The other day I discussed an NPR “cosmos & culture” website post by Tania Lombrozo. The title was “Can faith ever be rational?“, and her answer was “yes.”
This conclusion, of course, gives immense solace to the liberal listeners of National Public radio. In drawing her conclusion, Lombrozo, a psychologist at the University of California Berkeley, leaned heavily on the work of Lara Buchak, a philosophy professor at the same University, “Can it be rational to have faith?” (reference below, free download).
Yesterday Dr. Buchak wrote me a cordial email about my post, clarifying some things and disagreeing with others, but also noting that our disagreement may rest partly on a lack of clarity in what she wrote. Her email is a model of cordial discourse (contrast it with the responses of, say, Henry Gee or Peter Hichens!), and she gave me permission to post it. I promised that I would do so without editing it.
Her defense below indicates why she thinks it can be rational to have faith, and, controversially, why it can be rational to have religious faith. I’ll add a few responses after the email:
Dear Professor Coyne,
I was pointed to your blog post yesterday. First of all, thanks for reading and engaging with my work! I appreciate the time you took to read the paper and engage with it. Second, I wouldn’t mind clarifying my paper a bit, so I’ve written a few points below. You could feel free to post it to your readers if you would like:
– Philosophers sometimes concern themselves with analyzing a concept – roughly, coming up with a definition that covers some set of cases. For example, philosophers ask “what is knowledge?” and then consider scenarios in which we would want to ascribe knowledge to an individual and scenarios in which we wouldn’t, and try to come up with a definition that includes the cases in which a knowledge ascription would be apt and leaves out the cases in which a knowledge ascription would be inapt. (Of course, it’s slightly more complicated than this, but that’s the general idea.) So, I am interested in analyzing faith: in coming up with a definition that includes cases we’d describe as cases of faith but not cases we wouldn’t describe as cases of faith. This is orthogonal to the question of whether all cases of faith are rational, some are, or none are: we first just want to figure out what the concept is. And part of my worry is that the current cultural conversation hasn’t taken on this project.
– So, the examples in the beginning of my paper are just examples of data we are trying to capture with our analysis of what faith is. I take on the assumption that “faith” is the same attitude in mundane and religious cases – that it should be given the same analysis. Thus, faith will be subject to the same rationality standards in both religious and mundane cases. Whether faith meets these standards is a separate question. (I think you might actually be on board with these claims so far.)
– Then, the analysis comes in, and I think that you do a very good expository job (thanks!), with one exception I’ll mention next. As an aside, if someone wants to argue for the alternative analyses you mention in the post, I’d encourage them to take up the project. The data is: apt and inapt uses of “he has faith,” and practices and phenomenology surrounding cases of faith (in, e.g., religious or interpersonal contexts). Show that some alternative hypothesis fits the data! It seems to me that the Kaufman analysis is too narrow (it is apt to say that I have faith in my spouse even if every reasonable person would also assent) and the other analysis you mention too wide (I have confidence, based on evidence, that Obama is president, but it seems inapt to say that I have faith that Obama is president). But these are genuine philosophical disagreements, so hey, let’s do some philosophy!
– On the part where you say: “This is where Buchak’s argument goes wonky.” Here is where you misunderstand my argument. I do see where the misunderstanding comes from, given the italicized contrast and my use of the technical term “credence” as opposed to “belief,” and I wish I had been clearer. So just to be clear: I didn’t mean to imply that it’s rational to have faith without sufficiently high credence. One shouldn’t manufacture high credences when the evidence doesn’t yield them (contra a modern-day version of a William James point), but you should have faith when the evidence does yield sufficiently high credence, when the available evidence is not highly correlated with the truth of the proposition in question, and when there are postponement costs and/or risk-attitudes of a certain sort. So, to be clear: the rationality standards for religious faith are just the same as the rationality standards for other cases of faith.
– Where you and I disagree – and where Professor Lombrozo and I disagree, too – is in whether the conditions are ever satisfied in the case of religious faith. I think they are (though I don’t think they are for everyone – so I wouldn’t want someone who thinks they don’t have evidence for God’s existence to have faith that God exists). I think some people do have evidence of the required sort. You (and Professor Lombrozo) think the conditions are never satisfied, that no one (or no one nowadays, or who has thought about it) has evidence of the required sort.
– Also, as for the “postponement costs” question. We are talking about having faith in God as expressed by particular religious actions – actions that would have an effect right now in how you live – not the question of whether you should believe in God per se. That’s a minor point, but the relevant upshot is that we shouldn’t be evaluating the postponement costs of believing, but rather the postponement costs of these actions. And, in general, I don’t think “the goods” to be had in, say, the Christian life (I will speak from my own tradition) primarily have to do with the afterlife, but rather with our time on earth. So in that sense, refraining from committing to the “Christian life” does have costs.
– So, to summarize, you have mostly correctly interpreted my view, except that I don’t think that the standards are different for religious faith and more mundane cases of faith. I think they are the same. (You and I then disagree about whether these standards are met.)
– Finally, my main motivation for writing the paper was because of the prevalence of statements like this in the “science vs. religion” debates:
Naïve atheist: “Religious beliefs are based on faith, so they are irrational!”
Naïve theist: “I don’t have evidence, but I don’t need any, because I have faith!”
I think that both of these attitudes are wrong, and harmful. And I think a helpful way to move forward is to figure out how to correctly characterize what it is to have faith. (If you already think these attitudes are wrong, that’s great, but it seems to me that these attitudes are prevalent in the public sphere, so I’d like to fight against them.)
Thank you for taking the time to read this, and for hosting a spirited debate.
All best,
Lara Buchak
******
I have three brief responses, which I’ll convey to Dr. Buchak.
1. Re the claim:
So just to be clear: I didn’t mean to imply that it’s rational to have faith without sufficiently high credence. One shouldn’t manufacture high credences when the evidence doesn’t yield them (contra a modern-day version of a William James point), but you should have faith when the evidence does yield sufficiently high credence, when the available evidence is not highly correlated with the truth of the proposition in question, and when there are postponement costs and/or risk-attitudes of a certain sort. So, to be clear: the rationality standards for religious faith are just the same as the rationality standards for other cases of faith.
This clearly implies that it’s rational to have religious faith—and for Buchak, “faith” means “acting on a prior evidenced belief without seeking further evidence”—when there is “sufficiently high credence.” That is, there must be fairly strong evidence buttressing your faith before you begin to act on it. (The “fairly strong evidence” part is from her argument.)
I don’t see that kind of evidence for religious belief, especially since Buchak claims that such evidence must be as strong for religious “faith” as for nonreligious “faith.” Would you to go to Catholic church for the rest of your life if the evidence you had was as thin as the evidence that Jodie Foster really loved you, or that UFOs have abducted people from Earth?
2. Re the claim:
Where you and I disagree – and where Professor Lombrozo and I disagree, too – is in whether the conditions are ever satisfied in the case of religious faith. I think they are (though I don’t think they are for everyone – so I wouldn’t want someone who thinks they don’t have evidence for God’s existence to have faith that God exists). I think some people do have evidence of the required sort. You (and Professor Lombrozo) think the conditions are never satisfied, that no one (or no one nowadays, or who has thought about it) has evidence of the required sort.
I’d like to ask Buchak exactly what the evidence is that can support a rational faith in God, and why it would differ among people. This is a crucial question that bears on my claim that faith really is irrational, for I see no evidence of even a moderately convincing sort. Remember, the evidence has to be sufficiently strong to motivate pretty strong actions: religious “belief” and actions predicated on that.
Now scientists do differ on what it takes to convince them of the provisional truth of a proposition, but the evidence is empirical, available to everyone, and doesn’t differ among scientists. There may be some people who didn’t believe in continental drift, for example, until we were actually able to measure that drift using satellites, but the evidence was there for everyone to see.
In contrast, religious “evidence” is based solely on revelation and the propositions of ancient, man-made books. And it differs among people—far more than it differs among scientists. Why is it rational for a Muslim to have faith in the claims of the Qur’an and, at the same time, rational for a Christian to have faith in the claims of the Bible?
Note that Buchak says that Lombrozo doesn’t think that it can ever be rational to rationally have faith in religion. If that’s the case, Lombrozo didn’t mention that in her NPR piece. In fact, at the end Lombrozo argues that the rationality of religious belief provides some common ground for a fruitful dialogue between believers and nonbelievers.
3. Finally, re the claim:
Also, as for the “postponement costs” question. We are talking about having faith in God as expressed by particular religious actions – actions that would have an effect right now in how you live – not the question of whether you should believe in God per se. That’s a minor point, but the relevant upshot is that we shouldn’t be evaluating the postponement costs of believing, but rather the postponement costs of these actions. And, in general, I don’t think “the goods” to be had in, say, the Christian life (I will speak from my own tradition) primarily have to do with the afterlife, but rather with our time on earth. So in that sense, refraining from committing to the “Christian life” does have costs.
This mystifies me for two reasons. First I don’t see the point of acting on a belief if you don’t really hold that belief. Buchak implies that the question of taking action based on a belief in God is somehow independent of actually believing in God. That is, you can take the action (predicated on a belief) without having good reasons for that belief. Maybe I’m misunderstanding her here, but that’s what it sounds like.
Second, I don’t know what the real-life “goods” are for the Christian faith, and Buchak doesn’t specify them. (I gather from this email that she is a Christian.) If it’s a motivation to do good, well, there are plenty of more rational reasons to do good than simply accepting the reported words of Jesus.
I’m not a philosopher, so I may be missing the subtleties of Buchak’s arguments. But her piece was written to be accessible to the average person, and I’m one of those people.
I’ve called Buchak’s attention to this post and my responses, so maybe she’ll reply either separately or in the comments below.
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Buchak, L 2013. Can it be rational to have faith? In Louis P. Pojman & Michael Rea (eds.), Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology, 7th edition (forthcoming)
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A basic problem with all such discussions over “faith” is that the word has multiple meanings. From the Concise Oxford Dictionary “faith” means:
1. complete trust or confidence.
2. strong belief in a religion, based on spiritual conviction rather than proof.
Clearly 1 can derive from evidence but by definition 2 cannot. We really need different words for these two cases!
Maybe the word “religious” needs to be put before the word “faith” every time someone is talking about number 2?
We should decree that the religious must use the word “credulity” instead of “faith”. 😉
Yes, the use of the word “faith” is quite different for, say:
“The bond has the full faith and credit of the US government behind it”
versus:
“I have faith that Allah will give me 72 virgins in a paradisial afterlife if I martyr myself for Islam”
Or: “I have faith the doctors who are about to cut me open under anesthesia and remove the cancerous tumor from my lung”
versus:
“I have faith that I will see my parents again in Heaven after I die”
Construing the two uses as equivalent is one of the standard tropes of the vast majority of religious apologists. It’s a word-trick, nothing more.
Yes, which was a problem many pointed out in the other thread.
This:
“…I take on the assumption that “faith” is the same attitude in mundane and religious cases – that it should be given the same analysis…”
from her response does nothing to fix that problem.
Yes, but everyone knows we are talking about the second definition when it comes to religious faith.
??
The point is that Buchak is equating religious faith and evidence-based confidence.
A nitpick: “proof” is manifestly different from “evidence”. “Strong belief, based on spiritual conviction [and evidence] rather than proof.” is clearly derived from evidence.
If Buchak’s arguments are the definition of philosophy then philosophy is hand waving and arguing minor, irrelevant points.
Anyone who makes claims without backing them up is opening their arguments for ridicule.
Yes, her response seems to me to come perilously close to word salad. I’m hoping there is other, better work she has done.
Not so much word salad as nonsensical in places, particularly what you’ve highlighted earlier–that she thinks confidence based faith and religious faith can be analysed as though they’re the same case.
I also agree that she’s indulging in hand-waving, which is disappointing.
Rather than the mild term “word salad” I personally feel that the proffered writings of persons defending religion invariably resort to “language abuse”, and I use the term abuse because the effects of such constructed arguments on the human world are so pernicious.
A typical “sand brick” of Dr. Buchak’s argument is the use of the word confidence. Elevating the word “confidence” to a state of being (“I have confidence, based on the evidence, that Obama is president”) is a subtle, but, for her argument to go further, NECESSARY misstatement.
Rather, I submit, Dr. Buchak is confident in the information that Obama is president.
The difference between a state of being >> “I have confidence” versus “I feel certain about the information that Obama is president” is the error that philosophers typically jump across in order to get on the other side of a question. It cannot be left unchallenged.
I think I can give a real life example of what she is talking about:
I once knew a man who was devoutly religious. It gave his life meaning and he loved life because of his religion. He was a very caring and friendly person and made an impression on everyone he met. He loved going to church and meeting with other religious folk afterwards, including the priest. In the end he actually gave up his profession and became a priest himself. He continues to enjoy life. I have not seen him for decades now but recently I met a man who came from his parish and found him to be the most extraordinarily friendly and considerate person he ever met. So it seems he hasn’t changed.
So, for my old acquaintance, it was rational to have faith in the sense that it gave his life meaning, it was the source of his many friendships, and the source of his thorough enjoyment of life.
And the truth or otherwise of the god he has faith in is, in this sense, irrelevant.
“And the truth or otherwise of the god he has faith in is, in this sense, irrelevant.”
I will fix that sentence for you –
“The god and his faith were irrelevant to what he accomplished.”
It could be achieved without them. He would even deserve more respect for what he did if it was not due to fear of godly retribution or due to promise of an afterlife.
And what about the children that priest indoctrinated? Was it rational for him to fill the heads of kids with lies, regardless of how kind he was?
From his pov, probably yes, because he would think that it would give their lives meaning and allow them to love life as he had.
It’s a variation of Socrates’ “No man knowingly does evil.”
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Rationality is no guarantee of morality.
It’s rational for a mob boss to order a hit when an insider has turned state’s evidence against the syndicate.
Since the priest is operating from inside a system that he perceives as well intentioned, ordered, benevolent, etc. then it is rational and in his view, and even moral, to teach the children.
For someone outside that system, it’s still rational, relative to the priest’s set of beliefs, but there is a strong case that it’s not teaching, it’s indoctrination, and that it’s not even moral.
Whether he thought it would give children’s life meaning or not, it’s still childhood indoctrination. It took me decades to completely extricate myself from my childhood indoctrination. I call that mental abuse.
Once you’ve taken te blue pill, you probably believe that it is in the best interests of other people to take the blue pill too. You might even argue (though I don’t) that the BillyJoe’s priest took the blue pill without knowing (or at least acknowledging) he was choosing what you and I would agree to be irrational.
IF (and I mean IF) we accept the premise that what is “rational” depends on the mental condition of the person in question, then most things will end up being considered “rational”. But then that pretty well makes the term useless for discussing any point beyond the personal feelings of individuals. (I think this is the crevice to which the religious apologist is obliged to retreat.)
I think we can generally agree that rationality means something more general and universal than that. At least I hope we can.
Just the point I was going to make. “It is rational to x” is not equivalent to “I like to x“.
Of course what’s rational depends on the mental condition of each individual. What’s rational to believe depends on one’s evidence and different people have access to different evidence bases. It’s not rational for you to believe I’m wearing green underpants, because you have no relevant evidence concerning that proposition. It is rational for me to believe it though, because I put them on this morning.
The important thing about rationality is that what it’s rational to believe is a function *only* of one’s evidence, and not, say, of one’s desires.
That sounds like the Alcoholics Anonymous idea of faith. In other words, you get that same kind of gratitude out of anything you want to believe to be a god. That still does not make faith a relevant and worthy virtue. It’s still self delusion.
The central question here comes down to the goals of the man himself. Which matters or mattered more to him: having an enjoyable life with meaning and friendships — or God? If he HAD to pick which one has prior significance, which is it?
If it is the first, then the priest is a humanist and when push comes to shove doesn’t really care if God exists. The concept is simply a convenient prop for him. He doesn’t have a “rational faith.” He doesn’t have religious faith at all. He’s basically a pragmatic (and poetic) atheist.
But if God is more to him than a vehicle for personal fulfillment and humanitarian works — and when push comes to shove God actually existing is the MOST important factor to his faith — then throw out those other aspects and concentrate on what is for him the main goal: God’s existence.
And thus the main question: why believe God exists? Reason and evidence and a dispassionate analysis? Or a moral commitment to try to believe in God for God’s sake — rather than his own?
If we are going to analyze whether a conclusion is reasonable for someone we have to be sure we are looking at the same question they are.
Sorry, my purpose in posting that story was to illustrate what I think Dr. Buchat meant when she said that religion can be a rational choice. I thought I’d get some feedback about whether others agreed with my assessment of what she was saying
I didn’t mean to imply that I agreed with her.
Sub.
“hey, let’s do some philosophy!”
hmmm…
Does she include ‘faith’ as in the phrase I detest, ‘people of faith’, that is ‘people who believe in a god or gods for which no evidence does or can exist’?
As I see it, it would be rational to ‘have faith’ if I were threatened with death for NOT having it, as I give some value to being alive (for some reason).
Sorry – I find Lara’s whole ideas about what is rational to be irrational.
Naïve atheist.
“So, for my old acquaintance, it was rational to have faith in the sense that it gave his life meaning”
Following this interesting line of argument it is rational for me to become a burglar as long as I can thereby enrich myself and get away with it. This is a sort of “rationality” that allows one to justify ANYTHING as being rational.
That would indeed be a rational survival strategy from an evolutionary biology point of view. Take the biological view of humans & everything becomes clearer to me anyway. It is all about garnering resources & reproduction.
We should not equate this sort of thing with human morality which is a different kettle of fish as Jerry says above. It may be rational for an individual but not a society, likewise there may be things that are rational for a society but not an individual. An example of the latter might be say a road that would be built through my house.
Sam Harris uses the example of a family that believes there’s a diamond the size of a fridge buried in their yard. It gives them pleasure and it bonds them as a family. (Like religious beliefs it has downsides which they won’t acknowledge, such as inadequate plans for retirement.)
Just because a belief gives you meaning, doesn’t make it rational.
Buchak undermines her argument by not offering a jot of evidence for any religious claims.
It’s just as irrational to have faith in Isis as it is to have faith in Jesus or Yahweh or Allah or Ganesh or …, for the evidence supporting all is the same: zero.
If Buchak could cite a smidgen of evidence for her preferred superstition, she’d have a case. But she hasn’t and cannot, and has no argument, explaining her time-wasting semantics that imply anyone who calls Isis-worshipers irrational is a “naïve atheist”.
you should have faith when the evidence does yield sufficiently high credence …
Naïve atheist: “Religious beliefs are based on faith, so they are irrational!”
As someone else said, Buchak herself is “naïve atheist” about all the gods except one. We just go one god further.
But… but… she’s not arguing that any god exists. Why does she need to provide evidence that one does? She’s arguing that it is possible to have religious faith (analyzed in a certain way) that is rational. It’s entirely consistent with this claim that no one actually has rational religious faith.
She’s argues that faith in God is rational if evidence exists and concludes that faith is rational, therefore implying that she has such evidence.
Where is it?
Besides, the concluding sentence of her paper is,
‘
This implies that there is some evidence (if not “all”).
Where is the evidence?
Bulchak doesn’t have any nor can she produce any.
Me thinks she chronically confuses the rational with her plethora of rationalizations. This is pretty common for all of us when we try to justify personal biases instead of exposing our notions to scientific exploration. It has apparently served her well financially at least – probably something she would refuse to admit to.
“…refraining from committing to the “Christian life” does have costs.”
What, precisely, are those costs?
And, what about the costs of committing to the Christian life? Self-delusion, having to hate the people they hate, energy spent on hocus-pocus, money given to some church so that they can recruit more victims, blind obedience, and the endless dance to defend BS – sounds exhausting to me. L
The real-life cost is living with the Christian fear that your “Loving God” Jesus will torture you forever if you stray, as He promises to do in the Gospels.
Bulchak tries to evade this fact and says without any supporting evidence that this hateful and harmful superstition is in some way rational.
You may have just been speaking (writing) quickly and informally, but to clarify just in case, Buchak is claiming that having faith in a religion (any religion) can be rational. She did not, in the quoted article anyway, claim that the superstition christianity is rational.
Yes, that’s the way I read it — a rational belief in belief! 😉
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A rational belief in the rationality about belief in belief?
Yes, exactly that: Define those costs for us.
And, what evidence makes your “credence” high enough? Tell us what evidence there is that makes the credence meter go high enough that it’s rational to have religious faith.
This appears to be a repackaging of Pascal’s wager. And like PW, it doesn’t operate very well unless there’s a binary NO FAITH/Christian[and a specific Christian]FAITH choice.
And don’t get started on “I will decide to believe..”
Pascal immediately came to mind for me as well with the “refraining from committing to the “Christian life” does have costs” line. It’s exactly the same argument, but with less severe costs (these days, anyway – a few centuries ago those costs might include being murdered by the Church).
Her biggest error, however, is claiming that two completely different use-cases of the word “faith” actually refer to the same concept. It’s a huge category error.
Didn’t the new pope cut the legs out from under Pascal’s Wager when he said that even atheists can get into Heaven as long as they follow their conscience?
So that cost of not committing to Catholicism has been officially waived. Feel free to disbelieve without postmortem repercussions.
“New pope cutting legs…”
Ahh, but you have to “not commit” using “right reason” and a “well-formed” conscience, as I was taught many, many (many) years ago.
Guess who decides if your reasoning is “right” and your conscience is properly shaped.
I’m fairly certain the pope is hanging his rhetorical hat on the assumption that most atheists will start believing in god when they meet him after death i.e. that god is real.
That is if he really is a believer himself after all.
ONLY YOUR BRAIN/BLOOD CHEMISTRY CAN DECIDE THAT! SO THE REAL ? FOR THE DELUSIONISTS IS “WHY DID GOD CREATE BLOOD CHEMISTRY?”
What, precisely, are those costs?
Potential Templeton money? I think her faith equivocation has earned her at least 65 billion dollars so far. Not bad for “research” that requires nothing more than an extra large box of wine and an armchair.
“In contrast, religious ‘evidence’ is based solely on revelation and the propositions of ancient, man-made books.” – J. Coyne
You’ve forgotten the rational arguments of natural theology.
“Natural theology is the practice of philosophically reflecting on the existence and nature of God independent of real or apparent divine revelation or scripture. Traditionally, natural theology involves weighing arguments for and against God’s existence, and it is contrasted with revealed theology, which may be carried out within the context of ostensible revelation or scripture. For example, revealed theology may take as authoritative certain New Testament claims about Jesus and then construct a philosophical or theological model for understanding how Jesus may be human and divine. Natural theology, on the other hand, develops arguments about God based on the existence of the cosmos, the very concept of God, and different views of the nature of the cosmos, such as its ostensible order and value.”
(Taliaferro, Charles. “The Project of Natural Theology.” In The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, edited by William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 1-23. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. p. 1)
“Buchak implies that the question of taking action based on a belief in God is somehow independent of actually believing in God.” – J. Coyne
I recommend the following text by John Bishop, in which he distinguishes (inter alia) between “the ‘doxastic venture’ model: faith as practical commitment beyond the evidence to one’s belief that God exists” and “the ‘sub-doxastic venture’ model: faith as practical commitment without belief”: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/faith/
” “the ‘doxastic venture’ model: faith as practical commitment beyond the evidence to one’s belief that God exists” and “the ‘sub-doxastic venture’ model: faith as practical commitment without belief””.
I don’t think the proper response to Jerry’s criticism of word salad is more word salad. Unsubstantiated discussion (claiming unsubstantiated “evidence”) is word salad.
Does “the ‘sub-doxastic venture’ mean the “doxy” (lady of the night) always gets to be on top? Reverse sexism if I ever heard it!
See: The Courtier’s Reply
Cheers!
I suppose in the most charitable sense a person can remain rational and have religious beliefs, but only within the narrow context of limited information. If I grow up in a religious community where everyone I know espouses religious beliefs it is not altogether irrational for me to go along with those beliefs.
Still, in a wider context religious beliefs are notoriously lacking in terms of supporting evidence. I can think of several examples of very religious people in very religious and culturally isolated communities ending up at odds with various aspects of their religion and being forced to reject it at great social and emotional cost.
Scientifically minded people instinctively seek as wide a context as they can, testing every idea as rigorously as possible against all the existing ideas that already have greater confidence. In doing this at all, religious beliefs need to either be rejected or shrunk down out of the realm of possible fallibility (becoming essentially meaningless).
In a wide sense, “faith” is a necessary evil. We cannot possibly examine everything everywhere at all times. We are limited in our ability to observe things, so we cannot ever really have absolute certainty in the strictest sense. This is not an excuse to discard all observation and put all beliefs on a level playing field. We must temper our beliefs against our observations and predictions, having the courage to file many important questions under the unknown. Religious faith is very carefully positioned outside of observation or testing, unfaltering in making assertions that cannot be justified. Religious faith is not rational in any educated person.
“absolute certainty in the strictest sense.”
Are there any elephants down at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, walking about?
I can tell, though I have not been within a thousand miles of that location, with “really..absolute certainty in the strictest sense” that NO, there are no elephants walking around, at the bottom of the ocean, in the Marianas Trench.
There are particular features about phenomenon and objects that allow us 100% certainty regarding those phenomenon and objects. The examples abound. Yet people seem to desire to “soften” their stance, pile unclearly-defined condition upon unclearly-defined condition (e.g, “strictest sense”), for no good reason other than it is the “humane” thing to do!
There are things I could do to be more certain about the life forms in the Marianas trench, but in complete honesty I have to say I don’t know what is down there.
In any practical way, of course there are not air breathing mammals deep in the ocean. That idea contradicts what we know about elephants. In any regular sense of the word, we do not have to account too hard for the possibilities of massive conspiracies or new and unexpected things that go against the laws of nature as we know them behind every unexplored corner of the universe.
If someone wants to talk about a particular definition of faith that they clearly explain I am fine with that. If Buchak wants to talk about faith in this broad sort of way it is fine with me as long as it is clear. My point is that even though we have to take some leaps now and again without being able to justify every last part of every idea, religious ideas are still not justifiable. Ideas never tested and never to be tested cannot be distinguished from things completely imaginary. Insisting on a narrow definition of “faith” or “certainty” is not required.
Jesus Elephant could do it if He wanted to! (He just doesn’t.)
Buchak is clearly practicing mauvaise foi.
Nonetheless, I’m pretty sure Jodie Foster really loves me.
That is funny.
I am pretty there are human beings living in the center of the sun having a good time.
I’m certain you’re right.
Cheers,
b&
I love it when Christians make “I’ll explain it from my own tradition” statements, thereby dancing past the problem of explaining why faith in Xipe Totec isn’t perfectly reasonable.
Nah, it’s rational beacuse I believe it. Q.E.D.
or even because …
Xipe Totec is my favorite Mexica deity. Wouldn’t have wanted to be one of his priests, though. My faith would not be strong enough to wear a flayed human skin for a month.
Yeah, it would have sucked. But then so does flagellating yourself in penance.
Probably sucked even worse for the guy whose skin adorned you!
It seems to me important to acknowledge that a person can be very rational, and be entirely wrong. That is because they start by accepting premises that seem reasonable based on intuition, and they reason correctly from those premises. Based on these premises and reasoning, beliefs can be formed. But if the premises don’t hold, then the logic can be valid but not sound.
I think it’s fair to say that religious faith can be rational, i.e. based on valid logic, but not sound, i.e. based on invalid premises that are founded upon human subjective intuitions. For example, there was a time when it was quite rational, based on visual evidence and intuition, to believe that the sun revolved around the earth. We know that is a false belief because we have investigated the premises of that belief, and found them to be wanting.
So it is really not correct for atheists to say that religious believers are irrational. It is intuitively natural for the human mind to reach certain conclusions about nature based only on sensory data. We intuitively notice that things have a beginning and an end, and that people make things. So it isn’t far fetched for a person ignorant of scientific knowledge to find a satisfying explanation in the story that a benevolent powerful intentional being created the things we see. And much of religion is then rationally derived from there, together with observations from the experiences of life.
What is not rational is to never reexamine the premises, and to continue to hold those beliefs because they satisfy something intuitive, even though there is powerful evidence that the intuitions the original premises are founded upon are not applicable when extrapolated from the scale of a human family to the scope of the entire universe.
Suppose you are a member of a primitive hunter gatherer tribe. There is no real medical care, and people are subject to predation, war, disease, famine, and other causes of death. People die young, children die frequently, so everyone is often exposed to death, and witnesses frequently the process of dying, the transition from an animated member of the tribe or family to an inert corpse, meat with all the external appearances of the former person, but none of the charm, wit, or personality.
It seems intuitively obvious that something has left the body. It seems very reasonable to hypothesize some notion of the soul, and that the difference between dead meat and living flesh is the invisible magical energy that leaves the body upon death.
It is also reasonable for people to accept tradition, the time honored beliefs handed down from generation to generation, and the longer lasting the tradition, the more serious and substantial it seems, the more credible it seems, the more authority it possesses. There is certainly rationality behind such tendencies of the human mind.
But there is a contrary reasonable stance that says we should reexamine the premises, and not simply accept tradition for tradition’s sake, but that we should do the hard work to question it and reexamine it with “new eyes”, with our modern technological understanding of nature.
And once one seriously does this, faith in God, the soul, the afterlife, rapidly becomes a set of reasonable syllogisms that may have validity, but they simply aren’t sound.
I think this is right.
Dr. Buchak appeals to evidence that some people have and others don’t, i.e. subjective “evidence.”
Many years ago during a time of extreme emotional stress I had a “religious experience.” I now look back on it as a psychological event, but at the time it felt real and transformative. My response was rational enough; the experience I was responding to was not, and constituted a false premise.
But the experience was emotionally profound, and quite overwhelmed my faculties. It took years before I could look at it with real objectivity.
Alas, we are human, not Vulcan. While we are firmly committed to rational assessments of truth claims, we should still be gentle with one another’s misleading emotions.
And the shipyard shooter appears to have a profound experience of “low-frequency radio waves”. So one presumes that his reaction was rational??
Of course not. Neither is your comment, which doesn’t follow at all from what I said.
I think this is basically correct. The only thing I would add is that if personal conviction arises from a deep emotional source (e.g. religious revelation, a concatenation of ‘spooky’ circumstance, devotion to a political party, or even ‘stalking’ a celebrity) then the person holding the faith is blinded to contradictory evidence. It cannot be seen, let alone considered. It is the confirmation bias running full bore.
In which case while subsequent behaviour may be internally rational to the faith-head, to other people it seems obsessive and irrational.
Better than I could have said it.
The only religious faith that ever made sense to me was a conditional faith that was willing to revise its opinions and allow its own faith-stance only a limited validity. (Jerry DeWitt in his book “From Faith to Hope” states that all of the best ministers are semi-agnostic.)
One could appeal here either to the Buddhist parable of the three blind men feeling an elephant or to Paul’s “we see through a glass darkly”, both of which have been appealed to say one’s own paradigm (Christian, Sikh, or whatever) has only a bracketed qualified validity. But it’s still a POV that allows that subjective experiences are a pointer to something transcendental even if it is in a way that is not reproducible for others!! One effectively must endorse a religious pluralism or inclusivism to believe this, or as William James put it “piecemeal supernaturalism”. James held no one religion was literally or completely true- all were flawed maps of whatever supernatural there was, but that religious experience genuinely reflected some mysterious supernatural reality, thus everyone should be encouraged to follow the best of their own tradition, on the assumption that there’s something behind it however poorly understood. Effectively a 3 on the Dawkins scale.
In my own experience, more and more liberal religious folk who embrace some form of this paradigm are also willing to embrace bad post-modernist attacks on modern science and use this thinking as an excuse to just not critically examine assumptions that are almost certainly false!! And the more one studies the psychology and sociology of religion, the less likely James’ outlook seems to be!!! As such, I have personally transitioned to a more strict “evidentialism” and “reliabilism” which is how I think philosophers label the stricter science-oriented paradigms generally advocated here.
The problem with this is that the religious “conditional faith” seldom takes the task of revising its opinions seriously. Instead, a hesitant and uncertain religious faith still frames the situation in terms of positive virtues: having hope, learning to trust, becoming humble, reaching beyond one’s limitations, etc. etc. The conditions are all focused on the believer deciding to believe rather than an objective assessment of the facts in light of modern science.
+1
To a point.
But in this day and age, it is simply not rational to maintain belief in things that have been demonstrated to be false. More importantly, we also know that belief is warranted only by sufficient objective evidence, regardless of your ontological starting point. There is quite a lot I don’t know about the world, but I can still see that drawing conclusions from insufficient evidence is a problem.
And much religion doesn’t actually follow logically from a given set of premises. Consider Mormonism. This was not some ignorant primitive people’s attempt to explain the world based on their experience of it. It was simply made up. A lot of religion is.
More to the point is examining the phenomenon called Compartmentalization.
In order to proceed in life, often it is necessary to set an experience into compartment of the mind and not let it interfere with other experiences. A good example is Major League Baseball. Striking out four times in a row, as a batter, must not influence your confidence in getting a basehit in your fifth at-bat.
If it does unduly influence your fifth, sixth, seventh at-bat, you will not be a successful Major Leaguer. The ability to compartmentalize is essential to every Major League Baseball ballplayer.
The person who incorporates religion into their life in an exemplary fashion simply illustrates the human ability to compartmentalize their experiences and knowledge. Knowing that “God did not listen to six million people screaming their prayers, asking for help, dying a frightful death at the hands of the Nazis” is put into a different area of recollection while kneeling in a church or bedside and uttering simple prayers. That set of prayers creates a feeling of well-being in spite of the knowledge of Nazis and death and God and sixty-million-plus unanswered prayers, just those prayers, among billions, unrequited.
And that resulting well-being is accomplished by mental compartmentalization…not because of any intrinsic values in any religion.
Well put.
I wonder how much the development of machinery has influenced our intuitions here. Machines (which are often anthropomorphised; see, e.g., The Iron Maiden), wear out and break down irreparably, without anything having left them. Why not our bodies too?
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I think you’re right. Especially intelligent machines like computers and robots. I think knowledge of these makes it easier to see bio-organisms as protein and information based machines whose death is effectively any of a wide variety of possible bio-mechanical or biochemical failures.
It doesn’t seem so poetic to a twentieth century mind, but this view actually enables a whole new world of awe and wonder at the marvel of humans that can’t easily be grasped by minds inculcated in more traditional views of humans.
Buchak thinks her Christian faith is rational, I assume? What exactly and precisely does her faith consist of? And how is it rational? If she is correct she ought to be able to show that her faith is reasonable. Not simply to her own satisfaction, but to mine.
In case you are interested in tracking this thread. I like what the philosopher is doing – but it seems to me absent the evidence she implies she has but fails to provide, all it does is condemn religious faith as not based on evidence and credence….and thus distinguish semantically between “I have faith in my wife” and “I have faith in God”
@14 – “It seems to me important to acknowledge that a person can be very rational, and be entirely wrong”
I totally agree with this. It can be rational to be a Muslim in Iran: all of the information available to you will say Islam is true as well as the fact that being an apostate is a death sentence.
It is certainly entirely rational to be a shia moslem if you live in iran, irrespective of whether you believe any of it.
True. Preservation of the belief and the self preservation of the believer.
That’s not an argument for whether it’s rational to believe in Islam’s claims. It’s merely an argument for acting as if you do.
Ok so it may rational to act as if you believe its true. It doesn’t negate my point.
I’m going to ‘sorta-kinda’ side with Buchak on this one. Well, not really.
In the original post, I thought Jerry was overly hard on her, and this response of hers seems to back up my thoughts that she wasn’t just another dumbass accommodationist.
This is not to say that I agree with her. Because I don’t. However, having heard dozens of people say similar things, her statements feel much more substantial. I can see where she’s coming from, and it’s not Lalaland.
I don’t wish to group her in with all her other compatriots just yet, as there may be something worthwhile in what she has to say, even if it’s only better understanding more liberal religious people.
Unfortunately, she doesn’t go into as much detail in her response as I’d like, and it’s far to early in the morning for me to ‘defend’ (for want of a better word) her claims. I hope to hear more from her.
I don’t know.
She’s still conflating the two definitions of “faith”. On top of sort of pretending that there is no generally recognized definition and that as part of her project to figure out the meaning and implications of “faith”, it’s somehow necessary to lump the two together.
Based on what I’ve read here on WEIT it doesn’t seem like a meritorious project.
I don’t know if it’s possible to coin a deepity without prior equivocation. But then, I’m not a philosopher, so I’ve never tried.
Me thinks: “Rationality is in the eye of the beholder.” If it meets a need to define one’s belief as rational then one so defines it. It is an merely intellectual argument (great that we all have this luxury) as to whether a position or belief is actually rational, whereas it is an emotional reality if it meets one’s needs. Those believers that behave in a manner that meets my needs are OK by me, likewise those secularists that behave in a manner that meets my needs are also OK by me. Both groups contain takers as well as givers, the commonality being each and every single individual is meeting his/her own very unique needs. Perhaps in the long run that is the only absolute we can hang our hat on.
All ethics are situational, but folks often defend their positions with with a dependence on moral absolutes that don’t exist, but provide the appearence of moral superiority. Believers that perform acts that I support (caring for vulnerable fellow humans, for example) may be doing so as a result of what I believe is a dependence on a supernatural delusional belief. So what?! I have been dependent on relying on my five senses to define reality for me, but that does not necessarily mean it’s the totality of reality. Reductionist logis, circular reasoning at it’s best? Perhaps, but it serves to support my somewhat arrogant & ambivalent agnostic position.
However, if the CUBS ever win a World Series, all bets are off!
Reason properly belongs to aesthetics? You will have a very hard time arguing that one. Or if you mean that reason is entirely a matter of personal psychology, where does that leave mathematics? Whether Pythagoras’ theorem applies depends on psychology – not geometry?
As far as my experience goes, mathematical laws are certainly absolutes in the human experience, and at the present time I certainly have no empirical evidence that it will change. I only suggest that there may be a possibility, and that any human’s use of seemingly evidence based laws, be they mathematical or otherwise, is dependent on their needs, and the unjique experience of their five senses. Fortunately the vast majority of us have used our five senses to define the boundaries of our knowledge. However, I would still question whether our research sample, ie., the experience of humans on the planet earth, necessarily defines all reality beyond the experience of those of us on earth. That, to me, is the true beauty of scientific exploration: the endless questioning of data for the purpose of expanding our knowledge base.
Thanks for your response – keeps this old man on his toes(maybe)!
Well, it is nice of Buchak to have faith in her analysis, but it isn’t rational.
As I said the other day, unevidenced belief has failed the rationality test, and in a big way:
“Rationality doesn’t work that way. Just because a few individuals have survived kilometers of free fall without a parachute in WWII doesn’t mean that it is a good idea to step out of a plane at altitude.
What we want to establish is whether or not faith is empirically irrational.
And it is, from the bottom to the top. Unsupported belief can only lead to accepting irrational ideas.
This has lead all organized beliefs to use a method of pointing at anything and claim “godsdiddit”, which means they intentionally want to accept untestable, irrational ideas.
And now we know that the “godsdidit” method has meant inventing the worst possible ideas to explain anything, the idea that magic action is responsible for life and its species or the universe and its contents. …
In the same way that science has earned our trust, religion has earned our distrust. In spades. If it hasn’t worked for millenniums, why would we expect it to suddenly work?”
I also noted that Buchak should be rationally arguing for parsimony (in order to lower postponement costs in acquiring new knowledge) – including skepticism of religion, e.g. atheism.
Here it seems to me Buchak is arguing for the old religious gambit that falsehoods are good if they lead to good results:
It is arguable if it is rational to immorally coddle adults as if they have no rationality or to make their decisions for them. The former is hurtful and the latter is inviting fascism.
You illuminate more aspects of Compartmentalization by the human mind.
By constructing impassible barriers between areas of information, contradictory information can exist forever.
Buchak is going into Therapist/Anthropologist mode: let’s set aside the truth of the beliefs and just see how well they work (or don’t work) for the people involved. This is not only okay if you ARE a therapist or anthropologist — it’s also a reasonable and pragmatic social stance, one which will smooth discord and achieve harmony. Dinner-Table Diplomacy.
The trouble is that the niggling little issue set aside — the truth of the beliefs — is supposed to be the MAIN issue to the people involved themselves. “Discord” is the result of respecting that: “harmony” is only achieved by ignoring what’s presumably most important.
And if a justified faith is indeed the goal, then therapists and anthropologists can’t always hold themselves above and outside of the fray. Nor should they.
A little OT, I just noticed that John Cassidy’s politics column in the New Yorker is “Rational Irrationality“.
(Maybe the religion column is “Irrational Irrationality” … )
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It still all seems to start from unnecessarily conflating quite different meanings of the word “faith”.
Do other languages use the same word for “trust or confidence” and “religious belief” in the same way that English does?
It still all seems to start from unnecessarily conflating quite different meanings of the word “faith”.
And – apparently – quite different meanings for “rational.” 😉
Russian does. There’s all manner of prefixes and things to twist the words to mean trust/assurance/belief/faith/superstition/etc. but it’s always the same root.
German distinguishes the two meanings: das Vertrauen for trust or confidence and der Glaube for religious faith. We should start distinguishing in everyday English.
Although I appreciate Burchak’s discussion of the topic I share what I percieve to be JCs frustration with the ephemeralness of the issues.
I think there is a concrete way of forcing the issue:
If there is sufficient evidence to believe something on faith and hence be rational, then the converse, not believing it on faith, should be irrational.
If its rational to believe in God, why isn’t it irrational NOT to believe in God?
If its rational to be a Muslim, why aren’t Christians irrational for NOT being Muslims.
I’d appreciate any feedback on this of course
I think you need to incorporate the word “information” into your philosophy. Try restating it using information instead of “evidence”.
Evidence is a tricky slippery term, best used within the strictures of a legal system, where it is defined, i.e., what is evidence in particular, and what is not evidence.
After all, if I claim that there are no lions in my neighborhood because I sprayed lion repellent all around, is the absence of lions “evidence” that, yes, indeed, I sprayed lion repellent?
Similarly, Muslims often proclaim the inability to “see Allah in all the evidence surrounding you” is evidence that you are blind!!
I thought Burchak’s letter was well-written and friendly, and not anything close to a “word salad”.
I gather she rejects the rationality of faith without evidence, and thinks the only sort of religious belief that is rational is that based on good evidence in the eyes of the believer.
I’m of course skeptical that such good evidence can exist without some prior irrational belief. For instance, if you think that crying in the presence of a rainbow is evidence of God, and you do indeed cry in the presence of a rainbow, then that might very well count as good evidence to you that God exists.
Uh, sure, and the Navy Yard shooter had “good evidence” that he was being targeted with ULF electromagnetic waves. Who needs objectivity?
Yes, all points of view are rational in some sense of the word. 🙂
and that (were we to accept it) makes the word useless …
I’m stuck on this part too:
It seems a little sophistry-esque or at least doesn’t make sense to me. If you do “Christian deeds” and you are an atheist, how does that work? Should I have faith in god because I did stuff the Christian god would like?
Oh, Jesus — I hope you don’t do things that the Christian gods would like. Selected redacted portions of some of the post-Enlightenment re-revised reinterpretations of the Christian gods, maybe, but do please stay as far away from the originals as humanly possible.
Cheers,
b&
Ha ha, as I was writing that the same thought went through my head. I thought about killing your neighbour for working on the Sabbath. 😀
@ Ben Goren
Posted September 26, 2013 at 9:34 am
Again, Ben, you make a hopelessly inaccurate historical claim about the multiplicity of original Christian gods. The comment is vaguely off topic, but at least get your facts on early Christian claims right.
Slaínte.
Dermot, the notion that any popular religion today is or ever was “monotheistic” is laughable, and only common because it makes for a good marketing slogan.
If Pluto, Set, and Hades are all gods — and they most certainly are — then Satan and Beelzebub and Lucifer are, too. If Mercury and the other Olympians are gods — and they unquestionably are — then so, too, are Gabriel and the rest of the Heavenly Host at the Annunciation. If Romulus and Remus then Abraham and Isaac. And so on.
And that’s looooooong before we get anywhere near the theological quagmire of Trinitarianism.
Really, all that “monotheism” in practice means is that the believer in question has one particular favorite god that gets most of the worship. And, surprise, surprise, by that definition, even the ancient Roman and Egyptian and Greek Pagans were all monotheists as well.
Cheers,
b&
On “the probability of evolution in Christian theology”, one biblical scholar writes,
“When the sayings of Jesus first began to circulate, the early Christians probably had a very different conception of who he was than Christians a century later did…the earliest Christian might not have believed Jesus was literally God, and even insofar as they thought him divine, they appear to have regarded his divine attributes as coming to him only after his death (e.g. Romans 1:4, cf. 1 Corinthians 15:43), not while he was still alive. Mark even appears to deny it (in Mark 10:18, 13:32 and elsewhere). And only once does any Pauline letter directly call him God (Romans 9:5), rather than a son, king or intermediary between man and God, and that one direct attribution could be a later scribal interpolation. The fact that it’s unique in the Pauline corpus suggests this, as does the fact that magnifying the Christological titles of Jesus, especially adding the appellation ‘God’ (Theos), is one of the most commonly documented interpolations, with numerous examples in extant manuscripts. But even if authentic, it still only refers to Jesus after his death, not during his ministry. Likewise, the first (and possibly authentic) letter of Clement of Rome, believed to have been written at the end of the first century, never claims Jesus was literally identical with God, but always portrays Jesus as a chosen intermediary.
So it cannot be confidently proven that in the early days of the Christian mission Jesus was thought to share in the omniscience of God, any more than any other prophet did. Thus, a few sayings suggesting his ignorance would present no barrier to believing that Jesus was the Chosen One of God, Lord and King of Kings, Anointed Son of God, and so on. For Jesus was not expected to share all the divine attributes during his days on earth, until much later in Christian history.”
Baldly, Christology moves in the first century of the Christian era from an assertion of Jesus’ humanity to a declaration of his Goddiness, with many stages in between.
Slaínte.
Dermot, you miss the point entirely.
Whether or not the Christians of any era apply the “god” label to Jesus or do or don’t see him as separate from or part of YHWH or whatever is entirely and totally irrelevant.
The earliest Christians and every Christian of every generation since have all defined Jesus as having properties that any objective observer must conclude place him firmly in the “deity” category — and, as well, all the rest of the gods of the Christian pantheon. Again, whether or not a Christian is willing to concede that their gods actually are gods.
Hell, I could invent a new religion today with a central figure who has the power to levitate, restore missing limbs with a twitch of the nose, and will determine whether the dead will be dipped in chocolate or molten plutonium. And I could call this entity, “He Who Is Most Emphatically Not In Any Way A god No Matter What Anybody Else Says.”
Of course, HWIMENIAWAgNMWAES really is a god, despite his name — just as Jesus really is a god, despite what you misrepresent of the early Christians, and just as Satan, the Heavenly Host, the Patriarchs, the Saints, and all the rest are indisputably gods, no matter what some child rapist in a black dress and white collar might claim to the contrary.
Cheers,
b&
Ben, I am perfectly aware of the differences between humans and supernatural beings.
You made a claim, that Diana should ‘stay away from the originals’ of the Christian gods by which I presume you refer to the murderous, and almost permanently incandescent Yahweh, and to Jesus’ increasingly deluded moral prescriptions. But you indicated that the original Christians claimed Jesus as God; they didn’t and that is not ‘entirely and totally irrelevant’, it demonstrates to us how early first century Jews could interpret the world.
The same biblical scholar writes about, “presenting evidence that the Christians of (St.) Paul’s time believed what later Christians claimed. But there’s nothing in the evidence from Paul himself that Jesus was ever thought to be God Incarnate while residing on earth. All the evidence there is consistent with the view that Jesus was merely a man, a Messiah possessed by the Spirit of God, who was adopted by God (either at his birth, baptism, or death) and thus was the ‘Son of God’ only in a legal and spiritual sense, not a literal sense. Indeed, Paul outright says that Jesus ‘was born from the seed of David in respect to the flesh,’ but ‘ordained the Son of God in power in respect to the spirit of holiness, from the resurrection of the dead.’ In other words, from the seed of David he was a man, but after his resurrection he was appointed Son of God – when he was not flesh, but spirit (Romans 1:3-4). The words are unmistakable: Jesus genomenos, ‘came into being,’ ‘was born’ a descendant of David (from gignomai), and then horistheis, ‘was separated out,’ ‘distinguished,’ ‘marked,’ ‘ordained’ – the word in fact often meaning ‘deified’ (from horizô) – not in the flesh, but in the spirit, and not in life, but after death. It is true, however, that a few other passages from Paul imply pre-existence, so (if we assume these other passages were not scribal interpolations) many scholars take this verse as representing the original gospel, and Paul’s view as a more Platonic development implying spirit possession…”
A ‘misrepresentation’ on my part of the original Christians? I don’t think so.
Slaínte.
Not in my reply to Diana, I didn’t.
But let’s see what the earliest surviving Christian authority has to say about the matter, shall we?
Now, you may well be arguing some theological nonsense about some of the finer details of Trinitarianism, but Paul in his opening statement of the first words of his to be found in the Bible makes clear that Jesus is the textbook embodiment of a (demi)god.
I’m sorry, Dermot, but this notion of yours that Jesus isn’t a god and wasn’t originally conceived as one is so laughably absurd that I feel like I’m explaining to a young child that, yes, the sky really is blue and grass really is green and the stove really does get hot.
Cheers,
b&
You once told me to be careful what I said about early Christianity, Ben, because Richard Carrier often comments on this site. Well he just did, twice. The quotations are from Richard Carrier, ‘Why Christianity Didn’t Need a Miracle to Succeed’ Kindle edition, 2009, location 5583.
You literally don’t know what you’re talking about, do you Ben?
And here’s more evidence; I think I can demonstrate to the satisfaction of any reasonable person two things. The first is that you do what you have accused me of: that is, of not reading the early documents which we discuss. And secondly, of not reading them ‘critically’.
You recently said that you would expect the ‘Dead Sea Scrolls’ to mention Jesus (which they do not). Here is my response.
The Scrolls, covering the approximate dates 200 BCE to 70 CE, are made up of works generally considered to be by the Essenes; they comprise rule books, Bible interpretation, religious poetry, Wisdom works, calendars and liturgical texts. Much of it is written in highly allusive, mystical language. You have to know a lot about Jewish history to interpret what they refer to.
If you think they should mention Jesus, then you should ask yourself a simple question: which other prominent personality in first century Palestine do they mention? The answer is none. Not one.
No Roman Governor of Judaea: no Coponius, Marcus Ambivulus, Annius Rufus, Valerius Gratus, Pontius Pilate, Marcellus, Antonius Felix, Porcius Festus, Gessius Florus nor one of the presumed nemeses of the Essenes, Sextus Vettulenus Cerialis.
No high-ranking Jew (high priest, king or tetrarch): no Ananus, no Caiaphas, no Gamaliel, no Herod, no Agrippa.
The claim – on the WEIT website of all places – that you would ‘expect’ the Qumran Scrolls to mention Jesus is frankly embarrassing. Give up that argument.
I can think of two possible explanations for why you would claim that the Qumran Scrolls should mention Jesus. The first is that you have not read them, and like any uninformed person, you simply assumed that a first century Jewish sect might mention Jesus. The second is that you have read them, but uncritically, or rather, not uncritically; you simply have not taken in anything that you read. Which is it? There is a third option, which you, I and any readership can infer.
This demonstrates the rigour of your historical research, Ben.
It would be refreshing if you tried to counter any interlocutor’s counter-point with an accurate representation and appreciation of what they really propound; and not with an incoherent accusation that anyone who wishes to discuss Jewish and Christian history must, for some reason known only to yourself, agree with any element of those religions.
Regarding your initial comment to Diana, I can think of no other explanation for the meaning that I have ascribed to it; unless you have moved the goal-posts.
Slaínte.
Wow, Dermot. You’ve fully gone off the rails and entirely into Liar-for-Jesus apologetics la-la land here.
And waaaaaaaaaaaay off-topic, to boot — so I’ll leave you with a sentence or three, as you’ve already taken up far more than this thread’s share of column inches than is warranted on this subject. If you want to spam the thread further, have at it — it’s all your’n.
Of course the Scrolls are light on the mentions of contemporary political figures; they’re not the type of political history that, say, Josephus penned.
What they are that’s significant to the question of the Jesus incident are the actual original documents written by the hands of people who lived before, during, and after the entire time “The Greatest Story Ever Told” is supposed to have happened.
Just as you wouldn’t expect the meeting minutes of the Tempe Transportation Commission to include a listing of every minor functionary in Maricopa County government, you would expect the minutes to make at least oblique reference to a horde of zombies invading downtown during the Fall Festival of the Arts.
Every early source for Jesus is filled with that kind of spectacular can’t-miss-it huge public event that would have forever imprinted itself on anybody who lived through even one such example. And, yet, not a single such event made enough of an impression on any contemporary person to have recorded it.
That’s the significance of the Scrolls.
And the only way to dismiss that significance is to equally dismiss each and every other document that actually does mention Jesus as being insane exaggeration at best. But then what’re you left with to actually “know” anything about Jesus at all?
It’s the Incredible Shrinking Jesus line of Christian apologetics. He starts out as Bible Jesus, but turns into an “humble” nobody schmuck when you bring out the contemporary documents, and instantly expands into the rebel commando who founded Christianity the moment you pour the documents out of the glass, and then by Sunday he’s back getting his guts groped before he flies off into the skies once he’s dried off.
Cheers,
b&
I’m mildly amused I was somewhat to blame for this whole thing. 🙂
Okay, I demand that this acrimony and name-calling stop RIGHT NOW. It’s okay if you guys want to discuss ideas or history, but it’s not okay to be this nasty and call each other names (including “liar”). So stop it! NOW!
Sorry, Jerry. I’ll drop it, and I’ll try to remember to not let Dermot engage me again in the future.
For what it’s worth, I was using the phrase, “liar for Jesus,” as a synonym for “Christian apologist” in exactly the same sense as you yourself regularly do — such as here and here. And, yes, Dermot’s arguments here and elsewhere are textbook examples of Christian apologetics, of the type that regularly accompany the breathless declarations of dozens of ancient (but decades- and centuries-late) documents that mention Jesus.
Cheers,
b&
“I think some people do have evidence of the required sort.”
And I have a fire-breathing dragon in my garage, but I can’t let you see it. Sorry!
I would guess the dragon in your garage is actually a fire-exhaling dragon and not fire-breathing.
Otherwise your gas/electric bill would be huge!
Unsurprisingly, Jerry nails it.
Until the faithful can adduce objective observations supporting their claims, their faith is irrational in that it is a disproportionate apportioning of belief with respect to what a rational analysis of empirical evidence would indicate.
That, right on cue, Ms. (Dr.?) Buchak fails to supply any evidence, and since the entirety of the evidence available to date is overwhelmingly consistent with an entirely natural universe and actively hostile to claims of a supernatural one, it really isn’t necessary to give even a hint of further consideration to her arguments, no matter how eloquent.
The short version is that religious faith is every bit as anachronistic and dangerous a method of decision-making as haruspex. We don’t need to even grant cursory credence to the possibility of its validity; it’s simply worng, as worng as worng gets.
Cheers,
b&
Lara Buchak’s response seems to be an honest reply from her perspective. I don’t think the differences are resolvable as described though.
Why frame the solution from the christian point of view? The attempt seems to be to encourage atheists to adopt the word “faith” as a substitute for strongly held reasoning. However, any reasoning that I have strongly held could be abandoned when faced with stronger contradicting evidence. A typical christian will ignore contradicting evidence or twist the evidence in a way that saves their faith. How can that difference be fairly communicated within the bounds of the one word, “faith”? As an example Lara doesn’t address the mounds of evidence that contradict the christian faith as laid out in the official (actually there are several “official” versions, why is that even desirable let alone permitted if it were the inspiration of one “god”) holey book.
Many times a christian will sweep aside contradicting evidence by redressing the words that are written in their holey book but, that redressing occurs on a situational basis; the redressing isn’t applied consistently. The same verse from the bible can be used with opposing meanings from person to person or even day to day by the same person. Christianity as it is applied in the real world is a jumbled up mess, and I have “faith” that christianity as it is practiced by christians has damaging consequences for any society in which it is dominantly applied. It breeds inconsistency, insincerity, and confusion, while giving undue advantage not to the seeker of truth but to the bully, baffler, and/or “smooth” talker. There is definitely a difference between the faith of a christian and the strongly held reasoning of properly applied scientific methodological inquiry.
Let’s say someone asked you why it was rational to believe in evolution or that 17 was a prime.
You know what you wouldn’t do?
You wouldn’t start playing word games and redefining what it means to be rational. That someone has to take those steps to defend their claims is a good indication of the weakness of their claims.
Dear Professor Coyne,
First of all, thanks for your attention to my posts at NPR’s 13.7 and for posting this reply from Lara Buchak. I may or may not write a response to points you raise elsewhere, but I did want to clarify something relevant to this post. Buchak notes (correctly) that I don’t think *religious* faith (i.e., in supernatural entities) can ever be rational. You write:
“Note that Buchak says that Lombrozo doesn’t think that it can ever be rational to rationally have faith in religion. If that’s the case, Lombrozo didn’t mention that in her NPR piece. In fact, at the end Lombrozo argues that the rationality of religious belief provides some common ground for a fruitful dialogue between believers and nonbelievers.”
You’re right that I don’t state explicitly that I don’t think religious faith can ever be rational; perhaps I should have. But here’s what I actually did write in the NPR piece:
“Buchak’s paper suggests that under some conditions, faith can be rational, and sets the stage for a more sophisticated conversation about faith for theists and atheists alike.” Then after more text and a quote from Buchak, “Sounds like an excellent basis for establishing more charitable ground!”
http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2013/09/16/222907684/can-faith-ever-be-rational
I did *not* write:
“Buchak’s paper suggests that under some conditions, RELIGIOUS(1) faith can be rational, and THEREFORE(2) sets the stage for a more sophisticated conversation about faith for theists and atheists alike….sounds like an excellent basis for COMMON(3) ground.”
To comment on each of these highlighted changes:
(1) I think Buchak offers a compelling conceptual analysis of faith across religious and non-religious cases, and I find the decision-theoretical analysis likewise compelling. I’m therefore sympathetic to the idea that *faith* can be rational, but not religious faith. As I wrote in my original post (immediately before the quoted text above), skeptics can argue that the condition of needing strong evidence to begin with will never be met, a point with which I agree. (Note that Buchak disagrees, as she writes in her reply to you, but it isn’t the aim of her original papers, nor of her response to you, to argue that such evidence is available.)
(2) I think Buchak’s analysis sets the stage for a more sophisticated conversation about faith for theists and atheists because it allows us to focus in on the nature of different kinds of commitments, whether the conditions for the rationality of those commitments are ever satisfied in religious cases, and (perhaps) why rationality matters in the first place. I think this is a more productive conversation than one in which we claim that religion (or science, for that matter) does or does not involve faith or simply assert that faith is or is not rational.
(3) I argue for charitable ground, not common ground, an idea that I develop in an earlier post to which you’ve responded:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2013/09/08/220450752/science-v-religion-let-s-be-civil
As I state explicitly in that post, the idea behind charitable ground is not to find middle ground. I’m arguing for respectful and productive debate, not that we all compromise.
In any case, thanks again for the attention, and I hope this clarifies some points for you and your readers.
Sincerely,
Tania Lombrozo
Perhaps you could clarify what you expect the product of such debate to be, if not compromise or common ground? How would you measure productivity, if not in terms of minds changed?
Compromise typically implies that both sides concede something. But the best position isn’t necessarily the one in the middle, or the one that borrows elements from both sides. What would it mean to compromise in this case? To suggest that we have some evidence for God, but not much? To suggest that some people have such evidence and others don’t? To suggest that some people’s faith in God is rational, while that of others is not? I wouldn’t endorse any of these positions.
So I do think we can measure productivity in terms of minds changed (in the right direction), but I think it’s a mistake to antecedently commit to compromise. In some cases the best position *does* involve a compromise or middle ground, but in other cases one side might simply be wrong.
This paragraph sounds like it could be a defense of the “New Atheism”, that so many friendly accomodationist peace makers call “strident”, “fundamentalist”, and other variations on “stubbornly unreasonable”.
The claim of atheists is that religion is simply wrong in its metaphysical claims. It is wrong to claim that a theistic God exists as represented in religious scriptures, that the soul exists, that angels exist, that humans descended from Adam and Eve, that God created life by fiat during an intense 6 day period of magic, that Jesus was born of a virgin, that he rose from the dead, and that an afterlife exists. And it is disingenuous to pretend, as many less fundamentalist religious devotees have, that an Einsteinian type pantheism, in which space, time, energy, matter, light, and other facts of the natural universe are referred to as “God”, constitutes a justification for religious doctrines.
It’s fine to be nice and civil, but religion always insists on an exaggerated invulnerability to criticism (or insult as they call it) of their sacred beliefs. It is the very claim of sacredness that sets up a kind of invisible force field of invulnerability to which our society pays far too much respect. And it often seems that the call for dialog, for meeting in the middle, for niceness, and for mutual respect, simply helps to perpetuate and strengthen the unreasonable invulnerability to criticism of what is claimed to be sacred.
I agree that when atheists call religious believers “idiots” it goes too far. I’d rather say they are simply mistaken and out of touch with the present state of knowledge, and there are lots of reasonable arguments based on verifiable facts that support that claim. But beyond actual ad hominem insults, which ought to be out-of-bounds, it is becoming more and more popular to ridicule the sober insistance that one side is right and the other is wrong, and this point is routinely characterized as strident or openly hostile because it doesn’t adequately pay obeisance to the sacredness of belief.
I agree with you, Jeff, except for one thing. I don’t think it goes too far to call someone like Pat Robertson an idiot. He is more than simply mistaken. He is willfully and maliciously ignorant. In other words, the man is an idiot.
It may be true that he is an idiot. I agree with you he seems a bit soft in the head, and too deeply inculcated with Bible-based thinking. He occasionally surprises, but very rarely. And he clearly seems past his prime. I don’t think it’s necessary to point that out. It’s enough to argue against his ideas and his public pronouncements. The inference as to his character and intellectual ability can be left up to each person to decide.
In public discourse, impugning motives and maligning character are often counter-productive tactics. These are things people can judge for themselves after they’ve heard the points and counterpoints in favor or against the various positions being advocated.
Many of our founders hated each other and thought their rivals (in some cases correctly) to be idiots. But these opinions were expressed in private letters, not in public speeches. One famous example is Jefferson and Madison vs. Patrick Henry. With the explosion of snark on social media all over the Internet, it seems this ideal of public civility is forgotten.
There is something more powerful and satisfying in eviscerating and humiliating your ideological enemies by destroying their ideas with reason and good arguments. It’s too crude and too easy to simply call them names. It makes one’s self look stupid, and can increase sympathy for the opponent.
I disagree. Your position boils down to “there are no idiots”. I think there really are idiots out there and offer Ken Ham as another example.
I don’t think Jeff’s argument boils down to “there are no idiots” but boils down to “there are idiots, and I will show what idiots they are by using reason, logic and finesse instead of a crude way of calling them an ‘idiot’, which will only make others sympathize with them as a victim of my crude attack”.
I’d also note that ridicule is an extremely powerful social tool — weapon, if you will — and that we should not lightly discard it out of some sense of purity.
Yes, our evidence and reasoning must be rock-solid. But there are many credulous people, especially amongst the religious, who are swayed more by appeals to emotion and social acceptability than to objectivity and logic. So why on Earth should we refrain from an appropriate method of honestly communicating our own feelings and opinions?
Cheers,
b&
Diana: Those are not mutually exclusive options.
I think Diana got my argument exactly right.
And I agree with Ben, ridicule is a powerful tool, but it’s most powerful when intelligently ridiculing ideas rather than people.
Thing is, in practice, despite theory to the contrary, you can’t ridicule ideas without ridiculing those who espouse said ideas.
I could say that the proposition that a faery tale anthology that opens with a story about an enchanted garden with talking animals and an angry wizard is a reliable source of knowledge and wisdom is utterly preposterous and idiotic. But it’s an inevitable logical conclusion from that that those who hold such a proposition are themselves idiots.
Not actually calling them idiots is like referring to, “the ‘N’ word,” instead of actually using, “nigger.” You can’t make a reference to, “the ‘N’ word,” without everybody mentally substituting, “nigger,” in its place. You’ve communicated the exact same thing. It’s just like saying, “Eff you!” instead of, “Fuck you!” The exact same sentiment has been communicated.
There might be contexts where using euphemisms is preferable for whatever reason, but the euphemism doesn’t at all change either the intended or understood meaning.
Cheers,
b&
I think the difference is you may say things that offend them in saying their beliefs are myths and they may take that you are implying they are an idiot but that is something they bring to the argument not the other way around.
Yes, that’s certainly the theory.
But I offer you Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, and our very own host all as examples of people who take exactly the approach you describe and yet are uniformly accused by the religious of being insulting, strident, militant, and general all-around meanies.
Cheers,
b&
Yes and those people who call Jerry and Richard meanies are what I like to call, wrong 🙂
I think, Ben, it is partly a rhetorical device to allow people to separate self from idea. When you say “belief in talking snakes is idiotic” instead of “you are an idiot who believes in talking snakes” you allow the recipient of the comment a bit of room to maneuver. This can be useful with people who maintain some degree of open-mindedness.
That said, I remain convinced that some people clearly deserve the label “idiot”. These are people who are repeat offenders; willfully and publicly ignorant people who have developed and maintained a reputation for idiocy. I think it is folly to think that refraining from calling a spade a spade will encourage the implement to become some other kind of earth-moving tool.
Those truly deserving of direct application of the “idiot” or other labels — say, Pat Robertson, Ray Comfort, Sarah Palin, William Lane Craig, the Pope, Ted Haggard, etc. — have no open-mindedness and no desire to maneuver. But, as is so often the case, they’re not the ones one wishes to persuade, even if they’re the ones you’re addressing.
And, besides. We know from Cognitive Dissonance Theory that those holding to false beliefs won’t abandon them until the pain from holding on to the belief outweighs the perceived pain from abandoning it. Admitting you’ve been an idiot is painful, yes, but the pain of admitting that is essentially a constant. The significant variable is the pain from holding on to religion. Today in the States, that pain only arises when directly engaged on the absurdities and horrors of religion, something that mostly only happens through accident. What I want is to create a world in which proudly claiming sincere belief in religion is as socially devastating as declaring yourself to be a Nazi who thinks Dahmer was a righteous guy.
Cheer,
b&
I agree that one can conclude that people who hold idiotic opinions are, in some sense idiotic. But then people are complex. Someone could hold idiotic opinions on one topic, and be brilliant in other ways. There are idiot savants, but also people become attached to certain ideas for emotional reasons that don’t necessarily indicate cognitive impairment, even if it does indicate cognitive dissonance. So there is a difference between being somewhat idiotic and being a complete idiot.
But regardless of what people are, there is rhetorical and narrative power in allowing an audience to any discussion or story to draw their own conclusions. This is why they say “show” don’t “tell” in writing fiction, for example. The best films allow the viewer to enjoy the experience of reaching their own conclusions.
So with the talking snake example, you don’t even have to say “belief in talking snakes is idiotic”. You could say “snakes don’t have vocal chords” or any number of other ways to more cleverly express that it is impossible for snakes to talk. If a believer insists that snakes really can talk, then any observer to the conversation has to conclude that the person is an idiot. Instead of being aggressive, what you end up doing is to hand the person the rope to hang themselves with.
People like Pat Robertson, Ken Ham, and Bill O’Reiley have been hanging themselves for years. That is why it is legitimate to call them idiots.
The gist of Buchak’s argument seems to be that it’s rational to drink the Kool-Aid of unevidenced belief if (a) it smells good, (b) you have a reasonable expectation that you’ll be happier having drunk it, and (c) the cost of not drinking is the postponement or denial of such happiness.
The flaw in this argument is the assumption in (c) that faith is the best or only route to happiness, that the “goods” cannot easily be had any other way.
But of course they can. Hard-core science fiction fans, Civil War re-enactors, arts philanthropists, sports enthusiasts, role-playing gamers, and any number of other close-knit groups find meaning and fulfillment in their mutual interests without committing to unevidenced beliefs.
+1 You’ve summed it up nicely.
“Civil War re-enactors”!!!
Wow, that is a “weapons-grade” example of Compartmentalization!! I thank you for a marvelous, tangible, visual example.
Superb.
Indeed. I just returned from a Civil War re-enactment (as an observer, not a participant). I can vouch for the fact that these guys (and gals) do get “the goods” from it.
(Of course, many of them also get “the goods” from Jeezuz, too.)
Apparently now there are atheists who engage in Christianity re-enactment. It’s called Sunday Assembly.
I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I think you are on to it!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jerry-dewitt/in-praise-of-secular-chur_b_3525958.html
Well, she does a very admirable job of civilly and respectfully discussing her views and is doing her utmost to further the dialogue in the “controversy” between science and religion… which is sort of nice… I guess.
(I say so because, as Jerry pointed out, many who claim to be calling for a more “respectful” discussion fall before the first hurdle of even meeting their own standards for civil discourse.)
/But/, the problem remains a very simple one regardless of how narrowly or widely you define “faith” or other relevant terms: evidence. There really is no discussion (respectful or otherwise) to be had without some real, tangible, measureable-and-examinable-by-third-parties kind of evidence for religious claims. Does God exist? Was Jesus his son? Did his death absolve mankind of its sins? Was he resurrected? Heaven? Hell? Confession? These are all questions for which objective evidence is unavailable (arguably unavailable even in principle).
“Evidence” of the subjective sort that is not available for external examination isn’t much good in terms of furthering a discussion. People who do all sorts of bizarre and irrational things (the kind of things that get you committed to some institution or other) could just as easily cite such evidence. And maybe such people really do have some kind of subjective evidence that would render their behavior rational, but how could you ever tell?
“If faith is understood as commitment beyond independent objective certification to the truth of some overall interpretation of experience and reality, then all who commit themselves to such a Weltanschauung will be people of faith. Faith of this kind may be religious, and it may be religious without being theistic, of course, as in classical Buddhism. But there may also be non-religious faith: in particular, ‘scientific’ atheists may be making a faith-venture when they take there to be no more to reality than is in principle discoverable by the natural sciences.”
(John Bishop: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/faith/)
“Belief in the truth of materialism is a matter of faith and needs to be tempered by agnosticism.”
(Strawson, Galen. Mental Reality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994. p. 43)
I’m a materialist, and I think Strawson is right, because I can’t honestly say I know that materialism is true. I do believe it is, but I don’t and arguably can’t know it is.
(By “agnosticism” Strawson means what I call “epistemic agnosticism” rather than what I call “doxastic agnosticism”. To be doxastically agnostic about a proposition is to stay neutral about its truth-value, i.e. neither to believe in its truth nor to believe in its falsity. And to be epistemically agnostic about a proposition is not to be fully certain or not to claim to know that it is true.)
Yes, you can and should know that materialism is true.
Either the immaterial influences the material and is thus detectable through these influences (and is thus something akin to neutrinos or other weakly-interacting phenomenon) or it never influences the material and thus is not merely undetectable but irrelevant, even in theory.
Plus, our knowledge of physics is such that we can know with as much certainty as you know that you are not being drowned by a Kraken as you read these words that there are no “hidden” as-yet-unknown forces that operate at human scales. Yes, we know that there’re all sorts of things we can’t yet explain at other scales, but anything that operates at a human scale would long since have been detected, and everything at our scale has been accounted for six ways from Sunday.
Cheers,
b&
+1
I think this is a too little appreciated fact. By general principles, one must be cautious about claiming to “know” things. But there is enough “known” to have confidence in this. The problem is that not enough people “know” it yet.
The relevent experimental limits, from this post by Sean Carrol
http://www.slideshare.net/seanmcarroll/purpose-and-the-universe
Basically this says that any undiscovered forces that may exist, that have not been experimentally ruled out, must be extremely weak compared to gravity, or they must operate only over extremely small distances, and thus could not impact human individual biology or chemistry or human scale life on earth.
And there is this:
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/05/26/sean-carroll-we-dont-have-immortal-souls/
That link to the slides was supposed to indicate slide #20…oops.
Slide #27 is interesting…
/@
“Belief in the truth of materialism is a matter of faith and needs to be tempered by agnosticism.”
This is another mashing of the definitions of the word ‘belief’, implying it with religious belief, or guessing.
I have never said, or written, ‘I believe scientific evolution is true’ (Note: No ‘Darwin’), or ‘I believe materialism is true.’ Instead of belief, or believe, I use ‘support the validity of’. It eliminates this mashing of meanings; resulting in these arguments being inane and irrelevant.
This all smells of the postmodernist garbage; there are no truths, only possibilities. Any possibility is as ‘reason’-able as any other.
I think the word faith is perfect for the religious apologist. I recall many instances in childhood where I asked about evidence for a religious belief and was told to have faith. Apologists use faith one way with laypersons/children and another way with intellectuals. It is a disgrace.
I think not, because while Jerry would agree that the same rationality standards should be applied in both religious and mundane cases, the attitude in cases of religious faith is specifically directed towards insisting that the same rationality standards should NOT apply. That’s the whole point.
Faith is an immunizing strategy which protects the faithful from being put into the horrible quagmire of having to change their minds. “Losing faith” is supposed to say more about the weakness of the believer than it says about the weakness of the evidence. Reassessing the conclusion is always interpreted as a moral failure if it fails to strengthen faith.
An ordinary pragmatic reliance — no matter how certain it is — is simply not the same as a moral commitment to continue to believe. This factor is the critical distinction which can’t be left out of any comparison.
“Could you be wrong? What would have to happen in order for you to discover that you have been mistaken and revise your conclusion?”
The “mundane” cases of “faith” thus show themselves to be nothing like the religious ones. Secular certainties can and will have appropriate, honest, and humble answers for those two questions (or they should.) Spiritual certainties bristle as if insulted, confusingly and deceptively answering different questions or bravely and boldly responding with “No” (I can’t be wrong) and “Nothing” (would change my mind.) See how I will not waver from my commitment.
I’ve used this example before: consider the difference between having ‘faith’ in your doctor … and having a RELIGIOUS faith in your doctor: believing in his or her competence the way people believe in God. In that second situation there is now literally nothing your doctor could do to force you to change your mind about their competence — from cutting off the wrong leg to running through the hospital firing an automatic weapon. You will still believe — or know you ought to.
If you can’t twist yourself into a pretzel with plausible (or implausible) excuses then you’ll just meekly sit back and maintain, like a child, that you trust there are things you don’t and can’t know.
Religious faith is not supposed to work like pragmatic reliance.
“Your doctor was running through the hospital firing an automatic weapon?”
“Yes, he works in mysterious ways.”
“Your doctor was running through the hospital firing an automatic weapon?”
“Yes, I struggle greatly with that. My belief that he’s a great doctor does not come easily to me: I have occasional doubts. This shows that my faith is not dogmatic, but rational and human.”
Rational faith is a subset of all types of faith. It is easy to start a list that most would agree are acceptable as ‘rational faith’. Consider Set A:
1. The sun will rise tomorrow.
2. All electrons are leptons.
3. My cats will want food tonight.
…
What about Set B:
1. My god loves me.
2. I will be saved after death.
3. I live a better life believing in some god.
…
A and B are not the same thing. A is rational. B is rational only because it is believed to be rational.
I guess most has been said already. She starts out equivocating – using the term faith synonymous with I believe it’s going to rain tomorrow (but I don’t care enough to check the weather channel) with I believe in a god.
The secon whopper is using the term rational. I would assume that rationality presupposes that anything described by it is intersubjective and reproducible while the experiences of a god she seems to allude to seem to be inherently subjective.
As I recall, the Oxford Dictionary provides one definition of faith as: Believing in something (primarily a religion) that requires no proof.
To me, this appears to be nothing more than the mashing of the definitions of the word ‘faith’ and intermixing with the usage and definitions of ‘belief’.
It reminds me of the way creationists mash the definitions of the word ‘theory’.
In this context, I don’t think the concepts of faith, belief, and knowledge can be treated independently. They form a tryptych (a “trinity”? 🙂 of concepts that are all coupled. To have a sensible discussion about any one of them, I think, requires having consistent definitions of all of them.
If one does that, then I don’t see how one can avoid ending up with faith being something like “belief without evidence.” And that beliefs can be ordinally ordered by the quantity and quality of evidence for/against them, and that knowledge is really only stuff that is defined to be true by fiat. Even if one goes with that, though, “religious belief” ends up at the very bottom of the ordering.
A tryptic, coupled? I’m not sure that works.
Coupled twice or thrice.
Over on Strange Notions a while back, I debated the idea of the Buchak definition of faith.
I argued that since Buchak faith (as described to me by the person I discussed it with) involves actively avoiding gaining new knowledge on a subject, and therefore requires you to deliberately maintain yourself in a state of ignorance, that to have faith in the Buchak sense was actively immoral.
Unfortunately, that is not what I said or what Buchak says.
It’s not actively avoiding new evidence. It’s rather not actively seeking out new evidence.
You clearly didn’t understand. Hopefully you do now.
I’ve provided the link. People can form their own opinions of what you said by reading it directly.
I never said faith involved actively avoiding evidence. I said it involved not actively seeking out new evidence.
You clearly didn’t understand me before. Hopefully you do now.