So, yeah. Basically what Kim said: “After all, if one could reason that God exists without being able to demonstrate it, one could easily reason that he does not exist.”

You don’t need to turn off your brain to practice religion. I keep mine fully engaged, and I feel my faith is stronger for it. The reason this works is that my trust in God is based on direct experience with him. Reason and logic have changed my mind about a lot of things, but they can’t nullify that experience.

As far as picking and choosing when to apply logic: done with selfish motives it’s obviously dishonest. What I’ve been talking about is discovering as honestly as you can what its limitations are in a given domain. That’s a serious exercise in reason in and of itself. Also, note that discovering limitations doesn’t mean you can’t use it; it just lowers your certainty in your conclusions.

What do you think?

How can faith in God be based in logic and reason?

No, I am serious. my understanding of logic and reason on their basic levels is they require the demonstration to support ones premises.

If one happened to reason God’s existence, how can one demonstrate with any accuracy that God does indeed exist? How could anyone validate such a premise at all?

From a religious perspective, I think this is as it should be. If we are to conclude within ourselves that God exists through logic and reason, why bother coming to earth at all?

My interpretation of the statement you quoted, Jeff, is that Kenneth Johnson was getting at the idea that belief in God should be rooted in faith. After all, if one could reason that God exists without being able to demonstrate it, one could easily reason that he does not exist.

If my faith could be solidified in logic and reason, I’d be much happier trying to give it a go. I don’t like the idea that one can pick and choose when rationality should be heeded.

rick said: ‘Someone please explain how,”If our faith is rooted in the sandy soil of reason and logic, it will be swept away by a rising tide driven by the escalating winds of opposition.” does not mean,”If you think about it too much you will lose your faith.”‘

First, consider the word “trust” as a good replacement for “faith” to avoid faith’s common and unfortunate connotations with forced belief:

“If our trust is rooted in the sandy soil of reason and logic, it will be swept away by a rising tide driven by the escalating winds of opposition.”

The key word here “rooted,” which denotes someone’s cause for trusting God. Let’s enumerate some logic/reason-based causes.

1. You might be an armchair philosopher and find Pascal’s wager compelling.

2. You might be converted via the Word of Wisdom or some other principle you determine to be obviously inspired.

3. You might determine that the fulfillment of prophecy is sure proof of God’s existence.

(It’s going to appear for a while that I’m supporting your thesis, but just hold on for a bit.)

Let’s take #1. There are obvious problems with Pascal’s wager. After thinking for a bit, you might decide that there’s no reason to believe in an infinite reward. Or you might decide that life without God can have meaning after observing that die-hard atheists can still find it. The wager will start to appear to be inconsistent with your observations.

For #2, you might read up on historical background of temperance movements and find some striking similarities. Or decide that it’s entirely possible that the former “obviously inspired” principle was arrived at by chance. (There’s always a chance, right?) Maybe it was just the result of long experience and hard thinking.

In #3, there are legions of ways to crumble. When was the prophecy recorded? Was it reinterpreted after the fact? How likely was it that someone else would come up with exactly the same thing?

For any of these, if they are the cause of your trusting God, everything you built on top of them will be “swept away”.

Now let’s move on to spiritual witness as a cause for trust. That is, you believe you have directly experienced God, and that it made your life better. Further, you continue to experience God when you do what you believe he’s asking, and it continues to make your life better.

Let’s say you reason the same way as in #1, #2, and #3 above.

1: Who cares? Whether the wager reflects truth has no bearing on your trusting God.

2: You focus on the possibility that it really was inspired. (There’s always a chance, right?) I can show you through probability theory that it’s only rational to estimate the chance of inspiration higher if you believe that both it and your own experience come from the same source.

3: Same as #2.

You can always go another meta level, of course. But at the end of the day, you have what you feel is experience with the divine, and it makes your life better. Infinite regress of explanations or not, you have a model that works and you follow it. That’s trust. That’s faith – and it’s not getting “swept away” despite all your thinking.

By the way, I keep using the anonymous “you” when I really mean “me”.

Do I agree with this: “If you think about it too much you will lose your faith”??

If your thinking is based upon reason and logic, then yes I agree that it will show that having faith is illogical. Most people will lose their faith because of the ever growing doubt that will build over time using this approach. To have faith is to understand that you will not know everything at once but that you must press onward with a steadfastness in Christ, keeping His commandments, having a perfect brightness of hope and a love of God and all men. If you do this until the end, then the Father will give you all that He has and you will know all things. In that day His gospel (or way of life) will be logical and make perfect since and you will not need faith because you will know.

A disciple of Christ is taught to “act” according to his beliefs in Christ before he comes to a perfect knowledge of a principle. An example would be by following Christ by being baptized. This is the underlining principle of faith. It is not to have a perfect knowledge, but to believe in something that is not seen, which is true and act upon that limited knowledge. You cannot have faith in something that you have a perfect knowledge of. God wants to see if we will follow Christ even though we do not have a perfect knowledge of his doctrines. We should follow Christ because we are commanded too. It is that simple. When Adam was asked why he offered sacrifice to the Lord he stated that he knew not save the Lord had commanded him. This is the essence of faith. If we claim to have faith in Christ by any other means (reason and logic) we will not be able to stand when the winds of opposition roar our way. Why? Because no-one on earth has a perfect knowledge of God and his doctrines. Only the portion necessary to live by faith was revealed. Without the whole gospel revealed, it does not make logical since to the opposition and it is easily put to shame.

Someone please explain how,”If our faith is rooted in the sandy soil of reason and logic, it will be swept away by a rising tide driven by the escalating winds of opposition.” does not mean,”If you think about it too much you will lose your faith.”

What you’re probably bugged about is other people treating spiritual witness as admissible evidence.