Can reason prove Christianity is true?

  • Thread starter Thread starter SMateja
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SMateja:
He kept saying, “reason tells me that i see a tree, and the tree exists. I don’t see, hear, smell, or talk to God, therefore he doesn’t exist.”
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Can he see, hear, smell or talk to his own thoughts?
 
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SMateja:
I got into a pretty heated debate with this older guy who was wearing a tee shirt that said, “Reason is the only virtue, and it proves God doesn’t exist!”

I was pretty much taken aback by his shirt but approached him non-the-less. I planted a seed to say the least but, i feel that i didn’t do that great of a job explaining how reason proves that God does exist.

He kept saying, “reason tells me that i see a tree, and the tree exists. I don’t see, hear, smell, or talk to God, therefore he doesn’t exist.”

Can some of you help me to prove reason and the existence of God, we have set up another meeting in the future to discuss this issue further.

God love you and thank you.
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Can I give you a piece of advice?
  • Always pause for thought (and prayer) before such encounters.
  • If at all possible make your opponent defend HIS position rather than YOU burdening yourself with a proof. He was the one making the claim to prove God didn’t exist. Somehow now we’ve slipped into US proving God exists - why? He’s the one with the stupid shirt…let him demonstrate his point and then reveal an error of his demonstration. Party’s over.
  • Learn to apply the “syllogism” to logic. His argument can be restated as a syllogism(1.Premise 2. Premise 3.Conclusion). The premise is a statement of fact that both parties acknowledge as truth. The conclusion is a statement DERIVED OF NECESSITY from the simultaneous truth of the premises. His argument in syllogistic form would be something like this:
  1. My sensory perceptions allow detection of reality and through reason these senses provide awareness of all things in existence.
  2. My sensory perceptions do not detect the existence of God
    Conclusion: Therefore God does not exist.
Once you have the core of his argument stated in such a fashion, your job is to restate it for him in your new form, allow him to agree with the form you have stated it in, and then attack either of the Premises as being less than full truth or attack the conclusion as false. Probably the most common way of attacking conclusions is through the test of “necessity” Is the conclusion NECESSARILY reached if the premises are accepted?

Lets start with his Premise 1: The first point you should make is that the existence of reason can’t be demonstrated by his method! If he could point it out so that you could "see, hear, smell, or talk to " it you’d go along with his game, but as it stands he has no justification for his reason. Now I wouldn’t advocate such an approach, because you do acknowledge reason as existing, as does he, but his means of declaring God as non-existent also declares reason as being non-existent. Therefore if he acknowledges reason exists he has acknolwedge that his argument regarding the non-existence of God is erroneous.
The most obvious problem with Premise 1 is that he has claimed that his senses are capable of detecting ALL of reality. How could he possibly know this. We know for a fact that certain things are beyond the unaided senses(for example microscopic life, infrared/UV light, etc) and that for millenia people would have used his argument to “prove” bacteria don’t exist, nor does “invisible light”. It is simply an opinion of his that the senses can detect all reality.
On to Premise 2:
There isn’t much to argue about here, only that sensation and perception are separate. It’s more accurate to say that one is “unaware of my senses detecting” something than to say that they don’t in fact detect it. They may, in fact, be detecting God but he is unaware of it.

The Conclusion
To be most accurate, the conclusion may be true, but we can’t regard it as truth because he has a faulty premise. Instead of saying it’s false, we should just say that it can only be regarded as his opinion since he had a faulty premise.

This is an approach you will find useful for almost any issue two people wish to debate. It is an excellent discipline to strip an argument down to a couple premises and a conclusion. Once done, you can concentrate on the validity of the premises first, and if they hold up, then move to consider the NECESSITY of the conclusion.

Good Luck,

Phil
 
It is impossible to “prove” (beyond any doubt) that God exsist. Reasoning can tell you “well nothing comes from nothing and I see all of this before me, so God must exsist, how else would all of this be here, unless the universe is itself eternal.”

Science can never prove nor disprove the exsistence of God either, it deals with the physical and God is Spiritual. However there are many awesome aspects to Christianity. The Scientific insights in the Old Testament, archeology discoveries, historian evidence on the exsistense of Christ, and to my knowledge, Christianity is the only religon that it is by “Grace” that mankind is saved. Every other religon to my knowledge seems to praise mankind or it is constructed by mankind out weighing his bad works with his good works to be able to enter heaven. To follow Christ you know is no easy task, you would think that the ancient martyrs would never have thought to willing die for Christ is they didn’t believe what they saw with their own eyes, the resurectional Christ!

I would rather have a heart of compassion than a mind of a genuiess

God give you peace:)
 
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