Where are the lines drawn on what is rational and what isn't?

[cosmosdan]

@Critical1

so anything that you learn from your society that is a commonly held belief is by default not irrational?

so the belief that you get 72 virgins when you die a martyr is rational because its a commonly held belief?

Santa flies around the world delivering presents to children in a single night?

when you die you go to heaven or hell based on (depending on your religion) the foods you eat/don’t eat, the way you pray, or your ability to claim some quite possibly fictional person as your savior?

disease is caused by demons?

the sun orbits the earth?

all of these things are or were at one time perfectly normal beliefs, commonly believed has nothing to do with rationality. you may be normal in your society but that still makes you irrational.

Again, you’re ignoring the aspect of context and available information. There is no one size fits all.

You wouldn’t judge someone who was raised in a remote tribe the same as someone who went to Havard would you? Context includes what era and society an individual grew up in and what information they had access to, or were presented with.

There’s biblical passage that basically says, “if you have been given more, then more is required of you” So, when modern medicine is fairly common knowledge in your society then believing demons cause sickness can easily be considered irrational. It might not be irrational for the person who was raised on superstition in a remote tribe.

[Kimstu]

@cosmosdan

I don’t the intellect and emotion aspects of our humanity can be completely separated and recognizing that is essential to judgement calls about what is or is not rational. […]

I think judging rationality has something to do with the information you’re given and have access to. […]

If it’s not irrational to accept what you’ve been taught, then the possibility of God , is not irrational, unless, as I noted, you insist that you have some absolute knowledge that you do not have.

Well, I think you’re arguing here for the use of the word “rational” in a different sense from the way most of the other posters in this thread are using it.

I’m certainly not trying to claim that scientific rationality, or “rational materialism” as I’ve been calling it, is the only appropriate way for human beings to think about any aspect of life. But I find it more helpful to keep the word “rationality” to describe that particular mode of thought, rather than broadening it to mean “socially rational opinions in the context of a given society with its associated knowledge limitations” or “general good judgement” or “spiritual/intellectual balance” or other comparatively vague concepts.

[Acid_Lamp]

@cosmosdan

There’s biblical passage that basically says, “if you have been given more, then more is required of you” So, when modern medicine is fairly common knowledge in your society then believing demons cause sickness can easily be considered irrational. It might not be irrational for the person who was raised on superstition in a remote tribe.

snip.

True, however one arbiter of rationality might be the ability or willingness to accept empirical evidence over belief. Our tribesman might be less irrational to believe in sickness demons, but he would be equally irrational to persist in the belief after a demonstration of western medicine. I’m not certain that primitive or ignorant irrationality ought to really be considered such.

[cosmosdan]

@Acid_Lamp

That’s not quite what I took from that discussion.It’s more along the lines of: " Since everyone believes in Santa, it is socially rational to put up your stocking along with everyone else. The repercussions from not going along with the groups ludicrous, but harmless cultural norm outweigh the social benefits of standing your ground. If you want to change the norm, you work from within on a social level.

This not the same thing in regards to important matters of fact, or when irrational behaviour is becoming detrimental to society as a whole.

That’s closer but still not it. remember , the balance of emotion and intellect. It’s not irrational for a child to believe in Santa because they receive intellectual and emotional support for that belief from people they have faith in.

At some point though , society as a whole expects them to accept that Santa is a nice fiction used for the season. If you’re 35 and still refuse to accept that Santa is fictional then something is wrong emotionally and intellectually which would be irrational.

In religion that break from what your taught as a child and what you believe as an adult doesn’t occur for lots of people. They continue to receive emotional and, and lets say pseudo intellectual support for their beliefs so carrying religious beliefs through adult hood is not in and of itself irrational.

This comes with the caveat of being responsible to some degree for available information, the specific details of doctrine. If you maintain as fact that the earth is 6000 years old and want to believe dinosaurs and men coexisted, without one shred of evidence , and only to protect tradition, then you’ve allowed emotion to override intellect and have become irrational.

[HoneyBadgerDC]

Rationale I don’t believe has to be correct as much as it does sane or possess logic. If I feel the mathematical combinations for life to exist would be impossible without assistance from a superior being I would consider that rational, correct or not.

[cosmosdan]

@ITR_champion

Second is simply the fact that different people who claim to be using rational, scientific thought do not arrive at the same conclusions. Skeptics make much of the fact that mystics have a wide variety of mystical experiences. But imagine for a moment that we could disregard temporal difficulties and gather together in one room Voltaire, Karl Marx, Sir Francis Galton, Sigmund Freud, H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, B. F. Skinner, Ayn Rand, Philip Wylie, and Richard Dawkins. They would all agree that religion is wrong, but they’d barely agree on anything else. Yet all would claim that their worldview is based solely on rational thought. If the conclusions derived from rational thought are guaranteed to be part of a shared reality, then why are they so variable? (Of course some of the differences can be explained by new research developments, but massive differences still arise among those with access to the same information.)

Now that’s an interesting point.

[Jragon]

I think the big problem with criticizing religious people for being irrational comes with the fact that most people aren’t scientists, and many, many people get through schooling without really getting an intuitive feel for when you should question a claim because the scientific method can’t deal with it.

Most people, even atheists and skeptics, have to take things on faith (more like probabilistic inference) at some point. You simply cannot be an expert in every field, you kind of just have to assume that the entirety of biological research isn’t based on a farce, or that those damned folks at CERN aren’t just making it up as they go along. This becomes easier when you work in scientific settings and have it verified to you constantly that the scientific method produces good results, which again, not many people have.

So then the breakdown for most people comes in "well, from where I’m standing, you’re asking me to trust those people over THERE (evolutionary biologists, physicists, archaeologists, linguists, etc) instead of the people I know and trust (pastor, parents, etc). If you don’t have a feel for what the scientific method is and why it works, the argument just comes down to “why should I trust the authority of a bunch of people I don’t know at a university using a method I’ve never seen work when it contradicts what all of these important figures in my life say?”

Even though it stems from a misunderstanding, I don’t think their conclusion is irrational from where they’re coming from. They, in their mind, have life experience with these people who have probably given them reason to trust them. They don’t, in their mind, really see why they should trust a bunch of strangers who haven’t really directly earned their trust. It’s really the same for a lot of skeptics, except we understand the value of the scientific method and the power of peer review so we don’t see why we should trust random conjecture or proven results.

Yes, I’d say from the outside skeptics, atheists etc have the more rational conclusion, but I can really see why a religious person might be hesitant to just cast aside what everybody around them is telling them in favor of a bunch of random people using the scientific method if they don’t really grasp why the scientific method (and peer review, etc) is so powerful.

ETA: Not to say that there aren’t scientists, even good ones, who believe in all manner of silly things. Those people are probably engaging in some double think or rationalization.

[Jragon]

Missed edit:

One thing I’ve learned from doing AI is that rationality and correctness are completely different. One can make a rational conclusion, but if they don’t know or understand all the facts it can be very, very wrong. One of my textbooks made the example of an agent who looks both ways, determines it was safe to cross the street, and then gets killed by a crashing airplane. He made a rational choice, and it was rational to assume the street was safe to cross, but he was wrong that the street was safe.

I think religious people (or fairy believers, etc) are often, but not always, rational people, even if they’re not correct.

[cosmosdan]

@Kimstu

Well, I think you’re arguing here for the use of the word “rational” in a different sense from the way most of the other posters in this thread are using it.

I’m certainly not trying to claim that scientific rationality, or “rational materialism” as I’ve been calling it, is the only appropriate way for human beings to think about any aspect of life. But I find it more helpful to keep the word “rationality” to describe that particular mode of thought, rather than broadening it to mean “socially rational opinions in the context of a given society with its associated knowledge limitations” or “general good judgement” or “spiritual/intellectual balance” or other comparatively vague concepts.

I’m talking about rational in terms of the obvious reality of the human condition, in which NOBODY is just intellect or makes judgement based only on intellect. Our belief systems are both emotional and intellectual.

It’s emotional , and intellectual balance, not spiritual/ intellectual.
Consider this from Wikki on rationality.

In philosophy, rationality is the characteristic of any action, belief, or desire, that makes their choice a necessity.[1] It is a normative concept about the reasoning in the sense that** rational people should derive conclusions in a consistent way given the information at disposal.**** It refers to the conformity of one’s beliefs with one’s reasons to believe**, or with one’s actions with one’s reasons for action. However, the term “rationality” tends to be used differently in different disciplines, including specialized discussions of economics, sociology, psychology, and political science. A rational decision is one that is not just reasoned, but is also optimal for achieving a goal or solving a problem.
Determining optimality for rational behavior requires a quantifiable formulation of the problem, and the making of several key assumptions. When the goal or problem involves making a decision, rationality factors in how much information is available (e.g. complete or incomplete knowledge). Collectively, the formulation and background assumptions are the model within which rationality applies. Illustrating the relativity of rationality: if one accepts a model in which benefiting oneself is optimal, then rationality is equated with behavior that is self-interested to the point of being selfish; whereas if one accepts a model in which benefiting the group is optimal, then purely selfish behavior is deemed irrational. It is thus meaningless to assert rationality without also specifying the background model assumptions describing how the problem is framed and formulated.

bolding mine.

I don’t think my presentation of what is rational is obscure of vague. I think one that focuses on just intellect is an incorrect way to approach the issue of belief systems.

[Lobohan]

@cosmosdan

Now that’s an interesting point.

Not really. There are a large number of ways to check if there is a widget in a sealed box. If one guy shakes it, and another guy runs it through a metal detector and a third guy burns it and reads the spectral lines, they all can come to the same conclusion. This is especially true for ideas like the Christian God who are contradictory and silly in many ways.

[Voyager]

@Jragon

Missed edit:

One thing I’ve learned from doing AI is that rationality and correctness are completely different. One can make a rational conclusion, but if they don’t know or understand all the facts it can be very, very wrong. One of my textbooks made the example of an agent who looks both ways, determines it was safe to cross the street, and then gets killed by a crashing airplane. He made a rational choice, and it was rational to assume the street was safe to cross, but he was wrong that the street was safe.

I think religious people (or fairy believers, etc) are often, but not always, rational people, even if they’re not correct.

The problem with your example is that it doesn’t include enough context. When someone concludes that it is safe to cross the street he is almost certainly really thinking that no car is likely to hit him. If an airplane falls on him he is still correct - or if a sniper kills him from several blocks away, or if a gas main explodes under him. If he is crossing an airport runway the context would be quite different.

When an airplane files over, most of us pay it no mind. But I did some work once with a professor who used to work at Los Alamos. Because that was a no-fly zone, he got extremely nervous when a plane flew over, because in his context that probably meant the beginning of a nuclear war.

[Little_Nemo]

@ITR_champion

Two things here. Like most folks here, I was taught since middle school that science is defined by the fact that all its conclusions are backed by experiments which can be replicated by anyone. As I grew up, I accepted the basic idea, and shared roughly the position you outline here, that empirical thinking is better because it can be replicated, while rival ways of thinking don’t have that advantage. That’s roughly where I stood when I entered college. Later on, after I had learned more, I concluded that is not actually the case, and that at least a great deal of what is advanced as science is not and cannot actually be demonstrated by repeatable experiments. This conclusion came partly from classes that I took on the history and sociology of science and mathematics, and partly from direct observation once I began participating in actual research.

So for a person like me, who observes that much of the knowledge that gets advanced as empirical knowledge actually isn’t, wouldn’t it be rational to conclude that empirical thought is not superior to other modes of thought by reason of repeatability?

Second is simply the fact that different people who claim to be using rational, scientific thought do not arrive at the same conclusions. Skeptics make much of the fact that mystics have a wide variety of mystical experiences. But imagine for a moment that we could disregard temporal difficulties and gather together in one room Voltaire, Karl Marx, Sir Francis Galton, Sigmund Freud, H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, B. F. Skinner, Ayn Rand, Philip Wylie, and Richard Dawkins. They would all agree that religion is wrong, but they’d barely agree on anything else. Yet all would claim that their worldview is based solely on rational thought. If the conclusions derived from rational thought are guaranteed to be part of a shared reality, then why are they so variable? (Of course some of the differences can be explained by new research developments, but massive differences still arise among those with access to the same information.)

I think the problem you’re having is that just because somebody calls themselves a scientist and claims what they’re saying is science, doesn’t make it so. Science is always based on evidence; pseudoscience is not. And finding flaws and lies in pseudoscience doesn’t discredit science.

Put two philosophers in a room together and they may argue about fundamental principles. Put two scientists in the room together and they’re going to find fundamental ground they agree on. And this isn’t a “no true scotsman” argument - it’s the basic definition of a scientist. A scientist is somebody whose beliefs are based on the evidence derived from the real world. So all scientists are deriving their knowledge from the same source - reality - and they’re going to come up with common beliefs because of this.

[Kozmik]

@Little_Nemo

Put two philosophers in a room together and they may argue about fundamental principles.

That actually happened.

[Voyager]

@Kimstu

Yup. Mind you, the refusal to assume the existence of a deity unless and until there is empirical evidence for it is in itself making an unprovable assumption. Namely, it assumes that rationalist materialism—the type of mindset that says “I accept nothing without sufficient objective evidence and reasoning to back it up”—is the only correct approach to understanding reality.

And I’m certainly not saying it isn’t. I’m just pointing out that if in fact there is some non-rational, non-empirical mode of thought that does somehow supply some truth(s) about reality (via personal revelation or drug hallucinations or what have you), rationality and empiricism are intrinsically incapable of detecting that.

Maybe that’s what the OP is driving at? Saying “Based on a rationalist-materialist epistemology, the default rational position is to assume in the absence of any contrary evidence that there are no gods” is indeed totally rational.

But to say “I know FOR SURE that the default rational position is the only one that could POSSIBLY be true, and anyone who holds any other position is indisputably deluded” would be irrational.

Long story short, every worldview ultimately rests on one or more axioms that as far as we know are intrinsically unprovable and unfalsifiable. I don’t agree that that makes all such axioms equally “rational”, though.

The axiom that there is no valid way of understanding reality except via rationalist-materialist epistemology certainly seems to me, and to many other atheists, the most plausible and sensible such axiom that we could have. But there’s no denying that when it comes to absolute proof, our preferred axiom is no more provable than the axiom “A supernatural supreme being created the universe in a scientifically undetectable way” or any other arbitrary belief.

I hate this theory of knowledge shtick. Sure, saying we are absolutely sure of anything is probably not correct, but no one really does this. The empirical worldview does not rest on unproven postulates but on continued testing of they hypothesis. As such it works pretty well. Now, places where it does not work well, like idea generation, are places where it is not used. Science tells us how to test new ideas, not how to come up with them.
Say your drugs or hallucinations do contain something new about reality. How do you know this? By empirically testing them, of course. If I claim God or a genie or my dog told me who is going to win the sixth race tomorrow I had better go to the track or at least read the racing results.
To avoid mentioning God, someone who believes in astrology needs to follow the same process. We can’t prove that some function of star and planet sightings won’t predict the future, but we can be pretty certain it doesn’t.
Theists usually bring in proof, as in “you can’t prove god does not exist.” Let’s keep it out of the discussion, since it has little to do with rational conclusions unless you are talking math.

[Kimstu]

@Voyager

I hate this theory of knowledge shtick.

I’m not sure you’re really understanding it. Let me try again.

@Voyager

Sure, saying we are absolutely sure of anything is probably not correct, but no one really does this. The empirical worldview does not rest on unproven postulates but on continued testing of they hypothesis. As such it works pretty well.

Indeed, the empirical worldview (or “scientific method”, or “rationalist materialism”, or whatever we want to call it) does work very well. The fact that it ultimately rests on an unproven axiom doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t trust the results it produces.

It just means that if there exist any other truths about reality that the empirical worldview can’t determine (and that’s a hell of a big “if”, and one that I personally am very skeptical about), we will never be able to detect that by using the empirical method.

@Voyager

Say your drugs or hallucinations do contain something new about reality. How do you know this? By empirically testing them, of course.

You are absolutely right that the only way we could ever rationally know that a new claim about reality is true is by testing it with the empirical method.

What I’m talking about is the possibility that a claim about reality might be simultaneously true and yet incapable of being known rationally. In such a case, the empirical method would be useless.

I quite agree with you that such a possibility is both extremely unlikely based on everything we currently know about the universe, and highly unappealing from a rationalist-materialist epistemological standpoint. I certainly am not trying to argue that we should assume that reality actually does work in such an irrational and unsatisfying way.

All I’m doing is acknowledging that we can’t conclusively rule out such a possibility.

[Cheshire_Human]

@cosmosdan

…
An example, our fellow doper Der Trihs, recently said this again…

Which, correct me if I’m wrong, was what I took it that the OP meant when referring to “fundamentalist atheist”. DT is a perfect example of whom I think of when using the term, myself. An absolute, adamant insistence on the factual non-existence of any kind of god, despite the total lack of actual evidence that the god in question doesn’t (or can’t) exist. I’ve hit him up for cites to his overly-broad claims that it’s provable. So have others. We’re all still waiting for those cites. He doesn’t, and can’t, give them. He’s therefore ignored as an [not pit thread, so deleted] Surprisingly enough, he gets defenders in the pit threads. Hmmmm…

It becomes two entirely different arguments, depending on where you start. “I won’t believe in your god, until you provide evidence” is a far different argument than “Your god doesn’t exist, unless you provide evidence that he does”. The first is rational, the second just… isn’t. And DT is incapable of distinguishing the two arguments.

[Lobohan]

@Cheshire_Human

Which, correct me if I’m wrong, was what I took it that the OP meant when referring to “fundamentalist atheist”. DT is a perfect example of whom I think of when using the term, myself. An absolute, adamant insistence on the factual non-existence of any kind of god, despite the total lack of actual evidence that the god in question doesn’t (or can’t) exist. I’ve hit him up for cites to his overly-broad claims that it’s provable. So have others. We’re all still waiting for those cites. He doesn’t, and can’t, give them. He’s therefore ignored as an [not pit thread, so deleted] Surprisingly enough, he gets defenders in the pit threads. Hmmmm…

It becomes two entirely different arguments, depending on where you start. “I won’t believe in your god, until you provide evidence” is a far different argument than “Your god doesn’t exist, unless you provide evidence that he does”. The first is rational, the second just… isn’t. And DT is incapable of distinguishing the two arguments.

Of course you can’t prove that some kind of God doesn’t exist. But you can prove certain Gods don’t.

For instance, any God declared to be Omnibenevolent and Omnipotent is impossible, given that we have needless suffering in the world.

So if a Christian were to assert that, you can reasonably say that that assertion is wrong.

That doesn’t mean no God exists, but it excludes a specific concept of God.

[Little_Nemo]

I’d say Der Trihs is a perfect example of a “fundamental atheist”. We once had a thread about what evidence would cause you to believe in God’s existence. Der Trihs adamantly said he would not believe in God even if he experienced overwhelming evidence of God’s existence.

To me, a rational belief is one based on the evidence. A faith based belief is one that is held despite any evidence against it. So I consider Der Trihs’s atheism to be a religious belief - his belief in the non-existence of God is no different than a devout Christian’s belief in the existence of God. Both of them are simply choosing to believe something without regard for what the evidence is. The fact that they chose two contradictory positions to believe is a trivial difference.

[Cheshire_Human]

@Lobohan

Of course you can’t prove that some kind of God doesn’t exist. But you can prove certain Gods don’t.

For instance, any God declared to be Omnibenevolent and Omnipotent is impossible, given that we have needless suffering in the world.

So if a Christian were to assert that, you can reasonably say that that assertion is wrong.

That doesn’t mean no God exists, but it excludes a specific concept of God.

Thank you for your totally useless contribution. We were all just waiting for that…

[Kimstu]

@Lobohan

Of course you can’t prove that some kind of God doesn’t exist. But you can prove certain Gods don’t.

For instance, any God declared to be Omnibenevolent and Omnipotent is impossible, given that we have needless suffering in the world.

No, I think there’s an out for that. If God is omniscient and infinite, we with our finite human understanding cannot definitively prove that the suffering we see really is “needless”.

This is the famous “Mysterious Ways” evasive tactic, and while it may strike our finite human understanding as spiritually unsatisfying and distinctly fishy, I don’t think there’s a logically flawless way to nail it to the counter.

Basically, the problem with trying to make any kind of watertight proof against any particular infinite quality of the Divine is that we’re fighting out of our weight class. We’re natural beings with finite abilities, God is a supernatural being with infinite abilities: by definition, he can out-think, out-punch and outlast us.

We can come up with critiques, mockeries and denunciations of the aspects of hypothesized deities that offend our human sensibilities. But we with our human sensibilities can never plausibly claim to fully understand an infinite God. So it’s theoretically possible that all the things about God we find fault with are just misunderstandings caused by our limited capabilities. The important thing is that we can never prove they aren’t.

Never play cards with a man called Doc, never eat at a place called Mom’s, and never pick an existential fight with a supernatural being whose attributes are defined as being beyond your human comprehension.