into the room screaming that there is a fire, it is extremely rational of you to take him at his word. Only an idiot would refuse to evacuate until he personally had empirical evidence that the building was on fire.

Added to this, we must consider that we actually have empirical evidence of virtually nothing in our lives. Ninety percent of what we believe, if not more, is taken on the authority of other people. Most of us have never seen Pluto, yet we consider it rational to believe in Pluto's existence. Replace "Pluto" with "God" and the sentence remains accurate. Taking things based on the authority of sane, rational, and reliable human beings is often the only means we have of expanding the amount of knowledge in our heads.

I once talked with an atheist who never wasted a chance to rant against "religion, authority, and tradition." If my argument even began to tilt in any of those three directions, it was completely invalidated in his mind. One day I pointed out that he has never seen or performed the experiments which prove his most sacred belief, evolution. "You've never seen species evolve. You've never seen Darwin's research. You have blind faith in Darwin, far exceeding the level of rational and well-grounded faith I have in God." "Completely different," he protested. "I could go and do those experiments if I wanted to and achieve the same results Darwin did. That's the essence of science." "But you haven't," I countered. "He says it and you believe it, and you obviously consider it completely rational to believe the things he says based purely on his authority, even though you haven't personally seen the thing he's testifying." With his hypocrisy thus exposed, my friend took the conversation off in a different direction, but the point had been made.

One of the most popular counter-examples is Santa Claus. "Lots of parents tell their kids that Santa Claus exists, and he doesn't. Jesus is no different." However, I would say that for children, belief in Santa Claus is eminently rational on the basis of the evidence in front of them. Their parents, who don't normally lie, have averred the existence of this chubby gift-giver, and lo and behold, on Christmas morning there really are gifts under the tree. This is why the Santa Claus argument backfires on the atheist: Santa is not an example of blind faith. There is empirical evidence, in the form of the gifts, to support the statements made about him, and that evidence is the reason why children believe. To me, Santa is not a cautionary tale about belief in authority at all, but rather a cautionary tale about over-reliance on empirical evidence.

The problem is that one person's well-reasoned conclusion is another person's evidence of gullibility. One time after our church's homeless ministry, we had brought a homeless atheist named Mike along as we went hiking in a nature preserve. At one point, while Mike and I were debating about God, pastor Robert hollered, "Look! A deer!" I looked. Mike roared with laughter and started to explain how gullible I was for believing what people tell me. His mistake is that I wasn't gullible at all. I'd been to that park multiple times before, and on each and every previous occasion, I'd seen a deer. The claim that one existed was totally in line with all of my personal experience regarding the matter. For me, it was a well-reasoned conclusion totally in line with all the empirical evidence and past precedent. For Mike, it was gullibility. Even if a belief is appropriately justified in your own mind, a person who is sufficiently skeptical will always tell you that it's not.

So we end where we began: with the idea that if a sane and rational human being tells you something, you are entirely within the bounds of rationality to believe them. And again, we must consider at this point that the Christian faith was not something invented by a man in a cave, nor even by a single great moral teacher. The Bible is really nothing more than a series of eyewitness accounts about God and his interactions with humanity, culminating in God's final revelation to us through Jesus, who walked the earth, was crucified, and was raised by God from the dead. It's thoroughly rational to believe in that evidence - and, on the basis of what I pointed out in my article "Seven Reasons the New Testament Is Legit," I think that disbelief in that testimony (since there are few legitimate reasons to do so, other than a preexisting philosophical prejudice against the supernatural) is in fact incorrect and irrational. God, 1 Corinthians 11 tells us, is a God of order, not of chaos; he's a God of sense, not of nonsense; he's a God of truth, not falsehood. You can rest on the knowledge that belief in him is thoroughly rational no matter what anyone else may say.

Jim Barringer is a 38-year-old writer, musician, and teacher. More of his work can be found at facebook.com/jmbarringer. This work may be reprinted for any purpose so long as this bio and statement of copyright is included.

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