Why "rational"?
Sep. 22nd, 2008 09:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhuLast winter, I started to write a series of posts tagged "what I believe". (I didn't get very far before life intervened.) In a comment to the last post, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jtidwell asked, "How do you feel about rationality as a foundation for belief?" I owe her an answer.
I think this is one of the key aspects of my religious identity, and one of the reasons I feel compelled to document my belief system. So much of contemporary popular religious thought seems to be based on the idea that for faith to be valid, it must fly in the face of reason.
"Credo quia impossible est" makes no sense to me.
What separates humankind from the lesser animals is not just language but the ability to use language to frame hypotheses, test them, and pass the results down to later generations. This ability has improved our standard of living immeasurably: we are better at growing crops, treating disease, compensating for our individual physical limitations, launching spacecraft, measuring time, accounting for the effects of general relativity, caring for the weak, analyzing poetry, creating music, disseminating fiction, etc. There is no field of human endeavor which has not benefited from humankind's ability to apply rational thought and, I would argue, the scientific method.
So why shouldn't that apply to religion? What kind of sadistic deity would create a universe in which whenever we use our rational brains we improve our lot, only to place a stumbling block in front of us by making that ability counterproductive in the most important sphere of all? I cannot understand any fundamentalist --- Jew, Christian, or otherwise --- who asserts that the world is less than 6,000 years old and that the fossil record is a test of our faith. That supposes a cruel god.
jtidwell, in the comment cited above, goes on to ask: "Many people [in evangelical communities] place other forms of knowing well above rationality, to the point of rejecting science altogether in favor of revealed Scriptural knowledge. What other forms of knowing (for lack of a better term) do you think are valid, for you personally and/or for other people?"
I'm not sure how to address this. As I discussed in my earlier posts, I believe that God's existence is by necessity a proposition of indeterminable truth (shades of Gödel), but one can construct a rigorously consistent system based on assuming either the truth or falsity of that proposition.
But I am certain that any system that contradicts reason cannot contain truth.
Such a system cannot contain truth for me, and it cannot contain truth for others, no matter how certain they are that it does so. Rationality may not bring us unaided to truth, but it can shield us from error.
jtidwell asked, "How do you feel about rationality as a foundation for belief?" I owe her an answer.I think this is one of the key aspects of my religious identity, and one of the reasons I feel compelled to document my belief system. So much of contemporary popular religious thought seems to be based on the idea that for faith to be valid, it must fly in the face of reason.
"Credo quia impossible est" makes no sense to me.
What separates humankind from the lesser animals is not just language but the ability to use language to frame hypotheses, test them, and pass the results down to later generations. This ability has improved our standard of living immeasurably: we are better at growing crops, treating disease, compensating for our individual physical limitations, launching spacecraft, measuring time, accounting for the effects of general relativity, caring for the weak, analyzing poetry, creating music, disseminating fiction, etc. There is no field of human endeavor which has not benefited from humankind's ability to apply rational thought and, I would argue, the scientific method.
So why shouldn't that apply to religion? What kind of sadistic deity would create a universe in which whenever we use our rational brains we improve our lot, only to place a stumbling block in front of us by making that ability counterproductive in the most important sphere of all? I cannot understand any fundamentalist --- Jew, Christian, or otherwise --- who asserts that the world is less than 6,000 years old and that the fossil record is a test of our faith. That supposes a cruel god.
jtidwell, in the comment cited above, goes on to ask: "Many people [in evangelical communities] place other forms of knowing well above rationality, to the point of rejecting science altogether in favor of revealed Scriptural knowledge. What other forms of knowing (for lack of a better term) do you think are valid, for you personally and/or for other people?"I'm not sure how to address this. As I discussed in my earlier posts, I believe that God's existence is by necessity a proposition of indeterminable truth (shades of Gödel), but one can construct a rigorously consistent system based on assuming either the truth or falsity of that proposition.
But I am certain that any system that contradicts reason cannot contain truth.
Such a system cannot contain truth for me, and it cannot contain truth for others, no matter how certain they are that it does so. Rationality may not bring us unaided to truth, but it can shield us from error.
The rational rationale
Date: 2008-09-23 05:07 pm (UTC)These latter two, and especially the last one, seem the most error-prone, but are also hard to deny. For example, it's hard to imagine being dead, and that leads to a kind of feeling of immortality.
-pd
Re: The rational rationale
Date: 2008-09-23 05:21 pm (UTC)What I was specifically addressing was the question of whether I accept the idea that, for myself or for others, there is a way of "knowing" that supersedes, not augments, rational thought. And my answer is, simply, no. Rational thought is, as I see it, the only tool we have for checking our intuitive impulses, and any way of "knowing" that claims to override rationality is, to put it gently, suspect.