Can a belief in God be justified on a rational basis?

[Thought Criminal]

Many theists will tell you that their belief in God is based on faith, or on something equally nonrational or irrational, such as a special feeling they have, or their unshakable trust in their parents, or an ineffable experience.

Fine, but none of this carries any weight for me because, as a secular humanist, I have a commitment to believe only what is rationally justified, what a logical analysis of the evidence compels me to believe. It's possible that I might miss out on some truths this way, but I do avoid many, many falsehoods. Of course, I do want to believe whatever's true, so I'm always open to evidence.

Anyhow, this leads me to the obvious question: Can a belief in God be justified on a rational basis? If so, how?

TC

[Evales]

Religions were/ are used generally to answer things that we don't know.
Nowadays a lot of people are leaning towards science to tell us those things.
But this does not mean that belief in a God is not rational, because there are still things that cannot be explained.

I am talking about the Big Bang. We don't know what started it, somehow there was a large amount of energy which created mass. Since we don't know how or why that energy was there it is rational to assume that this energy was God because religion tells us that he just is.

Perhaps the LHC will tell us more.

[Cephus]

Religions were/ are used generally to answer things that we don't know.

Yes, that is true. People are uncomfortable not knowing things, therefore people made up religions to explain things they did not otherwise have a rational explanation for. That doesn't imply in any way, shape or form that religion itself is rational, it's simply an invented explanation.

But this does not mean that belief in a God is not rational, because there are still things that cannot be explained.

Yes it does because there isn't a shred of objective evidence, nor any rational reason whatsoever, to think that God actually exists. It's a made up answer to a question you don't have an immediate answer to. Why is this true? I don't know, therefore I'm just going to assert, without evidence, that some imaginary god did it. It's no more rational than claiming that invisible gnomes living on your shoulder did it. There is nothing rational about God and there won't be until people can come up with objective evidence to support the factual existence thereof.

We don't know what started it, somehow there was a large amount of energy which created mass.

Actually, we have some pretty good ideas.

Since we don't know how or why that energy was there it is rational to assume that this energy was God because religion tells us that he just is.

It's no more rational to assume that said energy was God than it is to assume that it was Zeus or the Easter Bunny. Religion *ASSERTS* that God is, religion makes a claim with no support. There's no reason whatsoever to think religion is valid and lots of reasons to think it's a load of horse, well, you know.

You want to know the rational response to your question? You want to know what rational people do when faced with a question they cannot immediately answer? They say "WE DON'T KNOW" and then go looking for answers. They don't just make something up because it's more comforting than admitting your own ignorance.

[Thought Criminal]

Which is exactly the point I've made for years. People let religion get away with things that they would never permit in any other aspect of their lives. They defend the most utterly absurd ideas in the name of religious faith as though religion is a "don't bother using your brain" card. What's worse is you find theists who are claiming that their beliefs are rational, logical and intelligent when it simply isn't true. I've used this example before but it works wonderfully. Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project, is undeniably a brilliant man, an absolute genius in the field of human genetics. He's also a Christian who "found God" when he saw a waterfall in the woods frozen into three parts. That is simply not rational or reasonable, no matter how intelligent he may be in other areas of his life. As a geneticist, Collins is one of the top minds in his field. When it comes to his religious beliefs though, he's out of his flipping gourd.

It's odd that religions seem to have this weird love/hate thing with science. They want the credibility of science and are quick to point at people like Collins in the hopes that his prestige as a scientist could rub off on religion. In his chosen field, if Collins makes a claim that's even slightly off, he can expect legions of careful peers to question his error, but when he talks about finding God in a frozen waterfall, it is the height of bad taste to do anything but not and affirm that it's just wonderful.

It is this difference in attitude -- critical vs. fawning -- that distinguishes the scientific and religious worldviews. It is also why, social niceties aside, we care very much what he says about genetics but nothing about his belief in God. If he can keep the two separate in his mind, then we can do him the courtesy of pretending he doesn't have these silly beliefs.

Christian apologists try to use this all the time though, they make long lists of otherwise intelligent and rational scientists who happened to be Christian as though that demonstrates that Christianity is intelligent and rational. It only demonstrates that intelligence and rationality can be compartmentalized and there are aspects of life where otherwise logical people completely throw logic to the wind. A concept is only rational and intelligent if rationality and intelligence are applied to it across the board. It's really disgusting how many otherwise smart people can't comprehend this. They can reject other examples of nonsensical woo, they can deny the existence of ghosts, alien abductions and Bigfoot, but the second you bring up God... they make an exception.

Conveniently, they ignore the strong negative correlation between religiosity and success as a scientist. For ever Collins who manages to wall off his religious beliefs or even use them to motivate his day job, there are countless others who quietly drop out of science programs because they're deeply offended by the "attack" on their pre-scientific worldviews.

For far too many people, theists and non-theists alike, their own personal comfort is more important than reality. This is why you've got people like Holocaust deniers. They don't want to believe that human beings could treat others like that, therefore they simply declare it never happened. Unfortunately, what you want to believe is really irrelevant to what is real. We often hear of people who say "I don't want to live in a world where there is no God". Who cares? What kind of world you want to live in has no bearing on the world that you actually live in. Your own wishes, desires and dreams don't magically change reality. Theists think that if they want it to be true and act like it's true, that somehow that makes it true. It doesn't. I just makes them ignorant and gullible and irrational.

I think that's a big part of why we give religion a free pass; it offers (false) comfort, and it would be rude to dash people's (false) hopes for an afterlife, for a simplistic and reassuring (but false) view of the universe and for a (false) basis for their ethical code. Quite frankly, while I'm not a fan of rudeness for its own sake, neither am I the sort of person who would want to be patronized if I had silly ideas. I'm not sure that we're doing these people any favor by smiling and pretending that their beliefs make a lick of sense.

It is a matter of accepting reality as it comes and living in the real world rather than an emotionally-coddling fantasy one. That's one of the first steps in growing up and being an intelligent, mature adult. It's also a step that large portions of the population completely miss.

What concerns me isn't just that it's childish, but that it's child-like. When adults act like children, accepting pseudo-parental control, we get authoritarianism, and this moves quickly from religion to politics. At the personal level, when you can defend any belief with "God said so", it becomes easy to avoid taking the heat for all sorts of bigotries.

I don't know about "prove" but you can certainly support and argue for just about anything. When you start from faulty and irrational assumptions, anything you build on it is going to be faulty and irrational. Theists start from the unjustified assumption that there is a God, therefore everything they say thereafter is tainted by that fallacious axiom. Because they absolutely refuse to challenge their own axioms, just about everything they have to say about the nature of reality is absolute rubbish. They assume they're correct, they refuse to examine their axioms critically and then they demand that any conclusions they draw on those irrational axioms must also be true.

Oh, try it with arithmetic. If we allow "1=2", it's easy to "prove" any other equation, such as "2=4" or "7=42". All you have to do is multiply, add, subtract and divide by the key false equation until you get your desired result. Of course it's not a sound proof, but it's a valid one in the sense that if follows from the false premises. The existence of God is just as big an error, allowing anything to be justified by it. If God, then anything.

It's also childish because in all other aspects of life, they learn to question and challenge ideas. In religion, however, they are fundamentally forbidden from doing so. The kid who sucks his thumb and holds a security blanket because it makes him feel safe and cared about eventually learns that there is no real security in the blanket, it's a false belief that does no good and could potentially cause much harm. Religion is just a security blanket for people who have never matured enough to reject it, but it doesn't actually make the world better and it doesn't make the individual safer and more secure, it's all an illusion for people who have purposely blinded themselves to reality.

Yes, it's that combination of intellectual incompetence with a societal attitude that protects it from scrutiny which truly defines religion. And this precisely why it's necessary to occasionally ask questions such as the topic of this thread.

TC

[Thought Criminal]

This was clearly an intelligent response, but I do still have a concern. Specifically, I'm not claiming that "no propositions are true". I was only claiming that "sensory perceptions are not evidenced as trustworthy" or "the proposition that the reality as we know it exists is not proven" this is not a self-contradiction in the same way that the "no propositions are true" assertion is, because it does not depend on sensory evidence or the existence of an external world for validity.

You're admitting that something exists but effectively denying that what exists includes more than your own mind, which is precisely the solipsism that I've accused you of elsewhere.

I will, however, completely agree that that, if I were insisting that all assertions about the physical world are proven to be false, I would clearly be wrong. I would also be completely wrong if I insisted that there were no physical world. These statements are ultimately paradoxical and should be rejected.

Ok...

This is of great personal value. It motivates me emotionally to assume that this is indeed an axiom.
Logically, I completely agree that there can be no propositions without axioms. The problem is that, in defending reality's existance, we aren't seeking to refute a proposition, but support one. The idea that reality is not established as true is not the proposition that reality is illusory, but merely the questioning of the proposition that it is more than illusory. Thus, this question is not destroyed by anything that would destroy propositions. On the contrary, it would be strengthened in such a case.

By affirming solipsism, you're denying the proposition that "There exists more than what is in my mind". Alternately, you could be admitting the first proposition while instead denying that "The senses offer information about things that exist outside of myself". The net effect is just about the same, though.

The problem here isn't that you genuinely deny either of these propositions, but that you think some additional, non-rational step is required to get them added to our list of basic facts. The key side-effect here is that you're making a false argument for the need (and therefore acceptability) of faith. I think you can understand why that might cause alarm bells to ring.

This is the difficulty with this question, and why it has bothered me so much over the years. It is not a proposition or a assertion of anything other than our lack of evidence about reality. It cannot be refuted by arguing the consequences of assuming that reality is false, because it does not make that assumption. It merely fails to assume the opposite. To put it away as invalid, we need positive evidence that reality is more than illusory.

I would suggest that you consider just what would constitute evidence of an external reality. How about, say, sensory perceptions of something that does not appear to be a part of our own minds?

I would politely suggest that our senses are evidence of something, which we have chosen to call "reality". The remaining question not whether reality exists, but what its nature is. If it is an extension of the mind, then we might expect it to allow our minds to control it, but this turns out not to be the case. This is clear evidence that it is not "illusory". In short, if you're looking for evidence, all you need to do is look around and then try (and fail) to change the world just by thinking at it.

TC

[Thought Criminal]

I would agree.
My support would be the fact that no logical support for axioms has been presented. Basically, we are told that certain things are just believable. Which things fit this category, of course, is a matter of debate. I think this seems like an inherently irrational (or at least non-rational) reason for adopting these beliefs. Hence, I claim that beliefs such as general trust in our sensory perceptions is non-rational.

Personally, I believe my eyes just as much as the next guy. I simply don't claim that there is a logical reason for doing so.

You're quite free to deny that you have a logical reason available to you, and instead believe on some other basis. However, this a statement of only your own limitations, not everyone else's.

To put it another way, some people might indeed take it on pure faith that the sun will rise in the morning, but astronomers have a justified, true belief, instead. The don't merely believe, they know.

TC

[Thought Criminal]

Quantum weirdness goes deeper: It implies that the logical foundations of classical science are violated in the quantum realm

I would appreciate it if you didn't spam the forum with large, unattributed bodies of text that are, at best, only peripherally related to the topic at hand. In fact, I believe this is in violation of the rules.

TC

[Thought Criminal]

Religions were/ are used generally to answer things that we don't know.
Nowadays a lot of people are leaning towards science to tell us those things.
But this does not mean that belief in a God is not rational, because there are still things that cannot be explained.

I am talking about the Big Bang. We don't know what started it, somehow there was a large amount of energy which created mass. Since we don't know how or why that energy was there it is rational to assume that this energy was God because religion tells us that he just is.

Perhaps the LHC will tell us more.

How is this different from the God of the Gaps fallacy?

TC

[Jester]

You're admitting that something exists but effectively denying that what exists includes more than your own mind, which is precisely the solipsism that I've accused you of elsewhere.

I’ll agree that this is a suggestion of solipsism, but want to make it clear that I haven’t claimed it absolutely. Rather, I’ve only suggested it’s possibility.
To that end, I don’t see how it’s been completely ruled out by the “no propositions are true� argument. That only applies to the claim that solipsism is certainly true.

I will, however, completely agree that that, if I were insisting that all assertions about the physical world are proven to be false, I would clearly be wrong. I would also be completely wrong if I insisted that there were no physical world. These statements are ultimately paradoxical and should be rejected.

Ok...

Hooray!! We have agreed.
I make a point of pausing to smile each time that happens in a debate. It makes me a happier person.

This is of great personal value. It motivates me emotionally to assume that this is indeed an axiom.
Logically, I completely agree that there can be no propositions without axioms. The problem is that, in defending reality's existance, we aren't seeking to refute a proposition, but support one. The idea that reality is not established as true is not the proposition that reality is illusory, but merely the questioning of the proposition that it is more than illusory. Thus, this question is not destroyed by anything that would destroy propositions. On the contrary, it would be strengthened in such a case.

By affirming solipsism, you're denying the proposition that "There exists more than what is in my mind". Alternately, you could be admitting the first proposition while instead denying that "The senses offer information about things that exist outside of myself". The net effect is just about the same, though.

I would completely agree, save that I’m not affirming solipsism. I’m merely affirming it’s as logical a possibility as its alternatives. Given that, I’m not actively denying the proposition that “there exists more than what is in my mind�. I do not claim that such a proposition is untrue, merely that it is unproved. Given that, the contradictions which would be created by trying to insist on any one of these options disappear.

The problem here isn't that you genuinely deny either of these propositions, but that you think some additional, non-rational step is required to get them added to our list of basic facts. The key side-effect here is that you're making a false argument for the need (and therefore acceptability) of faith. I think you can understand why that might cause alarm bells to ring.

I can definitely see why you would have a reaction.
There does seem to be some confusion about my claim, though. The claim that reality is clearly illusory is a false argument, and one I have not used. I have used instead the argument that reality is not evidenced to be true. This is a very different argument (as different as atheism and agnosticism), and should not be lumped in with the other.

I would suggest that you consider just what would constitute evidence of an external reality. How about, say, sensory perceptions of something that does not appear to be a part of our own minds?

Sensory perceptions do not come with logical proof of their validity, however. By all accounts, they certainly appear to be something other than our own minds. Of course, the lunatic fully believes that his fantasies are not a part of his own mind, either. If we’re talking evidence, our personal feeling that they seem to be true isn’t admissible based on the rules of logic.

I would politely suggest that our senses are evidence of something, which we have chosen to call "reality".

That is absolutely fair. I would agree.
I would add, however, that we don’t have any evidence that nearly all of our suppositions about this thing we call reality aren’t completely false (such as its having any existence outside of one’s mind).

Of course, you do address this here:

The remaining question not whether reality exists, but what its nature is. If it is an extension of the mind, then we might expect it to allow our minds to control it, but this turns out not to be the case.

I can understand the thought here, but believe that it confuses the conscious mind for the whole of the mind. Referencing to lunatics once again, they are not in conscious control of their hallucinations in spite of the fact that these things emanate from the mind.
Any number of “what ifs� (such as the idea that the mind is being controlled by an outside force, popularized by the film: The Matrix) can be named to illustrate the idea that there is no proof without outside evidence.

You're quite free to deny that you have a logical reason available to you, and instead believe on some other basis. However, this a statement of only your own limitations, not everyone else's.

I will completely accept this, and am open to hearing others' reasons for belief.

To put it another way, some people might indeed take it on pure faith that the sun will rise in the morning, but astronomers have a justified, true belief, instead. The don't merely believe, they know.

Other than to echo what is above, I’d add that scientists don’t know for absolute certain that the sun will rise tomorrow (astronomical disasters are always a possibility).

Simply, I think that there are a great many premises that come with our culture, era, personal upbringing, and existence as human beings. I feel that it is healthy to realize these premises for what they are, learn to question them, then decide which one’s to accept and which to leave behind.

Personally, I’d love nothing better than to have a clear and logical answer for everything (just ask my wife), but, after fifteen years of searching through thousands of years of writings (as well as my own logic), have had to content myself with the fact that this isn’t going to happen.

[Thought Criminal]

’ll agree that this is a suggestion of solipsism, but want to make it clear that I haven’t claimed it absolutely. Rather, I’ve only suggested it’s possibility.

Who are you suggesting it to? I ask this because, if solipsism were true, you could not suggest it to me as possibility. Since you appear to be doing so, the very consideration of the idea appears to refute it.

To that end, I don’t see how it’s been completely ruled out by the “no propositions are true� argument. That only applies to the claim that solipsism is certainly true.

It's ruled out by a parallel argument, which shows that even the consideration of this idea is untenable.

Hooray!! We have agreed.
I make a point of pausing to smile each time that happens in a debate. It makes me a happier person.

The ellipses were intended to show that I was only agreeing so far.

I would completely agree, save that I’m not affirming solipsism. I’m merely affirming it’s as logical a possibility as its alternatives. Given that, I’m not actively denying the proposition that “there exists more than what is in my mind�. I do not claim that such a proposition is untrue, merely that it is unproved. Given that, the contradictions which would be created by trying to insist on any one of these options disappear.

I believe I've shown that is in fact proven beyond any reasonable doubt.

I can definitely see why you would have a reaction.
There does seem to be some confusion about my claim, though. The claim that reality is clearly illusory is a false argument, and one I have not used. I have used instead the argument that reality is not evidenced to be true. This is a very different argument (as different as atheism and agnosticism), and should not be lumped in with the other.

We can distinguish them, but it is a distinction that makes no difference. Both versions are refuted at the same time.

Sensory perceptions do not come with logical proof of their validity, however. By all accounts, they certainly appear to be something other than our own minds. Of course, the lunatic fully believes that his fantasies are not a part of his own mind, either. If we’re talking evidence, our personal feeling that they seem to be true isn’t admissible based on the rules of logic.

I didn't say they were "valid", whatever that means. I just said they exist and have something to do with an external reality, something other than the mind. This does not exclude the possibility that our perceptions are affected by internal considerations. In fact, I would freely admit that this is the case.

The argument that we might be crazy (or manipulated by an evil demon, or merely a brain in a bottle, or whatever) successfully attacks infallibilism, but it has no effect on rationality, which is fallibilistic.

I can understand the thought here, but believe that it confuses the conscious mind for the whole of the mind. Referencing to lunatics once again, they are not in conscious control of their hallucinations in spite of the fact that these things emanate from the mind.
Any number of “what ifs� (such as the idea that the mind is being controlled by an outside force, popularized by the film: The Matrix) can be named to illustrate the idea that there is no proof without outside evidence.

And infallibilism fails again. But I'm still here.

The idea that the apparent external world is instead a compartment of the internal world is simply unparsimonious. We still need to treat it as if it were external in order to make any sense of it, but now you want to add the additional notion that it's an illusion.

Other than to echo what is above, I’d add that scientists don’t know for absolute certain that the sun will rise tomorrow (astronomical disasters are always a possibility).

Absolute certainty is neither justified nor needed.

Simply, I think that there are a great many premises that come with our culture, era, personal upbringing, and existence as human beings. I feel that it is healthy to realize these premises for what they are, learn to question them, then decide which one’s to accept and which to leave behind.

Yes, one premise common to our society is that there is a God of some sort, and I certainly question that. Then again, this is rather different from questioning the existence of an external reality.

Personally, I’d love nothing better than to have a clear and logical answer for everything (just ask my wife), but, after fifteen years of searching through thousands of years of writings (as well as my own logic), have had to content myself with the fact that this isn’t going to happen.

"The perfect is the enemy of the good." - Voltaire

TC

[Beto]

You're quite free to deny that you have a logical reason available to you, and instead believe on some other basis. However, this a statement of only your own limitations, not everyone else's.

I will completely accept this, and am open to hearing others' reasons for belief.

I told you mine. I can only warrant "belief" in things that are liable to objective empirical knowledge, regardless of the effort involved. Doesn't that really cover everything except "God"?