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THE REASONABLENESS OF FAITH by Diogenes Allen

THE REASONABLENESS OF FAITH

By

Pub Date: Oct. 25th, 1968
Publisher: Corpus Books

The Reasonableness of Faith is concerned principally with the unreasonableness of faith. Kant, Hume, Bultmann, et al have eroded the traditional Aristotelico-Thomistic demonstrations of the reasonableness of belief, the author points out, and there has been no replacement for those deft and secure syllogisms. What he proposes, therefore, is that, in determining whether or not a religious position may be adopted, the need of the believer rather than the objective truth of the belief (since this latter cannot be established objectively and scientifically) be the rule against which all is measured. There are distinctions, to be sure, and refinements, articulated in the dusty cadences familiar to the readers of doctoral dissertations (such as this). What Allen is doing is laying the groundwork for a religious subjectivism in which the ""felt needs"" of the individual will be the only valid basis not only with respect to doctrine but also insofar as moral values are concerned. The thesis is, in effect, the translation from the social level to the theological level of the welfare-state mentality which maintains that ""need"" can justify any irrationality -- so long as one does not call it an irrationality. A not uninteresting position, and one that obviously will have much appeal for a generation resolved to make over Christianity in its own image.