Thing is, I don’t know what it is like to only be able to mediate the world through what people call rationality. I have never done it, and I suspect those passionate adherents to their atheism haven’t either, they are just trying their hardest to do so.
My world is full of feeling and sensing, and perhaps what others might call extra-normal experiences. I didn’t call it God for my first 30-odd years, but it is no different now that I do. In fact I experience quite a bit less of it than I once did. It doesn’t come for wishing for it, that is for sure.
My point is, if you don’t experience this numinous world, never have, can’t imagine it, and find descriptions of it unbelievable, then what good is it to have a discussion about it? All you will do is try to convince me that I am crazy or stupid. Well, I’m not.
The argument that so many dopers seem to find of inexhaustible interest, “how come people believe religious stuff? The only possible explanation is that they are stooooooooooooopid. Unlike us!” I just can’t drum up any response to any more.
Belief is not what you think it is. And I cannot explain it to you. No one can give you the explanation you want.
Could you just address the posters who aren’t calling people with faith stupid? I don’t think I ever have (Well, I probably have, but when the faith in and of itself was not the stupid part). I haven’t made any assumptions of you, or at least I don’t think I have, unless you feel my restatements of your position aren’t right, which if so I’ll happily retract. And on the other side of things, I’ll happily confess to being fairly stupid myself.
On the other side of things you do seem to be making a few assumptions of your own - “I suspect those passionate adherents haven’t either”? The very first thing you said there was that you didn’t know what “only” mediating the world through rationality was like, and then immediately say that you recognise that the passionate adherents don’t do it either? That seems odd. If I said “I do not understand what an orange is, but I suspect that that group over there don’t, either” I’d expect people to be skeptical of my claim. How can I know someone doesn’t have something when I don’t understand what the “something” is?
That, actually, is what I was trying to say in response to your last post; that “faith” is more a, a … point of view, a way of living your life, than an acceptance of an intellectual proposition. But that’s also why it cannot be shared or conveyed to someone who doesn’t have it.
I suspect no one lives a life strictly mediated by rationality or logic; we’re just too good at telling stories. Stories, I think, are a fundamental result of how our pattern-seeking brains evolved. And we all tell ourselves stories. As Terry Pratchett points out, no one actually lives on Earth - we all dwell in comfortable little universes that revolve around our heads.
But when we try to break out of those little universes, to infer something of the real world whose existence does not depend on our minds, the tools of rationality are all we have. And since most theists claim that God, or Allah, or Yahweh, or Brahma or whomever is the ultimate objective reality, logic and rationality are the only way we have of grappling with those claims.
Yes, sort of. But it isn’t merely a point of view. A point of view can be conveyed to a willing ear. A mystical experience cannot.
This is, again, sort of, what I was trying to say as well. In that pure rationality does not exist for human beings, since we are not computers.
This is where we certainly diverge. This “we” which can only use the tools of rationality to grapple with claims of belief in the divine? That would you, not me. I would never use those tools for that purpose. They simply are inappropriate, one can’t attain to any understanding that I would value, using them. At least, I couldn’t.
Of course, I am not nearly as interested in or comfortable with the use of pure logic as many, perhaps most, of the people who frequent this board. I haven’t found it of much practical value, not nearly as useful as intuition, experience, or the ability to size up the value of a source. I am not a scientist.
I do not see the practical value of using logic to try discover why people have religious beliefs. I think it is a pointless exercise, to be honest.
But all of those things rely on logic. If you were to remove logic from the situation, you couldn’t make an intuitive leap, because there would be no place to start or end. Experience requires logic in that it requires us to recognise a situation as similar to or the same as something we’ve experienced before - without logic, we wouldn’t have any reason to connect, let’s say, your friend John talking to you about going to see a football game and why he later turns up on your door brandishing tickets. Or who he is. Or how you know they’re tickets, when you’ve never seen those particular tickets before. And the ability to size up the value of a source depends - assuming it isn’t random - on a pro/con value judgment, and the ability to comprehend and make future guesses based on prior behaviour.
I’m not sure what the scientist thing is about. Scientists do all those things, too. Was that your point?
Maybe I am defining logic too drily. You seem to define it with extreme broadness.
What am I trying to say here? I admire some kinds of scientific inquiry, and see its obvious usefulness. But I do fear it, because science has no morality – that is not its function. But then something needs to have that function.
I find the idea that one not only can, but should, dissect a meaningful and profound experience on a steel table in an aseptic environment to force it to yield its secrets, to be chillingly hateful. Like ripping apart something beautiful and alive to find out why it was beautiful and alive.
Perhaps we are talking about completely different things? Or perhaps I don’t belong here. I’ve had that thought a lot lately.
Sure, use your intuition and experience to derive a faith that guides your life. But that only gives you an analysis that works for you.Your faith, your intuition, your experience are not applicable to anyone but you; your truth is subjective. It is not “true” in the same way that the inverse square law is “true”. That’s not a pejorative statement about your faith, by the way; just an acknowledgement that religion, like art and philosophy and literature, is non-rational (pace Stephen Jay Gould’s Non-Overlapping Magisteria).
But that’s the issue with the arguments like those Flyer and Hector St. Clare put forward - they do think that statements like “Jesus rose from the dead” and “God created two people named Adam and Eve, who are the ancestors of all humans” are true the way that “1+2 = 2+1” and “the Earth is an oblate spheroid” are. Which takes them out of the realm of the non-rational and into the realm of the rational. And if you wanna be in science’s ballpark, you gotta play by science’s rules. Which means subjecting those claims about Jesus and Adam and Eve to those very tools that you correctly pointed out don’t apply to questions of faith. If God is the ultimate reality, then he’s got to be just as real as algebra.
You are unfortunately right that a lot of atheists take the “religion is stooopid” position. But the more intelligent of us understand that it’s treating religious beliefs as if they are objective facts that makes believers sound stupid.
Nitpick - “Why people have religious beliefs” is a (deeply fascinating) question of psychology and neurology, and thus susceptible to scientific analysis. The nature of those beliefs, and how “true” they are, is, as you say, a pointless exercise.
You are inserting some strange notions onto the quote. Certainty of the Theory of Gravity (or other scientific notions) is not what is being described, but rather the notion of certainty in what to believe or not to believe when it comes to who we are and what we should be doing (the original question being answered is how do we determine what is metaphor and what is not).
And does faith need to resolve anything between the Muslim and the Christian? We end up in different positions due to where out faith has led us. I think we are quite arrogant to assume that all of the truth is discovered by our one faith (whichever one it is).
Also it is quite common for reason to not resolve anything either. People can end up in two vastly different and contradictory places by applying reason. Both Burke and Voltaire were committed to using reason and ended up in very different places in political discourse, did they not?
And that underscores my entire point. Who cares if its rational? Why is that the be all, end all to determine truth? It may be yours, but it definitely isn’t mine.
What exact scrutiny can be upheld to an experience which does not fit within the rational? I think that it was that exact experience that shattered my mindset that rationality could explain everything. But I couldn’t explain it and I realized that was ok. More than just ok, it was the beginning of a journey that opened my mind and soul to new worlds I had shut off needlessly. I don’t think you are particularly a good judge of what experience is adequate or not for a believer to accept the existence of the divine.
Speak for yourself with your “we” ;). For generations people have accepted faith and religion as a way to truth. A deeper and more powerful way to truth than merely rationalizing.
Heck, don’t act as if people are easily rationalized out of the world views they have gotten from their parents or geographical region either. I was born and raised in a moderate Republican area of New Jersey. My parents were Republican. I became a Republican - quite easily. It took my moving to Georgia to start questioning somewhat (these Republicans were not my Northeast Republicans), but even then I identified myself with the GOP. It wasn’t until I became a Christian that I started moving dramatically left - from reading the Bible, for what its worth.
And yes, I accept that Jesus literally rose from the dead. It happens to be a cornerstone of my faith. Does that contradict physics, biology, etc? Yes. But that’s the point there. He was supposed to circumvent those laws (and do so as well in His ministry). It was shocking and hard to accept by even his own disciples for that very reason. I don’t think that it puts it in the realm of the rational at all, to be honest. With the possible exception of rationally trying to think about what the resurrection means for humanity and all of creation (of course that is a very rich theological question that has been discussed for almost 2000 years).
But that’s not exactly true, is it? Those of us who are religious don’t grapple or struggle with God through logic and rationality alone (some of us do - theology depends a lot on that, obviously). We struggle with who God is and what God does through our emotions and feelings about what is right and just and meaningful. We struggle with stories that may not be what we anticipate God is, and we don’t use logic for that - that’s just unsatisfactory by itself. We use our emotions to try to fight and struggle and try to make peace with it - and logic may be useful in guiding our emotions at times, but its not a logical struggle in the end and never really has been.
I don’t know that anyone even claims to operate on pure rationality. I’m a skeptical atheist. Yesterday, I threw away a perfectly usable waste basket as an act of revenge. See, a few months before he died, my dad suffered a nasty fall after tripping over it. Ended up in the ER. I was looking at it yesterday, and it made me really angry that my dad was dead, but this wastebasket have had survived. So i binned it a bought another.
Rationally, I could say that my anger at an inanimate object was displaced grief over my fathers death, or whatnot. But that doesn’t change the fact that it felt really good to stomp the basket flat and bury it under rotting garbage, in retaliation for what it had do do to my dad some time who.
You’re not? Lucky you. I am. Crazy, at least. I don’t think I’m stupid, but I can’t rule out the possibility that I’m too dumb to know how stupid i really am. But crazy, i hot snow actual diagnosis for. I’m get panic attacks. Which means that, more or less at random, my brain becomes convinced that I’m being attacked by a lion. Or maybe a tiger. Something big and dangerous, anyway. My mind is screaming at me, “RUN!!” And I’m like, “from what? There’s nothing here!”
My point is, my mind is not a reliable reporter. It filters reality, and those filters can be faulty. If my mind can convince me that I’m in mortal danger when there’s absolutely no threat, then it can just as easily deceive me into thinking that, say, there’s a higher power looking out for me when really, I’m completely alone. That would certainly be a nicer delusion than the ones I get now, but it doesn’t make it any truer.
And there’s similar things. I used to date a guy who, before I met him, was so deep in the closet he was convinced that he was really straight - despite the fact that he had never had a successful sexual encounter with a woman, and the fact that he regularly had sex with guys he met in bars. He was able to deny some pretty obvious realities simply because they didn’t mesh with how he wanted to view himself.
So, both human perception and introspection are both highly flawed tools. The brain is both what allows you to perceive the world, and what allows you to interpret those perceptions. There are a whole lot of points in there where error can creep in and distort our ability to correctly comprehend the world around us. There is, I think, a certain arrogance in the idea that, just because you’ve seen something, it must be a valid experience. I certainly don’t have that sort of faith in my own perceptions - I know, from long and uncomfortable experience, that they aren’t reliable. What evidence do you have that your perceptions are any more reliable than mine? And absent that evidence, how can you act as if your perceptions are true? Rationalism and the scientific method can, at the very least, give us a system of thought that does its best to reduce this sort of human error. It’s not perfect, but it has gotten us to the moon and back, which is more than you can say for any form of mysticism.
Actually, defining morality without the use of science is like trying to shoot a target without even knowing the general direction to point the gun. Without rational inquiry and the scientific method, we have no way to pinpoint what could or should be moral. We have no way to discern how our actions affect others. Is it any wonder that moral progress is so often directly in the wake of scientific process?
When did our moral prerogatives towards animals change - when we heard a voice from above, or when science discovered that animals are more than animatronic creatures, and that they can feel pain and fear? When did our moral prerogatives towards racism change - when god told us, or when science discovered that races are all but meaningless? When did our moral prerogatives towards the environment change - when voices from on high screamed “stop polluting” or when we discovered the very real negative effects of what we were doing through rational inquiry?
Morality without science is completely blind, and at best can take shots in the dark that may or may not have anything to do with what actually is good for anyone. And once you stop talking about what’s good for yourself and others, you’ve abandoned any discussion on morality actually worth having.
Except that without that, we have no way to establish that this experience wasn’t merely delusion. People are wonderfully good at reading meaning into things. One of my favorite stories was from a caller to the Atheist Experience, who explained that god had called to her - by placing a bible in her garage that she was sure hadn’t been there before, and by making the lights shine in a particularly beautiful way on her walk through the park.
…Yeah. It shouldn’t take much to see how silly it is to ascribe any particular meaning to either of those events. It’s easy to forget that you had something. It’s pretty common to ascribe meaning to something that seems odd but is actually quite mundane. But to use that as a justification to believe in something that we cannot establish exists is gullibility. You’re intentionally letting yourself get fooled. Now, I don’t know. Maybe you heard voices, or he came to you in a dream, or something else. Personally, if I heard voices in my head, my first thought would be “psychotic breakdown”. Yanno, Occam’s Razor and whatnot. Doubly so if he was telling me to kill my kids. I don’t even have kids, and a god would know that!
This is word salad. Wanna try again?
And I think it’s asinine to accept an epistemology that can give you directly contradictory answers to the same question. This is epistemology 101. If I ask “Is P true”, and the answer is essentially a coin flip, then we have a problem. If your method for addressing god is faith, and faith will lead you either to the Muslim god, whose faith demands that there are no other gods, or the Christian god, who is not the same god and whose faith also demands that there are no other gods, there’s a problem, and it needs to be resolved. Only one of those propositions can be true. And yet, people believe both on faith. I honestly don’t understand how you could not see this as a problem.
It’s like if you had a mechanism for evaluating claims, and someone told you “proposition P is correct”, and that mechanism told you that that was correct. Later, someone else tells you “proposition P is false”, and that same mechanism told you that that was also correct. It would indicate that the mechanism is broken. And this is important, because having a correct mechanism for evaluating claims is the difference between falling for a scam, and identifying it. It’s the difference between signing the contract you can’t read that they tell you ensures that you’ll be paid a certain amount for your work, and demanding that someone you trust reads it to you. It’s the difference between buying Peter Popoff’s miracle water and realizing that it’s total bullshit.
For the most part, this comes down to what assumptions one makes, and whether one’s reasoning and evidence are actually sound and representative. I’m not intimately familiar with Burke or Voltaire. However, I stand by my statement - if your epistemology, accurately applied, can lead to two contradictory positions, it is broken. I’d personally like to make sure that their applications were correct.
Well then, what is yours?
Honestly, this is the part of the discussion where I have to say, even though I don’t know you or anything about you, that you are almost certainly wrong. Rationality, reason, and logic are what we use in every part of our lives, on a day-to-day basis. It’s how we navigate the world, how we determine truth from fiction, how we decide everything from the mundane (is it safe to cross the street) to the profound (should I sign this contract). Honestly, if you didn’t apply reason constantly (indeed, often without even thinking about what you were doing), you probably wouldn’t be here badmouthing it.
What does that even mean? What does it mean to say that the experience “does not fit within the rational”? That seems like the kind of unintelligible statement most people would pass by without questioning to me, sort of like “non-physical entity” or “disembodied mind” or “thing that exists outside of nature”. Depending on how you define your terms, the phrase is either meaningless or misapplied. What do you mean by rational?
And for generations, people have been wrong. Faith does not pass one of the single most simple tests that one can ask any epistemology to undergo - the applicability of the laws of thought. The law of identity (A = A), the law of non-contradiction (NOT(A = NOT A)), and the law of the excluded middle (FOR ALL A: A OR NOT A). Faith has no way to resolve contradictions. My faith that no gods exist (NOT A) is just as good as your faith that gods do exist (A), and therefore the epistemology accepts A and NOT A. I can’t believe I have to explain why this is a problem.
(For the record, I don’t have faith no gods exist. I reject the proposition that gods exist based on rational inquiry. But I’m pretty sure there’s someone who does take it on faith that no gods exist.)
Logic is an extremely broad subject. It’s logic that lets us say that A is A, and that’s the underpinning for… well, almost anything. Absent logic we’d have to accept randomness.
As far as can goes, if we can then it’s true whether or not we actually do it. Should is the more difficult question, I agree, but the problem with that is that beauty as ever is in the eye of the beholder. Understanding is beautiful to me. Incomprehension of something means that something is going to be dead to me. If one person reads a textbook and finds it dry and boring, while another look at the topic with intuition or suchlike and finds beauty, that’s one thing. But you could also have that second person look on something in the world as dead and ugly, while the textbook reader sees life and interest and splendor in what they discover.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, science as dry and life-ripping and not-science as life-affirming and tremendous is something that’s person by person, not objective. It can even change within a person’s life. They’re not flaws, or advantages, to the methods themselves, just how we look at them.
The other issue with needing morality over science having nothing to say on that subject is… well, what is the purpose of morality? To do what’s right? But having morality is no guarantee of that. Some of the worst things in the world have been done by people with no morality. But some of the worst things in the world have been done by people who claimed what they were doing was the highest of rightness, goodness, holiness even. And science allows us to understand the world better and so see when morality comes into play. Let’s say our morality requires us not to kill - the boundaries of that are defined (and, likely, will continue to be defined) by science.
I always think it’s a shame when someone with an interesting viewpoint leaves, so you’d have my vote not to - but it is up to you. If you’re at a point where you feel that discussion is pointless, as you seem to suggest, then I could understand why you’d no longer be interested.
Budget Player Cadet, your argument is interesting, but you might want to tighten it up by avoiding errors of fact:
There have been several societies through history that proscribed inflicting pain on animals without the benefit of “science” explaining that animals experienced pain.
Racism was being fought on purely ethical grounds, decades before scientific consensus (which is still far from unanimous) declared that the division of humanity into race served no scientific purpose, (and that after “science” had “created” races, to begin with).
You come closer on the environment, although many societies ave fostered an attitude to avoid harming the earth; science has simply provided the evidence that our current scientifically driven expansion has been the cause of much of the damage.
Christians and Muslims worship the same God, although they do differ with each other regarding some divine attributes.
Eh. I don’t know about that. There’s been many conversion story threads on here, and I’ve seen a lot of people say something along the lines of “I felt uncertain and was effectively an atheist for many years but didn’t want to admit it/couldn’t back it up/had other favourable points for remaining religious that overweighed that, until I sat down and gave the Bible a good honest read/looked at it from a different viewpoint.” People seem to be able to continue on with cognitive dissonance for years. Likewise I’ve seen posters talk about never believing in anything in particular but having a vague “feeling” that turns into actual faith upon reading a holy text.
These things happen. Conversion doesn’t have to mean a road to Damascus-style event.
While this is probably mostly true, I think it’s reasonable to say that there are Christians and Muslims out there who define God in such a way as to disassociate that version from others, and from their own group. BPC’s point isn’t correct that broad, but we can adjust the claim down to make it reasonable.
If you were crazy, would you know it? Psychotic people often don’t know they are psychotic. But they can still be amenable to intervention and can learn to recognize when their minds are playing tricks. Anyone who has been successfully treated by cognitive behavior therapy knows that it is possible to change the thoughts generated by certain feelings and in turn change the feelings generated by certain thoughts. There are always multiple ways to interpret a subjective experience. Our brains do have control over our senses and the perception of those senses.
It strikes me as sad that you think being presented with alternative ideas means that you must choose between calling yourself “crazy” or “stupid”. Every day I change my mind about something when I read a compelling message board post, an intriguing editorial, or watch a documentary. I don’t think allowing myself to evolve makes me crazy or stupid. But I would be crazy stupid for refusing to engage in a discussion just because I am certain my position will never sway.
The argument that so many dopers seem to find of inexhaustible interest, “how come people believe religious stuff? The only possible explanation is that they are stooooooooooooopid. Unlike us!” I just can’t drum up any response to any more.
Belief is not what you think it is. And I cannot explain it to you. No one can give you the explanation you want.
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But did they believe that animals experienced pain? If so, how did they come to that conclusion? I highly doubt that many of these societies considered animals incapable of feeling pain. The main point I’m trying to make here is that people parse reality around them to form morality. It’s not about “science showed this”, it’s about “we have learned this about reality”. Empiricism and the acquisition of knowledge.
Yes, this was a poor example.
I disagree with this. There are numerous considerable differences between the god of the bible and the god of the Qur’an; most notably, the issue of Jesus. Allah has no son; Yahweh has one. This is not some minor point, this is a fundamental theological issue and one of the most significant differences (and far from the only one) between Christianity and Islam. The two deities are not reconcilable, not without some serious rationalization.