What is Reasonable?

Is a belief that Jesus Christ was the Son of God and had divine powers that led to his resurrection from the dead reasonable?  Is faith in any religious doctrine reasonable?  Does "reason" only extend to definitely proven and non-debatable facts?

I think we can extend "reason" even to things that aren't completely provable.  For example, I'm a computer programmer and have what I would call "reasonable" opinions about what makes the code I write "good" or "bad".  Many of these "opinions" are very close to fact or could even be considered fact as they are shared by many in the industry and have statistics and/or logic to back them up.  Others are more of a matter of personal preference and are based on how I define "good" and "bad."  I have my own reasons for these preferences and I could explain to others why I have these preferences and my reasons would make sense.  Holding to the standards I have chosen is "reasonable," but someone else could have a preference that is different and still "reasonable."

Religion can be viewed in a similar yet different manner.  Multiple beliefs could be reasonable.  Certain beliefs can instead be unreasonable.  However, unlike my computer programming example above where there may not always be a definitively "correct" way to right a program, different religious beliefs are contradictory enough that they can't all be 100% "correct".  I think if a belief is "correct" it will be reasonable, but not all "reasonable" beliefs are necessarily "correct".

Take the question of "Is there a God?"  There could be arguments for answering this with either a "yes" or a "no".  We might say that either belief is reasonable (or at least I would say that).  But only one can be right.  Christians say the right answer is "yes".  I don't want to say that not believing in God is unreasonable.  I instead want to argue that belief in God is reasonable.  I can't convince you that it's also right; that's up to you to decide.  But I hope you can at the very least agree that God could exist.

Now if we take this to the level of Christianity and try to find the "reasonableness" of believing that Jesus Christ was God and rose from the dead, I agree that it starts to seem even less reasonable than belief in some generic God.  But because Jesus's divinity depends on an event (namely, His resurrection) really happening, there is more concrete evidence to find and examine than there is when it comes to "simply" believing in God.  To me, if it weren't for Jesus, believing that God exists would be harder, but because we have documentation from first hand witnesses about Jesus, this makes belief in God and in Jesus as the Son of God more reasonable.

I hope to write more in the next couple of days about that documentation of Jesus' resurrection and just how reasonable it is to trust it, and then get into evidence about Jesus that I haven't presented yet.  These first two posts have contained thoughts and reasoning about Christianity and what is required to accept it, but my intention is to start examining evidence soon.  I could start quoting from the Bible right now, but since not everyone accepts all of the accounts in the Bible as factual, I'd like to do some other research as well.