Is Believing in God Irrational? PDF Download

Author: Amy Orr-Ewing
Publisher: IVP Books
ISBN: 9780830833535
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 142

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Book Description
Is God really real? And how can we know if anyone's experience of God is actually valid? Skeptics today are increasingly vocal in their assertion not only that God is unverifiable, but also that believing in God is irrational and even dangerous. Even those who believe wonder if they can speak objectively about the actual reality of God or if they can only appeal to a subjective belief in God. Amy Orr-Ewing addresses key questions and objections that many people today have about God. She explores whether our understanding of God is delusional or merely a psychological crutch. She probes whether the Christian claim to a unique personal relationship with God is plausible in light of other world religions, and how anyone can continue to believe in God in a world of pain and suffering. If you have questions about God, you're not alone. Come consider some possible answers.

Author: Anthony L. Taylor
Publisher: Xulon Press
ISBN: 9781629524450
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 82

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Book Description
Life definitely comes with its difficulties, uncertainties and questions of what the next step will be for you and your family. Some people choose to rely on their own strength and understanding to overcome the challenges in their way, while others may just let despair take over and convince themselves no solution is available. However, true believers in Jesus Christ know that through their salvation in Him, God hears, recognizes and will bless those who love and trust in Him. These believers have what author Anthony Taylor calls Irrational Faith, the title of his newest book that focuses on keeping believers' eyes on God while in complicated situations. Irrational faith comes through in heartfelt, groundbreaking decisions that a believer makes in order to surpass their negative outlook on their situation while faithfully seeking the will of God. From making the decision to accept Jesus as their savior to being tireless in prayer and patience, believers will become acquainted to God's voice and direction for their journey through life. Our attitude alone cannot define our faith. Faith must be developed by obeying God's word through the storms of life. It is during these times that we rely on God's provision, promises and overall concern for us revealed in His word. Anthony uses the familiar life stories of Rahab, Noah, Abraham and others to exemplify how each were faced with similar opposition in different scenarios, and received God's abundant blessings when they relinquished their lives to Him. By allowing God to take over the reins of your life, you, as the believer, are ready to face the obstacles in your path, with the full force of the Savior and Heavenly Father in front. Seeing follows believing when you give everything over to God, and find freedom in your breakthrough from sin. Anthony L. Taylor is a U.S. Army Chaplain, and one of today's dynamic speakers on the themes of faith development, spiritual resilience, empowerment, goal-setting, marriage and family wellness. He previously served as a senior pastor in Norfolk, Virginia from 1992 to 2000. He holds a Master of Divinity degree from Howard University, a MFT degree from Texas A&M Central TX, a CPE Certification from Riverside Regional Medical Center and a Doctor of Ministry degree from United Theological Seminary. Anthony and his wife, Paula, are the parents of three grown children, and reside in Central, Texas.

Author: Christopher Hitchens
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
ISBN: 1551991764
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Christopher Hitchens, described in the London Observer as “one of the most prolific, as well as brilliant, journalists of our time” takes on his biggest subject yet–the increasingly dangerous role of religion in the world. In the tradition of Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian and Sam Harris’s recent bestseller, The End Of Faith, Christopher Hitchens makes the ultimate case against religion. With a close and erudite reading of the major religious texts, he documents the ways in which religion is a man-made wish, a cause of dangerous sexual repression, and a distortion of our origins in the cosmos. With eloquent clarity, Hitchens frames the argument for a more secular life based on science and reason, in which hell is replaced by the Hubble Telescope’s awesome view of the universe, and Moses and the burning bush give way to the beauty and symmetry of the double helix.

Author: Merlin Stone
Publisher: Doubleday
ISBN: 0307816850
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
Here, archaeologically documented,is the story of the religion of the Goddess. Under her, women’s roles were far more prominent than in patriarchal Judeo-Christian cultures. Stone describes this ancient system and, with its disintegration, the decline in women’s status.

Author: Michael Bergmann
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780199671854
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Eleven original essays by philosophers and biblical scholars addressing the character of God as portrayed in the Hebrew Bible. Includes a critical commentary on each essay by another author, and replies to the critical comments by the original author.

Author: Lee Strobel
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 1458759202
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 510

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Book Description
The book consists primarily of interviews between Strobel (a former legal editor at the Chicago Tribune) and biblical scholars such as Bruce Metzger. Each interview is based on a simple question, concerning historical evidence (for example, "Can the Biographies of Jesus Be Trusted?"), scientific evidence, ("Does Archaeology Confirm or Contradict Jesus' Biographies?"), and "psychiatric evidence" ("Was Jesus Crazy When He Claimed to Be the Son of God?"). Together, these interviews compose a case brief defending Jesus' divinity, and urging readers to reach a verdict of their own.

Author: Jerome I. Gellman
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801433207
Category : Experience (Religion)
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Jerome I. Gellman observes that the mystic experience of God's presence, a sense of having direct contact with the divine, often compels belief in God's existence. On the basis of widely accepted principles connecting appearance with reality, Gellman contends, the claims people make of having experienced God show that belief in God is strongly rational, meaning that such claims are sufficient in number and variety to support a line of reasoning making it rational to believe that God exists and irrational to deny God's existence. Gellman considers challenges to his thinking based on epistemological grounds and challenges growing out of the diversity of religious experiences across the range of world religions. He thoroughly evaluates reductionist explanations of apparent experiences of God and finds them incapable of invalidating his view. Finally, he directs his attention to the two most compelling arguments against the existence of God: the charge that the idea of a perfect being is logically incoherent, and the threat to theism based on the existence of evil, in both its logical and probabilistic forms. Until and unless stronger objections come along, he concludes, personal experiences of God constitute sufficient evidence of God's existence.

Author: Francis Collins
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1847396151
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
Dr Francis S. Collins, head of the Human Genome Project, is one of the world's leading scientists, working at the cutting edge of the study of DNA, the code of life. Yet he is also a man of unshakable faith in God. How does he reconcile the seemingly unreconcilable? In THE LANGUAGE OF GOD he explains his own journey from atheism to faith, and then takes the reader on a stunning tour of modern science to show that physics, chemistry and biology -- indeed, reason itself -- are not incompatible with belief. His book is essential reading for anyone who wonders about the deepest questions of all: why are we here? How did we get here? And what does life mean?

Author: Robert Audi
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191619523
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Rationality and Religious Commitment shows how religious commitment can be rational and describes the place of faith in the postmodern world. It portrays religious commitment as far more than accepting doctrines—it is viewed as a kind of life, not just as an embrace of tenets. Faith is conceived as a unique attitude. It is irreducible to belief but closely connected with both belief and conduct, and intimately related to life's moral, political, and aesthetic dimensions. Part One presents an account of rationality as a status attainable by mature religious people—even those with a strongly scientific habit of mind. Part Two describes what it means to have faith, how faith is connected with attitudes, emotions, and conduct, and how religious experience may support it. Part Three turns to religious commitment and moral obligation and to the relation between religion and politics. It shows how ethics and religion can be mutually supportive even though ethics provides standards of conduct independently of theology. It also depicts the integrated life possible for the religiously committed—a life with rewarding interactions between faith and reason, religion and science, and the aesthetic and the spiritual. The book concludes with two major accounts. One explains how moral wrongs and natural disasters are possible under God conceived as having the knowledge, power, and goodness that make such evils so difficult to understand. The other account explores the nature of persons, human and divine, and yields a conception that can sustain a rational theistic worldview even in the contemporary scientific age.

Author: Edward Feser
Publisher: Ignatius Press
ISBN: 1681497808
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
This book provides a detailed, updated exposition and defense of five of the historically most important (but in recent years largely neglected) philosophical proofs of God’s existence: the Aristotelian, the Neo-Platonic, the Augustinian, the Thomistic, and the Rationalist. It also offers a thorough treatment of each of the key divine attributes—unity, simplicity, eternity, omnipotence, omniscience, perfect goodness, and so forth—showing that they must be possessed by the God whose existence is demonstrated by the proofs. Finally, it answers at length all of the objections that have been leveled against these proofs. This work provides as ambitious and complete a defense of traditional natural theology as is currently in print. Its aim is to vindicate the view of the greatest philosophers of the past— thinkers like Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, Leibniz, and many others— that the existence of God can be established with certainty by way of purely rational arguments. It thereby serves as a refutation both of atheism and of the fideism that gives aid and comfort to atheism.