Can theists be rational?

Consciousness without matter seems much more unlikely than sound without matter. And we can say for certain there is no sound in a vacuum, because there are no atoms and molecules for sound waves to travel upon. Isn't claiming to "know" a god or souls exists more irrational that claiming to "know" that sound can travel in a vacuum? What could possibly make the former statement more rational than the latter?
Order is an implication of chaos, on a lower level natural law is mutable, and fundamentally the world does not operate by any rules whatsoever. It is disturbing to the intellect that reason is an exception to a rule, that being there is none, but that is the way things actually are. Likewise, we are capable of discerning absurdity (effect before cause) and logic (cause before effect). The latter also being an exception to a rule in human nature.
 
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You can't really falsify the sound one, because you can't test all potential sounds in all potential vacuums and you can always play with semantics. At what point does a sound become a sound, for example...

Agreed. In fact we can only prove this by inductive reasoning -

1. I have never experienced a sound in a vacuum.
2. Every test I apply and my theoretical understanding of physics suggests sound can not travel through a vacuum.
________________________________________________________
3. Therefore sound does not travel through a vacuum.

However as Hume pointed out, I therefore have to assume the uniformity of nature, and that natural laws apply consistently at all times. I can not demonstrate said assumption. I have sneaked in another unevidenced premiss. If we assume the uniformity of nature (as I think we all would, but maybe not) - then this immediately gets pushed up to a deduction - otherwise deduction is restricted largely to dealing with formal logic and mathematical sets - but Hume doubted this, categorising our conclusion as a custom or belief,not the product of reasoning --
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction#David_Hume

It isn't any more falsifiable than god... you can say "for this sound and this vacuum" sound did not go through it. We can say that we have no evidence for any kind of consciousness outside a brain in the same way we have no evidence for sound outside a vacuum. But we can't really falsify either. We can't falsify demon possession either. We can show that things once thought to be demon possessions are now explained by neurological disorders, but that doesn't mean that there aren't some real demon possessions. You can't falsify the notion that it's sprites that are secretly putting ideas in your head.

Indeed, and if we are to follow Humes example that is precisely where we end up. No one has ever successfully managed to answer the Induction Problem, so to a sceptic like Hume almost all our beliefs are just that - many might fall in to the category Best Inferred Explanation, others are just inductive inference. Falsification has inherent issues as well.

None of this bothers me remotely as it happens - I just handwave it away, as I do radical Cartesian doubt - I assume there is an objective consensually experienced universe, other minds, and likewise i assume that there is a conformity of nature, in a pragmatic sense, and get on with it. Nonetheless technically the belief that sound never travels through a vacuuum is a belief that is not logically demonstrable and hence is arguably irrational, for the reasons stated. I doubt anyone will pick anyone up for claiming it, unless we actually develop evidence for the latter.

Failure to falsify cannot make a belief rational. Normally when we say something exists-- we mean that there's measurable evidence for it. Why doesn't god seem to fit this category? Why isn't it just as "rational" to say inucubi exist? Or is it? Surely something must account for whatever it is they are said to explain!

Of course it's logical to say incubi exist - if all your experiences suggest to you that is so. Years ago I met a lady who orgasmed whenever she lay down - source of many jokes when I mentioned it last time but actually distressing to her - and she blamed a ghostly lover. There was a simple medical explanation of course, and she was cured eventually, because I happened to have heard of a similar case through the SPR - but her belief sort of made sense in terms of her experience. There is loads of evidence for incubi - however here we have the simple question "is there a better explanation"? Parsimony suggest there is...

Anyway, here is my argument for theist being rational - note not theism - I'm a theist, and i seem to me be able to think and reason. I therefore conclude that theists can be rational, as can atheists, agnostics, and hell even Twoofers. Inded application of logic is what makes many people Truthers - but they lack sufficient data to make a clear judgment, or i do and they are right after all. Either way, as I keep saying rationality is a property of an argument, not a group of people. I have on three occasions in my life bought a lottery scratchcard - and as it happens won - but I'm not going to claim that buying lottery cards is rational (actually it could be, in my situation*) - but that irrational action does not make me irrational as a person, anymore than all humans are irrational.

Why do I think all humans are irrational? Because i believe in evolution by Natural Selection, and it follows logically...

1. The Human brain has evolved by Natural Selection for Adaptive Advantage
2. Adaptive Advantage may not favour understanding objective reality accurately
__________________________________________________________
3. Therefore humans may not be "designed" (for lack of a better term, no teleology intended) to understand truth.

I offer such well known concepts as Confirmation Bias, Outcome Bias, Expectation Bias - hell look at this list --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

It follows from our biology and how we got there that rationality is not something humans are going to be all that good at. :)

cj x

* Just to clarify the lottery example - if the odds of my lottery scratchcard giving me a break even win are 1 in 5, and a £200 prize 1 in 5000, clearly I am irrational to keep buying lottery cards. If however as I did I face a vet bill for £40, needing payment that day, and have only £1 to my name, the potential reward struck me as worth the gamble. I did and won, and paid the bill. £1 was useless to me - I had food etc. I needed cash - now. A large prize was worth far more to me at that moment than its cash value. Maybe to gamblers the thrill of the game offsets the economic loss, and to them the overall cost/benefit analysis appears rational, because the pleasure they derive from gambling losses is greater than the pleasure they would derive from spending said losses on other things. Dunno - but we must be careful restricting things to just economic analysis. A rural bus service may have a social benefit many times its economic profit value -- so we subsidize such services.
 
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Yes, get some sleep CJ. I'd like to believe that you believe whatever you believe for rational reasons, but I don't see it. (But I do think you are fantastically nice human being--please don't see my inability to see your rationalization as a statement about you.)

It's really sweet of you to say so, but I promise I'm really a dreadful human being. :) (In fact in local Charismatic Christian circles there is something of a growth industry in praying for my conversion, and from time to time trying to cast out my demons! I have long since stopped worrying about what people think though, but I can assure you that my niceness only really extends to dogs, cats, little old ladies and fellow sceptics!)

Ar emy religious beliefs rational. Nope - some are probably, and some completely irrational. I am always amused by that internet test which checks your religious beliefs for internal consistency - I always score 100%, but I am fully aware that I hold mutually incompatible beliefs to be true (not least my beliefs on life after death derived from psychical research and my Christian beliefs thereon, but on many other issues too). I find these areas of tension fascinating, and waste time when I should be working to maintain my state of miserable poverty on playing around exploring them. That's how my thinkingdevelops - I dissect the weaknesses in my beliefs.

However, given that I hold provisionally millions of beliefs, that many are going to be completely untrue, and that I can't always tell which are true and which are untrue, and that I am human and hence can never aspire to perfect rationality, hell I'll just assume i'm usually wrong. It's a human thing, and it stops me from ever becoming too dogmatic. :)

As I always say, on the nature of ultimate reality, I'm wrong and so is everyone else, but that should not stop is trying to get closer to the truth. :)

cj x
 
Amusing be damned. Factual.

Religion cannot be a rational belief. If you think it is, please state, very specifically, which religion is rational, why it is rational and why all other ones are wrong.

Of course religious beliefs can be rational, if they coherently explain something in terms of that person's experience. Wolfman just posted a fascinating example of people who hold on to religious beliefs because they work as an explanatory model for them as they appear to be in accordance with the facts. They are not irrational at all - they just do not have all the data. Nor do we - our Science & Medicine will appear in a few centuries to be filled with irrationality - but so what? - it's rational for us to use it now.

Anyway the question was "can theists be rational?" You said no. I disagree, and ask you to demonstrate this. I find it amusing because it reminds me of 18th century polemics on how black people are irrational - and les sthan human. Disgusting yes - but you seem to imply the same about theists - not really all there, less than capable of rationality. My point remains the same as I have argued from my first post - groups of people are not rational/irrational, ideas are. OK, so you can counter "theistic beliefs are irrational" - so "theists are irrational". However here you have moved from a particular to a general claim - is Francis Collins the geneticist irrational? Well sure, if you want to say his theism is irrational, we can arhue that. If you generalise however all his scientific work becomes irrational too. You see the problem? Theists are not defined by their theism: they possess other qualities. So really, if you wish to attack a specific claim is irrational - fine - we can look at that - but the generalization is a nonsense. If an atheist believes in Bigfoot are they rational? That is never an issue - I would never claim atheists are irrational - but the bigfoot belief might be (no idea, never studied the evidence, I have an intuitive feeling it may be rot though). Atheists are not by definition rational or irrational - they are people who do not believe in God/ess/(es), nothing more nothing less. I know a few atheist spiritualists - are they rational or irrational? Depends on which beliefs of theirs you are looking at.

And two people can hold exactly the same belief, and one can be rational, one irrational. My parents believe in evolution, but has no idea how it works - they just accept it as something scientists say is true, and that is good enough for them. It's a spurious appeal to authority -- they could not logically defend the belief, and it is quite muddled in their minds, but they think its absolutely true, on faith. Is their position rational? Nope - they believe it because they saw it on TV. Having worked in TV, I can pronmise that si not a sound basis for belief. ;) Professor Dawkins could argue exactly how evolution works (by his model) and make a perfectly logically coherent case: I could make a pretty good one which would suffice for non-biologists i think. That is a rational belief I guess. So the same true fact can be believed through rational and irrational methods...


Look, this is one of those subjects that's so obvious I don't usually bother discussing it. Lots of christians try to claim belief in the sky-daddy is rational, but it is not. Rationalists live on evidence, and aside from some very dodgy hearsay evidence, there is no evidence which suggests god/s have ever existed.

Rationalists actually don't rely on evidence; that's empiricism. Rationalists rely on reason??? I'm guessing you are using Rationalist in another sense here - as a synonymn for Atheist? I think I have seen it used that way...

You can try to turn it into a semantic argument, you can try to re-write the OED for all I care, but the enormously plain fact is that belief in a sky-daddy is irrational. And please note this view is from a religious apologist who believes christianity is of net benefit to humanity. (And who just also happens to be the bleeding Grammar Tyrant!)

But rational, it ain't.

Mate, when you see me and Arti agreeing on something, you know it's time to run!

:bgrin:

:) Well I am not sure if religion (and Christianity in particular) is a net benefit to humanity - fatr too many variables for me to consider - but I guess you could argue if it was then in cost/benefit terms it's rational. I remain to be convinced though! You really think religion is a net plus? I suspect the same about Humanism - there is a deep irony here somewhere.

cj x
 
Wow... thanks for quoting that... I had no idea that TA and I could agree on anything.

My skepticism has been challenged.
 
and finally for Articulett - I have to dash off now, off ghost hunting - back tomorrow - includes sound, a British soft drink advert which warns of the dangers of not believing in sprites...
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=YdPDr36qbn0
cj x

I loved it!

Can we use the the embed on UK youtube? a test!

I don't believe that believers should be treated any differently than I'd have wanted to be treated as a believer. There were times when I was glad for my skeptical friends silence as I spun what I so wanted to be true. But I also want to prod or serve as an impetus for the encouragement of freethinking, because I'm glad for those who planted the seeds that set me on the path. I feel that they are the proverbial "shoulders of giants" I have the privilege of standing up-- and I appreciate the view more than I can express.
 
Incessantly and exclusively ridiculing believers is hardly serving as an impetus for the encouragement of freethinking.

It is just ridiculing for the sake of ridiculing. It is standing on the shoulders of giants to merely piss on people.
 
Agreed. In fact we can only prove this by inductive reasoning -

1. I have never experienced a sound in a vacuum.
2. Every test I apply and my theoretical understanding of physics suggests sound can not travel through a vacuum.
________________________________________________________
3. Therefore sound does not travel through a vacuum.

However as Hume pointed out, I therefore have to assume the uniformity of nature, and that natural laws apply consistently at all times. I can not demonstrate said assumption. I have sneaked in another unevidenced premiss. If we assume the uniformity of nature (as I think we all would, but maybe not) - then this immediately gets pushed up to a deduction - otherwise deduction is restricted largely to dealing with formal logic and mathematical sets - but Hume doubted this, categorising our conclusion as a custom or belief,not the product of reasoning --
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction#David_Hume



Indeed, and if we are to follow Humes example that is precisely where we end up. No one has ever successfully managed to answer the Induction Problem, so to a sceptic like Hume almost all our beliefs are just that - many might fall in to the category Best Inferred Explanation, others are just inductive inference. Falsification has inherent issues as well.

None of this bothers me remotely as it happens - I just handwave it away, as I do radical Cartesian doubt - I assume there is an objective consensually experienced universe, other minds, and likewise i assume that there is a conformity of nature, in a pragmatic sense, and get on with it. Nonetheless technically the belief that sound never travels through a vacuuum is a belief that is not logically demonstrable and hence is arguably irrational, for the reasons stated. I doubt anyone will pick anyone up for claiming it, unless we actually develop evidence for the latter.



Of course it's logical to say incubi exist - if all your experiences suggest to you that is so. Years ago I met a lady who orgasmed whenever she lay down - source of many jokes when I mentioned it last time but actually distressing to her - and she blamed a ghostly lover. There was a simple medical explanation of course, and she was cured eventually, because I happened to have heard of a similar case through the SPR - but her belief sort of made sense in terms of her experience. There is loads of evidence for incubi - however here we have the simple question "is there a better explanation"? Parsimony suggest there is...

Anyway, here is my argument for theist being rational - note not theism - I'm a theist, and i seem to me be able to think and reason. I therefore conclude that theists can be rational, as can atheists, agnostics, and hell even Twoofers. Inded application of logic is what makes many people Truthers - but they lack sufficient data to make a clear judgment, or i do and they are right after all. Either way, as I keep saying rationality is a property of an argument, not a group of people. I have on three occasions in my life bought a lottery scratchcard - and as it happens won - but I'm not going to claim that buying lottery cards is rational (actually it could be, in my situation*) - but that irrational action does not make me irrational as a person, anymore than all humans are irrational.

Why do I think all humans are irrational? Because i believe in evolution by Natural Selection, and it follows logically...

1. The Human brain has evolved by Natural Selection for Adaptive Advantage
2. Adaptive Advantage may not favour understanding objective reality accurately
__________________________________________________________
3. Therefore humans may not be "designed" (for lack of a better term, no teleology intended) to understand truth.

I offer such well known concepts as Confirmation Bias, Outcome Bias, Expectation Bias - hell look at this list --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

It follows from our biology and how we got there that rationality is not something humans are going to be all that good at. :)

cj x

* Just to clarify the lottery example - if the odds of my lottery scratchcard giving me a break even win are 1 in 5, and a £200 prize 1 in 5000, clearly I am irrational to keep buying lottery cards. If however as I did I face a vet bill for £40, needing payment that day, and have only £1 to my name, the potential reward struck me as worth the gamble. I did and won, and paid the bill. £1 was useless to me - I had food etc. I needed cash - now. A large prize was worth far more to me at that moment than its cash value. Maybe to gamblers the thrill of the game offsets the economic loss, and to them the overall cost/benefit analysis appears rational, because the pleasure they derive from gambling losses is greater than the pleasure they would derive from spending said losses on other things. Dunno - but we must be careful restricting things to just economic analysis. A rural bus service may have a social benefit many times its economic profit value -- so we subsidize such services.

There is nothing I disagree with here. There are rational evolutionary reasons why we'd be irrational in the ways we are known to be irrational. It has no doubt been a lifesaver to assume correlation is causation that makes it worth the times we get it "wrong", for example. It's evolutionary advantageous to assume intent or recognize a face in a crowd--even if it sometimes leads to wrong conclusions or pareidolia.
 
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So according to the theists and religious apologists in the thread, my paranoid schizophrenic neighbour is rational. I must admit I was not entirely sure this was the case after frequently hearing her screaming at imaginary people to ****-off at all hours of the day and night.

Obviously there's a huge difference between her and theists who talk to their imaginary friend(s). Can anyone explain to me what this difference is?
 
Incessantly and exclusively ridiculing believers is hardly serving as an impetus for the encouragement of freethinking.
Yes.
It is just ridiculing for the sake of ridiculing. It is standing on the shoulders of giants to merely piss on people.
Yes.

Op = Can theists be rational?

Yes.

There sure are a lot of extra words in this thread.
 
So you think the author is saying that the assumption is understandable because atheists are of the (incorrect) opinion that every theistic belief system they have encountered is irrational? It's certainly not worded that way. The phrasing "when we consider that all of the theistic belief systems they have encountered have probably been genuinely irrational" makes it sound as though the author is stating that all of the theistic belief systems that atheists have encountered are probably genuinely irrational, which in light of his prior comments would only make sense if he knew how every theist every atheist ever encountered arrived at their beliefs.

-Bri

Irrational is not a well defined term. It is not an entirely unreasonable definition to say holding beliefs that define that something exists that there is no evidence for.
 
Like the earth was created in six days and is 6000 years old? :)

As I said that depends on how it is defined. I can claim god created the world two days ago to appear as if it is older. How do you disprove that claim?
 
Here's a rational argument for God, drawen from the Cosmological Fine Tuning discussion. Using cosmologist Paul Davies' numbers for the likelihood of the universe having arisen by chance Forster & Marston (1989) set out the Bayesian analysis as follows -

Let us assume the existence of a deity is one in a million.
Let us assume the chance of that deity creating the universe as is is also one in a million.

OK, so
1.Prior probability: Pr [God exists]: = 0.000001
Prior probability: Pr [No God]: = 0.999999

2.Prob [universe inhabitable if God exists] = 0.000001
Prob [universe inhabitable if no designer] = 0.00 (one billion, billion, billion zeros) 1]

Prob two is a false statement. One is assumes that the universe as it is, is the only way to support intelligent life. The other thing is that regardless of how likely or unlikely a universe with intelligent life is, any universe that has anyone questioning gods existence must have intelligent life.

So prob 2 is not rational, and your argument is then irrational.
 
Some day, I would really like to see a definition of a "religious apologist".
 
So which gods is there hard evidence for?

I couldn't tell you, but neither do I know about all gods, so therefore I cannot say that there is no hard evidence for any god. I suppose I could have been more accurate and said "I know of no hard evidence for any god." Thanks for the correction.

Irrational is not a well defined term. It is not an entirely unreasonable definition to say holding beliefs that define that something exists that there is no evidence for.

I'm not sure you can say that there's no evidence of gods (although you can probably make observations about the quality and quantity of that evidence). You could change it to "little evidence" or "not a preponderance of evidence" or something similar, but then you're describing all sorts of things for which people seem to hold rational opinions. So you can make up any definition for words you like, but keep in mind that the definition you proposed would mean that beliefs such as the belief in the existence of extra-terrestrial intelligence would probably be irrational.

Perhaps rationality has more to do with the strength of one's beliefs. It seems that few opinions are considered irrational (perhaps only if the evidence pretty well stacks against it) while stronger beliefs might be.

-Bri
 
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I couldn't tell you, but neither do I know about all gods, so therefore I cannot say that there is no hard evidence for any god.

...snip...

That is one of the usual, and I don't use this word lightly, excuses for not forming a conclusion about "god".

If you simply define the word god to be "whatever anyone may ever say it is" you are just creating a word that is meaningless and therefore you cannot say anything meaningful about it.


I'm not sure you can say that there's no evidence of gods (although you can probably make observations about the quality and quantity of that evidence).

...snip...

It all depends on how you define the word god. Again leaving it undefined or to define it as a infinite set that can contain any definition means that you cannot say anything meaningful about it.

You could change it to "little evidence" or "not a preponderance of evidence" or something similar, but then you're describing all sorts of things for which people seem to hold rational opinions.

...snip...

What is a "rational opinion"?
 
That is one of the usual, and I don't use this word lightly, excuses for not forming a conclusion about "god".

If you simply define the word god to be "whatever anyone may ever say it is" you are just creating a word that is meaningless and therefore you cannot say anything meaningful about it.

So please be my guest and define the word so that I can make a blanket judgment about the evidence for it.

It all depends on how you define the word god. Again leaving it undefined or to define it as a infinite set that can contain any definition means that you cannot say anything meaningful about it.

See above.

What is a "rational opinion"?

Most people don't consider opinions to be irrational (unless there is clearly evidence against the opinion -- most opinions are opinions and not stronger beliefs because there isn't a preponderance of evidence one way or the other). Do you disagree?

-Bri
 
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