If God exists, is analytical reasoning the way to reach him & understand him, or is it necessary to place faith in him?

[Melisa Jane]

BOOK WEBSITE: https://ygodallowsevil.com



In Part II of the book, the author argues that faith is necessary to establish a loving relationship with God. He writes that "cold, calculating logic" alone is never adequate to reach God because analytical reasoning is not the key to love: "Faith's primacy over cold, calculating logic arises from the fact that faith, not reason, is the indispensable action necessary for the experience of relational love. Even the most educated, intelligent person on Earth cannot analyze his way to the experience of relational love. Because salvation consists of the experience of an eternal loving relationship between man and God, the decision to place faith in God is the act that determines whether a person enters into this relationship, not the act of engaging in reason-based analysis."



What are your thoughts on this? Is it really necessary to place faith in God? Is God being unreasonable by insisting on our trust? Rather than place trust in God, why can't we just reason our way to a loving relationship with him? Is faith/trust really necessary for the experience of love?

[D-řẹäł Odinakachukwu]

Analytical reasoning can lead us toward understanding God, but faith is essential to truly connect with Him. Faith and reason work together, with faith deepening our insight beyond analysis alone.

[Surf M]

Faith. Always faith. Nothing worse than going through analytical thinking— it’s more critical than we could ever comprehend.

[Alicia Howell-Munson]

Viewing it the same as loving and understanding anyone, even non-deities, analytical reasoning and logic are never sufficient. There needs to be a more emotional component to it, such as faith or trust, to be able to share that connection with any individual, including god.

[Neha Panikar]

Great question!! Faith and trust in oneself, reiterated with the belief that everything happening is for a reason, and is for our benefit ultimately, can come from analytical reasoning, introspection and resulting into trust in God. I don't believe in doing good things to attain salvation, because makes it sound manipulative. True goodness is when you do it with your best intentions with a genuine desire to help or make things better.

[Bettny Andrade]

On some occasions, depending on the level of awareness of each individual, analytical thinking helps a lot to understand these issues better and take advantage of them. However, in general terms, faith is what drives many issues that, in their complete expression, would be considered "miracles", which are usually attributed to certain saints, religions, gods, among others, according to the beliefs of each person.

[Love Ukaegbu]

I doubt anybody can serve any God without Faith.

[Gerry Steen]

We must have faith in God. We cannot prove that God exists. We need God to exist. We need to believe God's teachings in the Bibles. Faith and love are intertwined to enable us to follow God. We must have faith that something is true to use analytical reasoning. No matter what, we need to have faith in order to understand something.

[Leslie coccia]

I think that God can be reached and understood through analytical reasoning and through faith. It doesn’t have to be either/or. I think there’s a general consensus that with analytical reasoning, there can’t be faith and that conversely, if a person has faith in God they can’t be analytical. To me that just doesn’t make sense. It just depends on the believer’s way of seeing and thinking about things.

[KeishaMoore]

The best way of looking at it is relating this to our relationship with our biological father, do you reason your way to a loving relationship with your biological father or do you just trust him to get things done the right way? Majority of the answer would be trusting him and sometimes, you might end up disappointed when he does what you didn't expect. So analyzing will take us no where with God just as it would take us no where with our biological fathers. And God doesn't impose His trust on us but allows us to make that decision to trust him on our own.