Can faith be justified?

In this paper, I argue for a new conception of religious justifications which takes the performance of miracles as the paradigm of reasoning in religion. The paper has two parts: In the first part, I argue against Swinburne's parity argument for the existence of God by showing that religious perceptions fit more comfortably among aspect perceptions, e.g., the perceptions of beauty and courage, than among our perceptions of objects and colors. While one can be said to believe that a certain object is red solely on the basis of someone else's testimony, one cannot be said to believe that a certain object is beautiful solely on the basis of someone else's testimony. In order to believe that a certain object is beautiful, one has to see its beauty for oneself. Similarly, as a matter of logic, one cannot be said to believe that God exists solely on the basis of someone else's testimony. Believing in God necessarily involves seeing God for oneself. In the second part of the paper I employ the analogy between seeing God and seeing beauty and the moral features of an act to propose a performative and transformative conception of religious reasoning. I argue that an argument in religion is a performance which brings various facts or events into life in a particular manner, so that God may be seen in or through them. Any such performance through which God is seen may be properly called a "miracle". Thus, the performance of miracles, i.e., of acts that are directed at becoming the vehicles through which God is seen, can be taken as the paradigm of religious reasoning.