I have always been a believer. Among other reasons, that’s because I think rationality demands it.

The Reasonableness of Religious Belief

by Rachel Lu

I have always been a believer. Among other reasons, 

that’s because I think rationality demands it.

When I talk about “belief” here, I mean it in a very broad sense, which is not synonymous with “Catholic” or even “Christian”; Sikhs, Hindus and Zoroastrians might all qualify, and I myself was raised in the LDS church and not (according to Rome’s decree) validly baptized until the age of 25. When I speak here of “believers,” I am distinguishing those who are prepared to believe in more than what eye can see, ear can hear or elaborate scientific machine can detect.

I wouldn’t mind if someone also wanted to refer to this group of believers as “non-materialists.” That would point us towards the same divide between those who seek to explain everything that exists or occurs reductively, as a complex interaction of quarks and atoms and firing neurons, and those who are prepared to consider explanations that refer to what lies beyond the merely physical.

Of course, the differences between believers themselves are vast and highly consequential, and I do not at all mean to trivialize them. Some believers commit themselves to deeply malignant forces, while others are so frivolous and inconsistent as to give real justification to those skeptics who take religion to be just a collection of just-so stories designed to comfort the weak-minded. In the very broad sense that I have just delineated, a person could even be a believer without committing himself to any specific metaphysical worldview. I myself was an “uncommitted believer” at one time. In one sense, then, it doesn’t take much to be a believer, and there have probably been whole epochs of history in which almost everyone alive would qualify.

Still, in this day and age, it isn’t nothing. Despite enormous differences, believers are natural allies in the midst of a gravely serious conflict. Although Catholics are today embattled from many sides, I myself believe that the most epic spiritual battle of our time is not with Muslims or Protestants or political liberals, but rather with the deadening spirit of secular materialism, which cloaks itself in the guise of reason and enlightenment, and ultimately consumes all its children into a black pit of nothingness.

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