Is faith irrational?  One man’s religion, it has been said, is another man’s belly laugh, and the variety of religious belief is astounding.  Consider what a billion or more Christians believe: A virgin peasant gave birth to a god who was killed, came back to life, rose bodily into the clouds, and can now be eaten in the form of a cracker.  Is any religion socially sanctioned lunacy-- a kind of madness—a delusion?

      There is a twilight zone between irrationality and rationality, depending on both the premises of that faith and the outcomes of that faith.  The Islamic terrorists who were willing to fly jets into the World Trade Centers and the Christian apocalyptics who are willing to risk nuclear war in the Middle East prove the irrationality of their faiths while demonstrating their rationality in enforcing their faiths.  A premise that leads an atheists to claim that all faith is irrational is also irrational as that claim is justified only by what they claim is true, not what is true.  The rationality or irrationality of faith lies in how we choose to live that faith out—the implications of that faith. The cost or political and religious irrationality for most individuals is zero, so long as those beliefs don’t manifest themselves.  Thus, we can get away with believing almost anything.  However, the more deeply held the belief, the more likely it will impact our lives, often in unpredictable and harmful ways.  So it is at that point that we need to be alert to deviations, if not from rationality, at least from reasonableness.  In so far as rationality helps us avoid mistake, it is always better to be rational than to be irrational.  In so far as rationality prevents us from enjoying life, it is always better to be irrational than to be rational.

       I think it is a mistake to describe Kierkegaard’s God as an irrational belief.  “The eternal essential truth (i.e. God) is by no means in itself a paradox,” Kierkegaard writes.  “It becomes paradoxical by virtue to its relationship to an existing individual.”)   I would argue with the Dane as to whether we can make the leap of faith at all.  The leap that has to be made is the leap of doubt.  The default worldview of humanity is not atheism but theism, and no small amount of intellectual effort is needed to step away from that theism.  My view is that theism is neither rational nor irrational but arational.  The danger of arationalism is that it leads to mysticism, individualism, and antinomianism.  Protestant doubt demolished the rational structure created by the medieval scholastics.  Luther asserted in Against Scholastic Theology that “it is an error to say that no man can become a theologian without Aristotle.  If a syllogistic form of reasoning holds in divine matters, then the doctrine of the Trinity is demonstrable and not the object of faith.  Briefly, the whole Aristotle is to theology as darkness is to light.”   The Reformation made reason the enemy and prepared the way for anarchism of faith.  Belief in the leading of the Holy Spirit, the priesthood of each believer, and the individual interpretation of Scripture led to irrationalism and anti-intellectualism.   The subsequent multiplicity of sects proved that efforts to make the Bible the standard of truth was a failure as the Holy Spirit led some to believe one doctrine and others to reject it as heresy. 

          The bridge between belief and non-belief is not reason but faith in Jesus.  If the essence of Christianity is faith and if God has revealed Himself by appealing to a facility in men and women other than reason, then argument is not enough.  Apologists for Christianity use one rational argument after another, only to find as Locke said “as far as reason will help them, make use of it gladly: and where it fails them, they cry out, ‘it is a matter of faith—and above reason.”  It’s an illusion that we can arrive through reason at a belief in God, as the ground for that belief must be reason itself.  Thus, the person who can discern through reason that God exists has only discerned that Almighty Reason exists, since reason is what that person ultimately trusts.  “God can no more prove His existence than He can swear,” Kierkegaard said. “He has nothing higher to swear by.”  The goal for validating the existence of God should be on meaning rather than reason.  Viktor Frankl, the French psychologist who survived the Nazi concentration camp, quoted Nietzche’s:  “If we have our own why to life, we shall get along with almost any how.”   People believe for the same “reason” that monkeys scramble up a tree to avoid the teeth of a hungry lion.

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