Rational proofs of God fail because belief acceptance is not reasoned
Evidence
Not surprisingly, Pascal was not fond of the attempts by many medieval Christian theologians, known as Christian Apologetics, to prove the existence of God by means of reason and evidence. He thought these attempts were misguided and missed the point. He was on to something: apologetics is doomed to failure as a philosophical enterprise because it fails to capture how our minds accept the plausibility of religious belief. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 596
Categorization
- SEED: An essay angle: the debate over whether apologetics ever persuades, given that belief plausibility is gut-level rather than proof-driven.
- XREF: connects to: Religious disagreement could supposedly be settled through necessary rational proofs rather than authority.; Scholastic theology assumed faith could be proven rationally to infidels; Faith that tries to transcend knowledge is destroyed by that very attempt — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 42 (+10 more)
- yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Religious disagreement could supposedly be settled through necessary rational proofs rather than authority.; Scholastic theology assumed faith could be proven rationally to infidels; Faith that tries to transcend knowledge is destroyed by that very attempt — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 42 (+10 more)
Broader Connections
- A belief’s lack of supporting evidence signals how deeply it is held as commonsense
#complicates(0.73) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2760