The Rationality of Belief in the Reality of God
Religion deals with the fundamental relations between fact and value. God is defined as a Cosmic Mind that is conserving and creating value. (1) Rational belief in God rests on organized religious experience. The special marks of developed religious experience are spiritual renewal, insight, and mor...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
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| Published: |
University of Chicago Press
1922
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| In: |
The journal of religion
Year: 1922, Volume: 2, Issue: 5, Pages: 449-465 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (JSTOR) Volltext (kostenfrei) |
| Summary: | Religion deals with the fundamental relations between fact and value. God is defined as a Cosmic Mind that is conserving and creating value. (1) Rational belief in God rests on organized religious experience. The special marks of developed religious experience are spiritual renewal, insight, and moral creativity. On the knowledge side religious experience consists of intuitions. Such intuitions are not infallible, but when organized into a coherent body they give objective truth, especially when correlated with other organized experience. Examples of fundamental religious intuitions. (2) Belief in God is rational because the synthesis of the physical and the human sciences reveals a cosmic trend upward. Relapses, stagnations, and evils regarded as due to limiting conditions which are inherent in the task of realizing values through a process-especially when those values are moral and social. (3) Belief in God as a Cosmic Mind is rational because all reality-from the atom to stellar systems and from the cell to the highest organism-bears to some degree the marks of organization and, so far as this is so, can be regarded as evidencing the working of a Cosmic Mind. On this interpretation belief in God rests primarily on religious experience, but secondarily upon the corroborations furnished by a reasoned synthesis of experience as a whole. |
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| ISSN: | 1549-6538 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: The journal of religion
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1086/480304 |