ABSTRACT
My point of departure is John Henry Newman who lived between 1801 and 1890, converted to the Catholic Church in 1845, and became a cardinal in 1879. In theology An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (Newman 1870), he develops several arguments for consolation. One of these has been called the ‘factory‐girl’ argument, which is an argument from the need for consolation. The main objective of this chapter is to find a reflective equilibrium between the need for consolation and doubt about the rationality of the consoling religious belief in God.
I present the ‘factory girl’ argument in the firstsection of this chapter and connect it with claims made by Richard Dawkins’s in The God Delusion (Dawkins 2006). In the second section, I discuss John Stuart Mill’s arguments in his essay on theism in Three Essays on Religion (Mill 1998 [1874]). In thethirdsection, I consider how the problem of evil impacts religious consolation in the context of the well-known “Last Letters from Stalingrad”, where a German soldier writes a letter to his father. He contrasts the pious feelings of the worship at home with the absence of God at the battle field of Stalingrad and concludes that God does not exist. In the fourth section, I analyse how the context-dependency of rationality affects the way that religious belief may offer consolation.
