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How does Pascal argue for the usefulness of believing in God? essay
Faith and reason questions
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The Limits of Human Reason One may ask the question, “What actually is reason?” You can give multiple perceptions to the word’s definition. However, what reason is, in the human life, is the notion where one uses their own intuition through their experiences to therefore trust someone or something. Trust, otherwise known through reasoning, is depicted from faith, where which both work hand-in-hand with each other. Faith involves the act of will, or the commitment of the believer who wishes to be therefore trusted; otherwise to be given faith towards. Pope John Paul II, Camus, Schopenhauer and Pascal all have differing views, but they all show how we cannot lead meaningful lives.
For Pope John Paul II the limits of human reason are only up to the faith and beliefs of the person, for example faith and reasoning. But reasoning, like I just mentioned, comes through evidential intuition, which is attained through experiences that we have with one another. God plays a huge part in life according to
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Faith can be seen as miracles or close to it. Reason is essentially the method of hypothesis testing. With testing, an event that wasn 't planned for can sometimes occur, though scientists won’t likely jump to conclusions that that event was a miracle, they will try to come to an answer for what actually happened. Like Pascal says these aren 't the same and they do not contradict one another.
For example the example given in class I would definitely put my life savings up for a 50/50 chance to be a billionaire. So in theory what is difference in putting faith in God? Essentially if there isn 't a God we wont be penalized for having faith in a higher power. “True Faith is not a wager but a relationship. But it can begin with a wager, just as a marriage can begin with a blind date.” (Pascal
The other answer to the question is that faith is doubt. This basis relies on the fact that since there is so little proof, one must doubt therefore one must have faith.
When I was at school in Vermont, one of my teachers explained to me Pascal's Wager. According to this teacher, the philosopher and mathematician Pascal had tried to establish the costs and benefits of believing in God. He saw it in this way: you can either believe in God or not. If you do believe in God, and there is in fact no God, then you will perhaps have spent some extra energy unnecessarily abstaining from certain pleasures and wasting your Sunday mornings in Church, but overall you did not give up too much. And, it could be argued, you may have actually treated your fellow men more kindly then you would have otherwise. If, however, there is a God, and you believed in him, then you get eternal salvation.
Faith is in the heart and as has been said, the heart has reason which reason cannot understand. So if it were a fight over finding rationality, it would not be fully supported because finding the complete and total reason for faith will never be found.
Through my study of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” and Saint Augustine’s “The Confessions”, I discovered that both text involve a journey of finding real truths before acquiring a faith. This suggests that faith and reason are compatible because one must embark on journey in which they are educated about real truths before they are able to acquire a faith.
“If one speaks about torture, one must take care not to exaggerate,” Jean Améry view of torture comes from a place of uneasiness (22). He discusses in his book At The Mind’s Limits, about the torture that he underwent while a prisoner in Auschwitz. In his chapter titled “Torture”, he goes into deep description of not only the torture he endured, but also how that torture never leaves a person. Améry goes to great lengths to make sure that the torture he speaks of is accurate and as he says on page 22, not exaggerated.
rational grounds, as in matters of passion, desired out come and choice. James claims that belief
Reason can be defined as trying to understand God and the explanation behind his decisions. We can understand God, and reason gives us hope at understanding God through scripture. Reason is a tool that we can use to discern and interpret God’s word and to gain insight into God’s character and personality. The nature of God is eternal, omniscient, omnipresent, and supernatural, and reason provides a lens to look at the behavior of God through his nature. “God is not irrational,” and there is a reason behind everything that he does (WQL 5). Reason is a valuable tool for the Wesleyan Quadrilateral but reason does not stand
Miracles are a staple to Christianity; thus, if Jesus Christ is not God in the flesh, and if Jesus’ resurrection did not really happen, then the Christian Faith is a complete lie (Douglas & Tenney, 2010, p. 958). Furthermore, if the miracle of grace falls short of being verifiable in the transformed life of a believer, then the Christian gospel is also a fraud (Douglas & Tenney, 2010). Without miracles, Christianity ceases to exist. Miracles, recorded in the Bible, began with creation itself and ended with the apostles. Although it is commonly believed that the supernatural miracles found in the Bible, ended with apostles, miracles are still possible today since God is immutable, and never changes (Psalm 33:11). Thus, a miracle can be characterized as an extraordinary, supernatural event that is orchestrated by God in nature, or in human affairs (Douglas & Tenney, 2010).
Something must be desirable on its own account, and because of its immediate accord or agreement with human sentiment and affection” (87). In conclusion, I believe that Hume thinks that reason, while not completely useless, is not the driving force of moral motivation. Reasons are a means to sentiments, which in turn are a means to morality, but without reasons there can still be sentiments. There can still be beauty. Reasons can not lie as the foundation of morality, because they can only be true or false.
A miracle is often defined as being a supernatural act or an act of God. Sometimes it is more specifically and negatively defined as a violation of a natural law. In philosophy class we discussed different philosophers views on miracles. David Hume’s critique of miracles included the criterion that for something to be deemed a miracle, there must be substantial group of credible witness to attest to its occurrence. Hume believes miracles do not exist. If something of the supernatural does happen it is not really supernatural it is part of nature, we just don not experience it often so we consider it to be supernatural or a miracle. Kant believes miracles have no role to play except in the rise and spread of a religion. Kant says miracles have no role to play in validating a religion since the truth of religion can be supplied by reason alone. The difference between Kant and Hume is that Kant resists the idea that miracles are a violation of the laws of nature and considers them to be outside of the laws of nature.
There have been many Catholic thinkers who have addressed this topic, most notably John Paul II in his 1998 encyclical Fides et Ratio, or Faith and Reason in English. In it, he attempted to point out that faith and reason are not opposed to each other and that faith does not contradict reason. Rather, they actually complement each other. This is clear from the very beginning of the encyclical, which states: “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart the desire to know the truth — in a word, to know himself — so that by knowing and loving God, men and women can come to the fullness of the truth about themselves. (FR 1).” Truth is discovered through the interacti...
Aquinas, in the Summa Theologiae, stated that, “Man should not seek to know what is above reason.” His argument was, in very simple terms, that men need reason to understand all of God’s truths. Yet there are certain truths that are beyond reason which men can only understand through Divine Revelation, or faith. And sometimes there might be certain aspects of faith that one day reason might have been able to prove but only a few men would know and understand this, so it is necessary that all men know this through Divine Revelation and faith.
Firstly, let us discuss the argument of faith vs. reason. Faith and reason will always be in conflict with one another, especially between the non-believers and the believers of the Christian faith. According to French mathematician Blaise Pascal, there is no rational proof for God’s existence. Pascal, however, argued that it is justifiable to believe in God if you assume he does exist. Let us imagine that God does exist but you get external punishment all because you did not believe i...
Human reason has in many instances saved individuals and the humanity as a whole from terrible outcomes. Somehow, reasoning is to judge the situation we met and give a approximated outcomes of future like a mathematical induction. Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels is the example of an individual who used reason to expose an inner-self in a process just like ‘self-discovery'. Swift begins the story with very limited knowledge of the world and the nature of society. Similarly, Voltaire in Candide undertakes a similar journey of self-discovery as he tours across the world. Both of these authors portray a common attribute of faith in their beliefs. Although their optimism is barely evident
The example of justification can be classified in different ways such as the origin of the justification, in from the other sources, the personal experiences, and our instincts that can collide with emotions. Throughout this essay I’ll explain different