"5 Reasons: Why I Still Believe in God" - DAY 8

Day 8 – the limitations of theological arguments

I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God.  –BERTRAND RUSSELL

Theists will never be able to prove God's existence, if by "proof" we mean evidence beyond any doubt. Their arguments may be reasonable but will never be absolute. Their logic may be compelling and sensible but will always end shy of certainty, leaving faith (based on the evidence at hand) as the final bridge to belief. 

The flip side is that atheists cannot prove their position either. They, too, use rational arguments to support their beliefs, but these likewise yield an inevitable degree of dubiety. They do not possess a monopoly on certainty any more than the theists.

In short, neither the theist nor the atheist can prove beyond any doubt that God exists or does not.¹

Daily Quotation

Bertrand Russell, What I Believe (New York: C. P. Dutton and Co., 1925), 13.

¹The atheist is less likely than the theist to approach certainty. He has the unenviable task of trying to prove a negative. His job is to prove that God is not, while the theist’s is to prove that God is. The philosophers tell us that his task, for this reason, is much more difficult. See “The Absurdity of Atheism” in Steve Kumar’s Christianity for Skeptics.