Is Disbelief Rational?

July 13, 2016 by Tom Gilson

Continued from Page 1

When it comes to the resurrection there's room to wonder about that. Study atheists' objections and you'll find they uniformly start off something like this: "Resurrection from the dead is impossible, therefore what really happened must have been something else." Either that, or (following Hume), "Miracles happen so rarely, we must always assume some other explanation instead." As C. S. Lewis put it, however,

If [miracles] have never happened, why then they never have. Unfortunately we know the experience against them to be uniform only if we know that all the reports of them are false. And we can know all the reports to be false only if we know already that miracles have never occurred. In fact, we are arguing in a circle.

…which is fallacious, and thus irrational in the proper sense of the term.

So what have I shown — that faith is rational? No. It would be going beyond the bounds of good reason to say I'd demonstrated that much. Rather I've given reasons to believe that rumors of its irrationality are prejudiced, premature, and probably based in poor reasoning — at least until we consider the evidence, which atheists say doesn't exist or that Christians don't pay it proper attention. It does, and we do.

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7/13/2016 4:00:00 AM

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