Is Faith in God Reasonable? 

In many cases, faith is the most reasonable thing you can embrace.  Say that you were climbing a large mountain and it grew dark.  Now suppose that because of the difficulty of the climb that it would be impossible to retreat off the peak at night.  The problem worsens when you learn from your radio that a storm is coming that would make the conditions hopeless to survive the night.  As you huddle on the mountain waiting for death, you remember a story told by an old man in the camp the week before.  He had mentioned that there was a hidden outcropping of rocks that forms a small ledge just below the summit and off the ledge was a small cave that one could go into to escape the weather.  He said it was marked by a small pile of rocks just a short distance beneath the summit.  However, to reach it you must jump down about ten feet, which is a large first step.  Now here is the problem.  It is dark, and you have found the marker.  However, you cannot see the ledge because it is dark.  The jump requires a leap of faith based upon the testimony of the old man.

In view of the conditions, is the leap reasonable or is more rational to be pessimistic and do nothing?  Would it be logical not to make a choice?  It seems that to both the pessimist (atheist) and the indecisive (agnostic),  a leap of faith is not the reasonable thing to do.  Both would have to choose to die on the mountain.  In this case, not to choose is to choose.  It is to choose death over the possibility of life.  What I am saying is that in some circumstances, the reasonable thing to do is to act on faith.  Sometimes reason tells us that it is not time to use reason.  In some cases, moving forward in faith is the most reasonable thing you can do.

Once the disciples of Jesus were listening to the Master, and when they turned around the crowd was walking away murmuring that they just could not believe what the Teacher was saying.  When the Teacher saw the despair on the faces of the disciples, He asked them, “Are you going to leave too?”

Their answer was their leap of faith in the midst of despair.  “Where shall we go?  You have the words of eternal life.”

Maybe you are on a mountain in the dark and in a state of despair.  Maybe the way out is to make a leap of faith in God.  If you do, you will find that it is not a leap into the abyss, but onto the Rock of Ages Who has saved millions of people.  I guarantee that you will begin to see everything differently. LD