system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Help me understand the enigma of Kierkegaard, reason and God

I'm deep into existentialism.  From Nietzsche to Sartre to Camus, they all make sense in their own way, as much as I disagree with their conclusions. 

But Kierkegaard, he's something else. He seems to come to the same conclusion as the other nihilists (if one can blanket-call them all that name), yet he then falls back onto Jesus and faith. Although I read his biography which summarized all of his works, I'm still unable to comprehend how he reasons to take that leap. 

If one can confidently arrive at the conclusion that there is truly no purpose in life, how can one then reason themselves back into faith? 

I ask because I'd love to be able to have faith. Even though it'd be artificial, itd offer infinitely more comfort than nihilism. I'm fully aware of hypocrisy of this quest, but I'm hopeful because if someone as mentally capable as Kierkegaard could fall back on that, so could someone much less intellectual. 

This bears the question, how did he specifically reason the existence of God and Jesus in particular? Most of his work is highly reasoned and logical, yet its culmination takes a huge leap of faith. How? Was it because the idea was drilled into him by his father while Soren was still in his formative years? Or does he offer a genuinely appealing reason for God?

Thanks guys.
gpt
I’m on mobile so I’m going to try to make this succinct - Kierkegaard was *not* a nihilist. While he did believe it is an extremely difficult undertaking to, for example, become an individual before God, he does believe it is possible. In fact, he thinks that every single person has been **commanded** by God to “become themselves” and that not doing so is to be in a state of sin. (The Sickness Unto Death)

As for his philosophy ultimately leading to a leap of faith, well, yes, because he denies the ability to “prove” the existence of God. According to him, the concept of God is so inconceivable from the vantage point of reason that to try to prove the existence of such a being a la Leibniz or even Aquinas or anyone else is futile. He calls this “The Ultimate Paradox” : the tendency of reason to think of something that is inherently unthinkable in a rational sense. One must submit to the absurd (not really in the sense Camus uses the term) in order to be faithful - faith is not an object of reason. (Philosophical Fragments) 

At the same time, he never denies that reason and rationality are important. In fact, without exercising ones reason to the fullest potential, one would never be confronted with the paradox of faith and would not come to the point of having to make the leap in the first place. The religious sphere of life, the sphere belonging to the “Knight of Faith” is reserved only for those exceedingly rare individuals who truly have faith - everyone else is still operating within the realm of established ethics which Kierkegaard takes as given from thinkers like Kant. He simply pushes back against the idea that this realm is the absolute highest of existence. (Fear and Trembling)

Kierkegaard simply believes philosophy needs to “stay in its lane”, that it is hugely important but that faith itself is something so purely existential, individual (in the sense that God assigns each individual a different “selfness”) and “unrational” that it would be crazy to attempt to philosophize it in any standard way.