The human species is one of the few species on the planet we know to have reasoning powers- i.e. we have the ability to predict future consequences of current actions based on past experience, both personal and cultural. Our reason and foresight has pushed us (debatably) ahead of all other species because our technology improves every generation. We have the kind of powers and abilities that other species could not begin to imagine, even in their wildest dreams, if they indeed have dreams. Evolution has moved beyond mere Darwinism for our species. Darwin couldn't possibly account for such things as, for example, sandwich toasters.

Evolution by natural selection has no intentions and no plan. Every characteristic it chooses for survival through the generations only survives through chance and random happenings. The result of generations of breeding between the members of a species that had the ability to survive in a particular environment is the variety of life around us. Humans had reasoning, foresight and an understanding of causality and this kept us constantly ahead of the competition. And being as the characteristics evolved of themselves, with no plan or motive to drive them, some perhaps unfortunate side effects came with them. So causality, the ability to find patterns in nature based around the idea of effect following cause, brought superstition along with it. We also evolved certain other characteristics which we otherwise could not, without a rational thinking mind; for example the rule we came up with to always listen to our elders and to place absolute faith in them for the sake of our own survival came about after many generations of older people warning younger people about threats to the species. This absolute and unconditional faith meant that we didn't simply believe our elders when they told us the truth but we believed them when they told us anything at all. So what was once based in reason became non-rational instinct and feeling and we followed our elders in all of their superstitions and irrational behaviour.

As mentioned above, our causality, which, when it started out was run entirely by reason, gradually eroded down to pure instinct. We began to place importance on trivial acts in the belief that they affected things like the weather. If cause always followed effect then if you didn't think about it, effect was the event that came after another event, the cause. Because logic works this way if you don't think about it. So any time our ancestors found the weather change its mood they attributed it to a certain way they moved or a certain shirt they wore that day and so whenever they needed a certain kind of weather they would behave as they did when they discovered the secret to weather-changing. Elaborate rituals built up around changing the things we couldn't. This irrationality has stuck with us over the millennia because while this particular evolutionary trait was flawed, it worked. It kept the species alive.

So today we have these ideas about mind/body duality and the soul or mind being separate from the brain and so forth. Our religions are non-rational, they defy reason. Moses and Job and Isaiah and Jesus and Muhammad and the Buddha and so forth each at least claimed, or it was claimed of them, that they had experienced something 'other' to this world. Their lives were subsequently given to revealing what they had discovered as a result of this experience. There is nothing empirically verifiable in their claims; it is entirely a matter of faith.

We cannot describe religions or anything religious using scientific, rational language because it is not based in objective and empirical experience, the basis of science. There is no evidence for any of the claims of religion. They are technically non-rational. Words such as 'feeling' and 'experience' are still used because rational language is the only language we have to describe anything. Rudolph Otto coined the word 'numinous' in 'The Idea of the Holy', as a solution to this problem of a lack of articulation, to describe these spiritual feelings. To Otto, even 'holy' the word, has become a shadow (in the Platonic sense) of what it once was. To Otto, rational language was not only inadequate for describing the religious, but also irrelevant to the entire sphere. It would be like, for example, a fish describing the sky with analogies to the world of water around him.

Now, if the claims of religion are ever to be proved, they must be proved scientifically. There is a reason why in our world science is the only method of acquiring knowledge, and that is because it can be verified. The claims of religion are based on evidence that is entirely subjective. They cannot be falsified. There is no objective measure or standard by which to base the claims of religion on. The contrary viewpoint can be justified, however.

The first premise is that God is immaterial. The soul is immaterial and Heaven occupies a dimension outside of our own. Therefore, since science deals purely with material, observable things, it is not an adequate enough tool for arriving at the true nature of things. The second premise is that there are two aspects to our being, the rational and the non-rational. The conclusion drawn from these is that the only way it is possible to arrive at any understanding of God, &c. is through non-rational means. Science and philosophy are useless.

Now, both of the above premises need to be proven in themselves for the argument to be logically sound, of course. The argument constantly goes around in circles- the premise is proved by the conclusion. The original premise that there is a God to be experienced non-rationally, and which cannot be experienced any other way, although it seems obvious to those who at least claim to have had some kind of religious experience, is unsatisfying to the rest of us because it is not something we have all experienced. And if it was, it would no longer differ from the experience we have of everyday objects, and God would be relegated from the level of Holy (in the Ottian sense) to another object in consensual reality. The only difference between my experience of a desk, and my experience of God, is that if I did experience God, I would be in a minority. This, of course, does not deny the claims of religion and is no proof against them. If there is a God, there is a God, whether it is experienced by us or not. But it cannot be proven into existence a priori.

Every experience everybody has ever had has been of the subjective kind. It is a very clever illusion we have all fallen for that there is an objective world out 'there', an objective world of empirically verifiable reality. Even if all of our individual experiences correlate these are still just a lot of subjective experiences that happened to agree with all the others. Even if there really is a world out there (and for all of our intents and purposes it is simpler to just assume there is), each of us is experiencing nothing but the effects of radiation and electronic repulsion and so forth on the areas of our body that are sensitive to these stimuli. Everything we experience is second hand and subjective. There just happens to be an agreement about what objects 'look' like and so forth.

It's all a matter of definitions, in the end. This is not the first time anybody has defined God into existence, either.

So given that this is true it is entirely reasonable to speak of an experience in purely subjective terms, maybe it is also reasonable to accept the possibility at least of people experiencing something through non-rational means. It is illogical to prove the existence of anything a priori. The definition of faith in the Kierkegaardian sense has nothing to do with knowledge, or proof. It is the end result of a psychological 'despair', which after the 20th century existentialist philosophers we would call 'angst'. This despair arises out of the realisation that the person we thought we were, barely even comes close to what we could be.

To William Blake, as well as Søren Kierkegaard, the spirit of genius was not simply that part of a person which was non-rational, but it was also super-rational. It doesn't merely transcend reason, it rises above it. It inhabits a different sphere entirely. To Blake, the body and soul were not two distinct but related aspects of a person; they were the person. Body and soul are one. '...that called body is a portion of the soul discerned by the five senses.. .'. Poetic, prophetic genius, in Blake's mythology, is personified by passion and fire, violent and sexual energy- called Los, a pun on the word 'loss' (similar to Kierkegaard's idea of despair, perhaps) and an anagram of sol, the sun, he represents fire and passion and energy. The antithesis of the creative genius is personified as Urizen, from the Greek word 'to bind' or 'to restrict'. It is also a pun on the phrase 'your reason'. That which restricts and fetters the creative spirit is your reason, to Blake.

A similar idea is presented in Kierkegaard's 'Either/Or'. It is written as a collection of letters sent between A, the voice of aesthetics, and B, the voice of ethics. The viewpoint of A is that life is to be experienced in joy and gaiety. He lives in the moment, does not consider future consequences of present actions, and lives a fairly empty life, devoid of any real meaning or content. As a result, he is in despair in his life. He realises there is something meaningful he could have in his life if he was willing to take the biggest gamble he has ever taken, with everything at stake. The cure for despair as prescribed in Kierkegaard's 'The Sickness unto Death', is a leap of faith. To go ahead and make that leap, to stand to lose or gain everything requires absolute courage and conviction and strength but once you have made the leap, Kierkegaard assures us, your life will immediately have meaning. You will have found a reason to wake up in the mornings.

The entire argument about despair and faith is unsound. You cannot make up your own premises. It is bad logic. It is possible to hide behind logical tricks and word games when talking about the relationship between God and man, that He is there to be experienced in the first place and since the religious defies science and philosophy it needn't be rationally justified, &c.- but not here. Every premise given needs to be itself proved before they can be put together logically. And it all comes down to a wager in the end, similar to the one Blaise Pascal put forward, except in Kierkegaard's gamble, all stands to be lost and all stands to be won.

Maybe there is a God, maybe there is not. If the atheist is correct in his belief that there is no god, nothing changes for anybody. But, this position can be falsified, as it has (allegedly, at least) been falsified on the personal level of several people over history (perhaps most famously as the religious experience of C. S. Lewis), and it is therefore rational. The theistic position can also be verified- in falsifying atheism, theism is verified, it's just the other side of the coin. Religion is not a matter of non-rational faith, these are just logical and semantic games people play to cleverly get out of philosophical binds.