About Religious Beliefs Being A-Rational

beetlejuice_hammer_handsI left this comment on Mike Duran’s blog post/sort of review of A Shot of Faith (to the Head): Be a Confident Believer in an Age of Cranky Atheists. The comment has some weird [sic] moments but you should understand what I was getting at.

Basically, it doesn’t follow that religious presuppositions should be thrown on top of the “evidence* or GTFO” pile while sense and memory data are not and cannot be treated with the same epistemological gloves. In that sense, religious faith is a-rational (I call it “pre-rational”, because I don’t know) because it’s taken as true without it being subject to the two forms of logic*.

This obsession with requiring externalized, material evidences for non-material presuppositions is reaching damned-near critical mass, but the theist’s philosophy-lite “science is faith too!” is a response so involuntary it’s maddening. It’s just two hammer-handed people seeing everything as nails.

I’ve probably said it before on here, Mike, but I believe belief in god to be a presupposition, not a conclusion we reach based on evidence. Evidence can remove barriers to accepting the presupposition but the belief itself doesn’t come from the evidence. In that way it can be said that belief (or non-belief) in god is a-rational. It might be more accurate to call it pre-rational, in that we accept it before the rationalizing starts.

For instance, my memory (memory being one of the ways we know things) tells me that yesterday at around 4 PM I blew my nose. No one else saw (or heard) me do it so people can believe I blew my nose only on my authority, another legitimate way of knowing things. This is possible if they trust me, don’t think I have a reason to lie, is a reasonable action to take, etc.

However, if they doubt me for some reason I can present material evidence: the used tissue in the trash, the fact that I’ve been blowing my nose often lately…indicating that it’s not unusual for me to do it, demonstrating that it’s not out of character for me or that I stand to gain from lying about it.

All of these may remove barriers to this nose blowing belief but they aren’t conclusive. They can all reasonably be falsified evidences, but that is up to the determinations of the individual. All of those reasons could exist *without* me blowing my nose at 4 PM yesterday, so in the end all other people have my authority *only* as a basis for their belief, nothing else.

So in that case, some things are pre-rational but very reasonable to believe. Belief in supernatural things can follow suit in a similar fashion.

* I’m assuming “evidence” to mean some sort of raw, probably physical, data that we can input into our logicizing. I’m equating “rationalizing” with “logicizing”. But I don’t know if people define these terms as such when talking epistemology or science-religion dichotomies.

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