Fear And Trembling By Søren Kierkegaard

In his book, Fear and Trembling, Søren Kierkegaard expresses the belief that faith of all types is irrational. As an existentialist, Kierkegaard believes that the most important things in the world are concrete human experiences, and as such religious faith, which is characterized by a belief in a God whose existence cannot be proved on a physical level, could never be called rational or logical. By emphasizing contradictions to rationality in religious texts and the differences between a belief and knowledge, Kierkegaard successfully proves that faith can be irrational yet still valuable. Despite Kierkegaard’s strong religious convictions, he sees faith as a belief rather than a fact. According to Kierkegaard, knowledge is something that

It follows then, that Kierkegaard categorizes faith as irrational. Kierkegaard’s prime example of the irrationality of faith comes from the story of Abraham and Isaac. God comes to Abraham in a vision, and He asks Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac to God as a burnt offering. This action would obviously be against all moral and rational logic, but because Abraham has faith in God, he begins to do it anyway. God stops Abraham from killing his son, rewarding his faith in God. Although Abraham’s decision was irrational by strictly moral reasoning, his confidence in God was more important to him as a religious man. This story exemplifies both the idea of faith as irrational and faith without explicit knowledge. It fits with the idea that the actions of the faithful do not appear to be sane to those who do not share their

I think that in our modern Judeo-Christian society that this assertion is no longer true because a majority of citizens (in the United States at least) have faith in a Christian God whose existence, according to Kierkegaard’s metrics, cannot be proven. In times when a faith is not held by a large number of citizens, the actions of the faithful may be called insane, but when most of the non-faithful have a basic understanding of the faith of their fellow citizens, the reaction to “illogical” actions regarding faith is no longer as intense. Insanity is not synonymous with irrationality, and as such, faithful people can be seen as irrational but not insane. On a more specific level, those who do not have faith in God may find that they disagree with certain ideals or religiously based expressions of morality. However, generally the actions of the religious faithful in the United States are not seen to be