Does It Make Sense to Believe in God?

Prompted by a pastoral encounter with a young man who had lost his faith, this synthesis paper asks whether belief in God remains rational and meaningful for a generation increasingly drawn to naturalistic explanations of religion (Dennett, Freud). The author first shows that reductive accounts of religion's psychological or evolutionary origins commit the genetic fallacy and cannot themselves disprove God's existence, then surveys logical and pragmatic arguments for God -- Anselm and Descartes' ontological argument, Aquinas' argument from contingency, the fine-tuning of the universe, and Pascal's Wager -- concluding that belief in God is reasonable. Turning finally to Kierkegaard and Gabriel Marcel, the paper argues that reason alone is insufficient, and that authentic belief ultimately requires a personal encounter with mystery beyond rational categories, illustrated by a return to the author's pastoral accompaniment of the young doubter.