This comment is in reply to some ideas in the comments below.
In my opinion, my rationality is as faith-based as is a religious person’s religious belief.
Among my highest values is “being right” in the sense of being able to instrumentally effect or predict the world. I want to be able to communicate across long distances, to turn combustible fuel into safe transportation, to correctly predict what an interstellar probe will find and to be able to build an interstellar probe that will work. Looking at the world, I see much more success in endeavors like these from science and rationality than from religiosity or appeals to god. And so I adopt rationality as it supports my values.
I also want to raise healthy, happy, “good” children. My one child who dabbles in alcohol, drugs, and petty theft, I am pretty sure I could “help” him by going to church with him. I’ve known many people who are effective at doing things I see as good because, it seems, of their religious beliefs and participation in churches and religious communities. I liked being a Lutheran for a few years. One night I told our pastor that I just didn’t believe in god. He told me he thought half the church had that happening. Even so I couldn’t stay engaged.
I feel the loss of religious faith as a sorrow, or a pain, or a burr under my saddle, or something. But I can’t justify it, or more importantly, I can only pretend to believe, actual belief does not seem to me to be a real option anymore.
And it turns out I have enough “faith” in scientific rationalism that I won’t even pretend I believe in god. I choose to believe that staying consistent with rational principles will payoff more for me and those I care about than will falling back to the more accessible morality of religious faith. It is a leap of faith, especially in light of “rationalists win.” If my son were to become an heroin addict and devote his life to petty theft, jail, and shooting up, AND I could have prevented that by bringing him to church, I will have paid a price for my faith, as much as any Christian Martyr who was harmed or whos family was harmed because he did not deny his Christian belief.
People who think their rationality does not come from a faith they possess remind me of religious people who think their belief in god is just right, that it does not come from a faith that they possess or have chosen.
Taboo “faith”, what do you mean specifically by that term?
Good idea. I mean that EVERYBODY, rationalist atheist and christian alike, starts with an axiom or assumption.
In the case of rationalist atheists (or at least come such as myself) the axioms started with are things like 1) truth is inferred with semi=quantifiable confidence from evidence supporting hypotheses, 2) explanations like “god did it” or “alpha did it” or “a benevolent force of the universe did it” are disallowed. I think some people are willing to go circular, allow the axioms to remain implicit and then “prove” them along the way: I see no evidence for a conscious personality with supernatural powers. But I do claim that is circular, you can’t prove anything without knowing how you prove things and so you can’t prove how you prove things by applying how you prove things without being circular.
So for me, I support my rationalist atheist point of view by appealing to the great success it has in advancing engineering and science. By pointing to the richness of the connections to data, the “obvious” consistency of geology with a 4 billion year old earth, the “obvious” consistency of evolution from common ancestors of similar structures across species right down to the ADP-ATP cycle and DNA.
But a theist is doing the same thing. They START with the assumption that there is a powerful conscious being running both the physical and the human worlds. They marvel at the brilliance of the design of life to support their claim even though it can’t prove their axioms. They marvel at the richness of the human moral and emotional world as more support for the richness and beauty of conscious and good creation.
Logically, there is no logic without assumptions. Deduction needs something to deduce from. I like occams razor and naturalism because my long exposure to it leaves me feeling very satisfied with its ability to describe many things I think are important. Other people like theism because their long exposure to it leaves them feeling very satisfied with its ability to describe and even prescribe the things they think are important.
I am not aware of a definitive way to challenge axioms, and I don’t think there is one at the level I think of it.
This comment is in reply to some ideas in the comments below.
In my opinion, my rationality is as faith-based as is a religious person’s religious belief.
Among my highest values is “being right” in the sense of being able to instrumentally effect or predict the world. I want to be able to communicate across long distances, to turn combustible fuel into safe transportation, to correctly predict what an interstellar probe will find and to be able to build an interstellar probe that will work. Looking at the world, I see much more success in endeavors like these from science and rationality than from religiosity or appeals to god. And so I adopt rationality as it supports my values.
I also want to raise healthy, happy, “good” children. My one child who dabbles in alcohol, drugs, and petty theft, I am pretty sure I could “help” him by going to church with him. I’ve known many people who are effective at doing things I see as good because, it seems, of their religious beliefs and participation in churches and religious communities. I liked being a Lutheran for a few years. One night I told our pastor that I just didn’t believe in god. He told me he thought half the church had that happening. Even so I couldn’t stay engaged.
I feel the loss of religious faith as a sorrow, or a pain, or a burr under my saddle, or something. But I can’t justify it, or more importantly, I can only pretend to believe, actual belief does not seem to me to be a real option anymore.
And it turns out I have enough “faith” in scientific rationalism that I won’t even pretend I believe in god. I choose to believe that staying consistent with rational principles will payoff more for me and those I care about than will falling back to the more accessible morality of religious faith. It is a leap of faith, especially in light of “rationalists win.” If my son were to become an heroin addict and devote his life to petty theft, jail, and shooting up, AND I could have prevented that by bringing him to church, I will have paid a price for my faith, as much as any Christian Martyr who was harmed or whos family was harmed because he did not deny his Christian belief.
People who think their rationality does not come from a faith they possess remind me of religious people who think their belief in god is just right, that it does not come from a faith that they possess or have chosen.
Taboo “faith”, what do you mean specifically by that term?
Good idea. I mean that EVERYBODY, rationalist atheist and christian alike, starts with an axiom or assumption.
In the case of rationalist atheists (or at least come such as myself) the axioms started with are things like 1) truth is inferred with semi=quantifiable confidence from evidence supporting hypotheses, 2) explanations like “god did it” or “alpha did it” or “a benevolent force of the universe did it” are disallowed. I think some people are willing to go circular, allow the axioms to remain implicit and then “prove” them along the way: I see no evidence for a conscious personality with supernatural powers. But I do claim that is circular, you can’t prove anything without knowing how you prove things and so you can’t prove how you prove things by applying how you prove things without being circular.
So for me, I support my rationalist atheist point of view by appealing to the great success it has in advancing engineering and science. By pointing to the richness of the connections to data, the “obvious” consistency of geology with a 4 billion year old earth, the “obvious” consistency of evolution from common ancestors of similar structures across species right down to the ADP-ATP cycle and DNA.
But a theist is doing the same thing. They START with the assumption that there is a powerful conscious being running both the physical and the human worlds. They marvel at the brilliance of the design of life to support their claim even though it can’t prove their axioms. They marvel at the richness of the human moral and emotional world as more support for the richness and beauty of conscious and good creation.
Logically, there is no logic without assumptions. Deduction needs something to deduce from. I like occams razor and naturalism because my long exposure to it leaves me feeling very satisfied with its ability to describe many things I think are important. Other people like theism because their long exposure to it leaves them feeling very satisfied with its ability to describe and even prescribe the things they think are important.
I am not aware of a definitive way to challenge axioms, and I don’t think there is one at the level I think of it.