UDK: 141.4:261.32
AutHor
Marko P. Đurić
Summary
In this article, I start from the claim that our belief in one God, the Creator (Genesis, 1, 1; Qur’an, 7, 29) can be first justified before our reason/mind. Our belief hence, first of all, is not a “blind leap into something” nor a risk of any kind, and that’s what it would first be according to Barth, and the quotation from the book of the prophet Isaiah (Is. 50, 10).Wherein when I make all these claims, with possible objection by Protestant and Orthodox fideism, I refer to the Old Testament book of Wisdom (13, 1, 5) and the Apostle Paul (Romans, 1, 19, 20). According to them, we will be closer to Him through our reflection also. When it comes to a Muslim’s belief in God, I first remember Goethe’s statement, in which he says: “Islam is … suitable to reason”. Based on the above sentence, the Book of Wisdom and the Apostle Paul (Romans, 1, 19, 20),I am saying the following: Islamic and Christian belief in God is in the synthesis of man’s intellect and his logic. Although Christian crowd didn’taccept belief in evangelical truth by relying on reason but on miracles and realized prophecy, patrology and scholasticism and the greatest apologists of the Church always were for the Augustine option that says, “When religion is not intended, it is nothing” (De vera religionem, VII 12, Introduction). Although we remember Horkheimer by his “Dialectic of Enlightenment”, heis now remembered for his Critique of Enlightenment Reason, which he finds guilty of many things: the emergence of positivist reason incapable of making the question about God important, the emergence of heartless capitalism that establishes the rule of money, and the emergence of fascism and other negative ideologies. Otherwise according to Horkheimer, the question of whether our belief can be justified before our reason, is a question for mind rather than reason, because Horkheimer recognises significant differences between them….
As we will not be able to justify our faith in the Trinity God, but we will always be able to justify our faith in one God the Creator, St.Gregory of Nyssa asks: “How can it be that one and the same isequally aged and countableand evades the count at the same time?… How can it differ in persons while it is inseparable in its essence” asks the saint and the theologian of Nyssa.
Protestant theologian Barth remembers hristological paradox that is all in the claim that Jesus was a true God and a true man in one Personand, according to him, believing in God in the Christian way, has no solid support so it is like a man’s “suspended state”. Since the Christological paradox can not be rationally solved, all then is a matter of grace. Muslim philosopher Averroes made reason “a judge of faith and reduced its truths to the level of the initial philosophical truths”.
Key words
God, Kant, Augustine, mind, intellect (reason), theology, Islam, Christianity
URL: https://www.ibn-sina.net/en/can-our-belief-in-one-god-the-creator-be-justified-before-our-reason/