Part I – Beliefs and Reasoning

There has been much debate between theists and atheists. There has also been much debate between theists who hold different specific beliefs. What reasoning can one have to hold a certain set of beliefs? Many people don’t have much reasoning, or any reasoning at all, to explain why they believe what they do. Some don’t care to find such reasoning, while others continue searching for answers. How could a person be satisfied without being able to explain their own beliefs? How could a person be so indifferent that they don’t question all of existence, or at least their own existence? I believe everyone should ask themselves what they believe and why they hold the beliefs that they do. Asking questions leads to obtaining answers and answers are what we should seek. So we should start by asking questions rather than making assumptions or just not caring enough to investigate.

I had an experience with my nephew in which he continued to ask “Why?”. This, of course, is common behavior for a child. Adults sometimes get frustrated by such a line of questioning because the continuous asking of “Why?” seems unnecessary and because they struggle to come up with more answers. However, there is an important aspect of such a line of questioning that often goes unnoticed. Children that continue to ask “Why?” show an incredible understanding for the principle of sufficient reason, which states that everything must have a reason or a cause. This principle is often attributed to Gottfried Leibniz, a German logician, mathematician, and philosopher who lived in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although, there were philosophers who preceded him who conceived and utilized such an idea, including Anaximander, Parmenides, Archimedes, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Avicenna, Thomas Aquinas, and Spinoza.

If we adopt the curiosity of a child and continue to ask “Why?”, can our curiosity ever be satisfied? Would such curiosity be endless? How could such a line of questioning ever end? Lines of questioning that continuously ask “Why?” move us backwards in the line of reasoning, meaning we are in a position of knowing results without necessarily knowing reasoning. This is the movement that can always produce endless questioning, even if the same answer, or answers, are repeated into infinity. The endless questioning could only be satisfied through endless reasoning. To answer these questions and satisfy the endless line of questioning, we would need to start on the other side of the endless questioning, so we are in a position of knowing reasoning without necessarily knowing results. We would then be moving forward in the line of reasoning instead of backwards. How would we do that?

There is an ultimate question that we will arrive at if we continue to ask “Why?”. Why is there existence instead of non-existence? Once we seek an answer to this ultimate question, we begin to move forward in the line of reasoning. Some, called rejectionists, believe there isn’t a reason. Eliminating reasoning would eliminate justification. Therefore, such a belief is unjustifiable and we should dismiss it from consideration. The only way to develop justifiable beliefs is to proceed with the assumption that there is a reason why there is existence instead of non-existence. We begin with an investigation about this reason.