Guide to Critical Thinking

A Closer Look: Warrants for the Belief in God
Striving for warranted judgments might seem difficult when 
it comes to beliefs that we have accepted on faith. Note that 
not all that we accept on faith is necessarily related to God or 
religion. For example, we likely have faith that the sun will rise 
tomorrow, that our spouses are honest with us, and that the car 
we parked at the mall will still be there when we return from 
shopping. Many American children have faith that the tooth 
fairy will exchange money for baby teeth and that Santa Claus 
will bring toys come Christmas. Are we reasoning correctly by 
judging such beliefs as warranted? Whatever your answer in 
regard to these other issues, questions of religious belief are 
more likely to be held up as beyond the reach of logic. It is 
important to recognize this idea is far from being obviously 
true. Many deeply religious people have nonetheless found it 
advisable to offer arguments in support of their beliefs.
One such individual was Thomas Aquinas, a 13th-century Roman 
Catholic Dominican priest and philosopher. In his Summa Theo-
logica (Aquinas, 1947), he advanced five logical arguments for 
God’s existence that do not depend on faith.
The 20th-century Oxford scholar and Christian apologist C. S. Lewis, perhaps best known for 
the popular children’s series The Chronicles of Narnia, did not embrace his Anglican religion 
until he was in his thirties. In his books Mere Christianity and Miracles: A Preliminary Study, he 
employs reason to defend Christian beliefs and the logical possibility of miracles.
There are, of course, many more examples. The important point to draw from this is that all 
of our judgments of faith—from the faith in the sun rising tomorrow to the faith in the exis-
tence of God—should be warranted beliefs and not just beliefs that we readily accept without 
question. In other words, even faith should make sense in order to be able to communicate 
such beliefs to those who do not share those beliefs. Note that philosophers who have pre-
sented arguments in defense of their religious views have helped transform the nature of reli-
gious disagreement to one in which the differences are generally debated in an intellectually 
enlightening way.
We have not yet reached the point in which differences in religious views are no longer the 
cause of wars or killing. Nonetheless, the power of argument in the formation of our beliefs is 
that it supports social harmony despite diversity and disagreement in views, and we all gain 
from presenting our unique positions in debated issues.
Photos.com/Thinkstock
In his Summa Theologica, 
Thomas Aquinas advanced the 
idea that belief in the existence 
of God can be grounded in 
logical argument.
warranted judgments—is as essential as learning to read and write. Knowledge of logic is a 
relatively tiny morsel of information compared to all that you know thus far, but it has the 
capacity to change your life for the better.
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Section 1.4 
Arguments Outside of Logic