Mr J’s trial: an affirmation of belief in God.
My trial is about reconciling faith and reason. About wanting to believe in God (I do) and an afterlife despite there being no solid, rational argument for the existence of God/afterlife. I am familiar with just about every rational argument for God and my conclusion is that they suck (please no one take any offense by this, for there are a great number of people I respect and am profoundly influenced by who think there are). Despite this, I have many a reason to believe in God. I have achieved this through the guidance of the philosopher Unamuno. I am guided by him not because he changed my mind, but rather because he underwent the sheer agony of figuring out why, despite the above, people like me still believe in God.
While most of Unamuno’s work argued vehemently for the irrational side of life, he fully recognized rational thought. The battle between the rational and irrational produced the tragic sense of life for him as he was unable to “dominate or violate the other”. This led him to philosophize not only with reason but his whole will and personality; he felt required to fulfill the needs of passion and was unable to do so with reason. This is because what we are, our existence cannot be objectivized but only grasped through pure subjectivity. I’ll let the following Unamuno quote summarize and explain the above:

“ I frankly confess that the supposed rational proofs ... of the existence of God, prove to me nothing; that all the reasons adduced to show that God exists appear to me based on sophistry and begging the question... nobody has succeeded in convincing me rationally of the existence of God, nor yet of his nonexistence ... if I believe in God it is, first of all, because I wish that God may exist, and then because He is revealed to me through the challenge of the heart.”

Unamuno felt we have a vital need to believe in God, in immortality, as without it there is no meaning in the Universe. I cannot explain here why Unamuno supported this vital need, but I will try to give a brief outline of mine.

Simply put, it comes down to the fact that I myself cannot accept there is no God/no afterlife. I am not sure why. I am not afraid of hell nor am I looking forward to Heaven. Yet I need God, and he is there when I need him. My very existence makes me needs believe; it leads me to find and know God, no matter how hard reason bats it down ( I suppose this would be heaven so one could argue I am looking forward to it). I would love to describe these experiences in this blog for I think that is why were are writing in it; not to argue for or against God, but to to describe our shared experiences, our journey. Perhaps, given Mr’s A permission, I will do so. But Just in case I am wrong about there being a God, I will let Senancour console me:

“ Man is perishable. That may be; but let us perish resisting, and if it is nothingness that awaits us, do not let us so act that is be a just fate.”