The Folly of Faith vs the Results of Reason
joekeysor again, who teaches at a university in Saudi Arabia:
There are flaws in our reasoning because we didn't evolve to think in a completely coherent and logically manner. That's why there are people of faith like you in the first place. But we've discovered science. Science is the corrective to bad thinking. Science produces objective results that help us understand the world of nature. Utilizing science leads us to objective knowledge. So to reject the conclusions of reasoning is to reject the results of science and therefore to reject the only way to know about the world of nature. It's not that there is no better alternative. It's rather that there is no other objective reliable method. I don't know if there are things beyond the reach of science, since it's still in its infancy stage. We'll know better in a thousand years. In the meantime I'm willing to watch and learn.
On this issue I insist everyone reads the full text of a chapter in my anthology Christianity Is Not Great, titled The Failure of the Church and the Triumph of Reason.
I don’t believe I am disparaging reason when I say that there are things beyond reason, that its reach is limited and it cannot encompass all of reality. I believe this is a simple fact, not disparagement. I believe you overestimate reason, and seem to believe – correct me if I am wrong – that there is nothing of any importance beyond the reach of human reason. But even in the ordinary course of life there are many things we don’t understand. Reason is in fact often a very puny and unreliable instrument. I only claim that there are higher truths that cannot be found by reason alone.John Loftus: It's the assumption of faith where you're wrong. Faith causes people with it to be anti-intellectual who reason like you. It causes people to fly planes into buildings because that's the logic of faith. When one has faith anything can be believed, anything can be justified and any horrible act can be done. People with faith can and do say what you have said to deny reason.
There are flaws in our reasoning because we didn't evolve to think in a completely coherent and logically manner. That's why there are people of faith like you in the first place. But we've discovered science. Science is the corrective to bad thinking. Science produces objective results that help us understand the world of nature. Utilizing science leads us to objective knowledge. So to reject the conclusions of reasoning is to reject the results of science and therefore to reject the only way to know about the world of nature. It's not that there is no better alternative. It's rather that there is no other objective reliable method. I don't know if there are things beyond the reach of science, since it's still in its infancy stage. We'll know better in a thousand years. In the meantime I'm willing to watch and learn.
On this issue I insist everyone reads the full text of a chapter in my anthology Christianity Is Not Great, titled The Failure of the Church and the Triumph of Reason.
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