Thomas Doubting inquires,
I’ve met and talked to a number of people who, while originally atheists, have found faith in God and become active Christians as result of their intellectual pursuit that led them to the conclusion that God is logically necessary.
There is an ambiguity regarding 'logically necessary' that needs to be removed. Suppose there is a sound deductive argument A for the existence of God. Necessarily, if the premises of A are all true, then A's conclusion -- God exists -- is true. That is not to be confused with: If the premises of A are all true, then A's conclusion -- God exists -- is necessarily true.
The necessitas consequentiae must not be confused with the necessitas consequentis. See my separate post on this topic. The premises of a sound argument logically necessitate its conclusion, but that does not imply that the conclusion is logically necessary.
So even if one succeeds in demonstrating the existence of God, one has not thereby demonstrated the existence of a necessary being. For one might have succeeded only in demonstrating the existence of a logically contingent being.
I will read you as saying that there are people who come to faith in God via deductive arguments that they consider to be sound, just that, without the additional idea that the God so demonstrated is a necessary being.
Other relevant sources of ambiguity: Are you thinking of persons whose faith is SOLELY based on argumentative considerations? Are the argumentative considerations demonstrative only, or are probabilistic considerations relevant?
I will assume an affirmative answer to both questions.
I've always wanted to know, but was a bit uncomfortable to ask, how well are they prepared to deal with a quite conceivable situation where they should accidentally discover that their investigation was logically flawed and from the rational point their conclusion is not valid and, therefore the their faith in God’s existence has no logical grounding.
In other words, if your intellect guided you on the road to God and in the years following the finding of God you developed strong faith in and love for God would you still cling to your faith if you had suddenly discovered that the reasoning that brought you to Him was defective?
Suppose someone comes to accept the existence of God on the basis of one or more arguments, but then discovers that those arguments are flawed. It would not follow from this that the person's reasoned faith has no logical grounding. For there could easily be other arguments that establish the existence of God.
So your question is better put as follows. "Suppose a person who became a theist solely on the basis of arguments comes to believe that there is no extant argument that demonstrates the existence of God. Would that person be justified in clinging to his faith in God?"
The question is interesting and important but also very complicated. I'll just make a couple of points.
Does the person also believe that there is no extant argument that demonstrates the non-existence of God? Suppose that is the case. Then the person has three beliefs: that God exists; that God's existence cannot be demonstrated; that God's non-existence cannot be demonstrated. Is he rationally justified in holding all three? The theoretically-rational course would be to suspend judgment on the question of God's existence by neither affirming that God exists nor denying that God exists.
But there is also prudential rationality to consider. If the arguments pro et contra cancel out, then God might or might not exist for all we know. Believing would then be the prudentially rational thing to do, and pragmatically useful to boot. This is because the question of the existence of God is not a merely theoretical question, but one that bears upon our ultimate happiness and well-being.
If, on the other hand, the person in question has come to believe that some argument demonstrates the non-existence of God, then to be rational he ought to reject belief in God. Or so it will seem to most.
But it is not that clear. Suppose one believes that there are no good arguments for the existence of God, but there are good arguments for the nonexistence of God, arguments from evil, say. Suppose the person is also skeptical about the power of reason to decide such a weighty, metaphysical question.
Would it not be prudentially rational for him to go on believing? After all, God might exist. And what would one lose by believing? What one would lose by believing would be as nothing as compared to what one might gain by believing and coming into right relation with God.
Related: Is it Sometimes Rational to Believe on Insufficient Evidence?
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