Disengaged Reason and Belief In God

It is sometimes assumed that the appropriate way to reflect on whether to believe in God is to consider philosophical arguments about whether God is needed as an explanation of the physical universe. I argue that treating this relatively disengaged form of reasoning as a primary way of deciding for or against religious belief confuses the issue by making belief in God into a kind of theoretical question. Rather than treating the idea of God as the answer to a question about how to explain the universe, I argue that we should treat it as an answer to the practical question of how to live. This question arises in the context of exercising agency within a value-laden world, and it is at this level that one can consider features of human experience that tend to drop out of our theoretical reflection, but are vital to acquiring or maintaining religious belief