At the moment I'm reading a book by Tim Keller called The Reason For God. It's an apologetics book of sorts. (Not quite sure if it's aimed primarily at an unbeliever or rather at people interested in learning about how to do apologetics with at least certain kinds of unbelievers. I really like its overall thought process. The target audience of the arguments are non-religious, pluralist people. Basically, it's a two step approach. The first step is to take their specific doubts and reformulate them as statements of faith (faith in something other than Jesus, of course, but faith nonetheless), and you illustrate why their faith in the form of "doubt" requires just as big a leap as faith in Jesus. Then, once the person realizes that their belief system is no more rock solid or based in "objective observation" (that is, once they doubt their doubts), you present some clues for why Jesus is plausible and good.
This deviates a bit from rationalist forms of apologetics where arguer accepts the rational premise (any true statement is provable through argument based on some set of secular premises). Indeed, anything proved through logic cannot actually be automatically held to be true, since logic is always circular, because to use logic, we have to assume that logical conclusions are true, which is unprovable within logic. And indeed, there is no logical proof for God, nor is there a logical disproof, and even the strictest rationalists accept that at some level.
So, in any case, it's a good read. (Actually, I haven't finished the book yet, but the first 3/4 of the book was good.)
I think I agree that the validity of logic is axiomatic rather than provable. And the use of logical reasoning as evidence could be considered circular - one can only rely on its results if one already rely on the process, whose validity must be assumed. But if you do accept the axiom that logic is a valid tool for understanding the nature of reality - and the overwhelming majority of people do, whether they've ever thought about the question or not - properly applied logic is not a circular process. And while I agree that the existence of God cannot be logically proved, I do think that reasoning is a valuable, perhaps even an essential, tool in considering the question.
ReplyDeleteBut certainly not the only valuable tool, and almost certainly not the most valuable one for the majority of present-day Westerners (don't know enough about contemporary non-Western societies to have an opinion). The book you describe sounds interesting and useful. Our library system doesn't have it, but they do have another book by the same author, which I put a hold on.