Letter: Is belief in God rational?

The statement “the existence of God is very, very improbable” is complete nonsense. Since God — if he does exist — does not belong to the empirical world, empirical sciences (physics, biology, psychology, etc.) cannot make any statements about God, whether the existence God is probable or “improbable”.

The question “whether it is rational to believe in God?” (The Jakarta Post, Dec. 22) comes down to the question of whether or not it is irrational to believe in something that cannot be verified empirically.

As philosopher Kant showed convincingly, you cannot even verify the existence of “I” empirically. But is it irrational to believe in one’s own I? But does it make sense (i.e. is it positively rational) to believe in God? This question can, obviously, only be answered by a believer since a non-believer, precisely because he does not believe, cannot know what believers experience. God’s existence is then rational when it helps the believer to understand his or her existence better.

If non-believers want to understand why God makes sense for believers, they have to enter into communication with them and enter their world of existential experience.

When Dawkins (evolution) and Hawking (cosmogony) try to show that you can explain the universe and our planet with us humans without invoking God, they are, of course, right: Believers also reject a “God of gaps” (Dawkins’ term), because in a created world, natural processes would also evolve according to the laws of nature.

What they fail to explain satisfactorily is the horrendous improbability of a purely incidental origin of this world (it is less than 1 out of 101,000,000 other possibilities).

Their only explanation up to now, that there might exist more than 101,000,000 universes (of which our universe is but one), is a purely ad-hoc theory. In principle, it cannot even be proved empirically, since empirical methods can only prove what is possible in the universe we experience. Believers, on the other hand, do have an answer.

Franz Magnis-Suseno SJ
Jakarta