I have a question, mainly for the theistic and religious members of the forum. Atheists often have a widely held assumption that faith is blind and use this to discredit religious belief as incompatable with knowledge (particularly when obtained by rationalist or scientific methods).
However, I am interested to know if this is infact a convenient myth.
I think that conversations and debates between theists and atheists can create a false impression. I've seen this scenario play out more times than I can count:
- the atheist asks why the theist believes in his or her god(s).
- the theist lists off a bunch of reasons.
- the atheist explains the logical problems with each of those reasons.
- the theist does a poor job of responding to the atheist's points.
- the theist eventually brushes the atheist off with something like "well, I just believe and that's good enough for me."
I think the false impression comes from two things:
- the atheist assumes that once the theist's reasons for belief have been exposed as illogical, the theist will drop them.
- the atheist assumes that when the theist says "well, I just believe", it's an honest description of the theist's beliefs at that point and not simply a face-saving measure.
OTOH, I think it's pretty common for the theist to attribute their poor performance in the discussion/debate to a failure in their
ability to explain their assuredly rational beliefs and not a failure of the beliefs themselves. The end result of all this is that the theist is sure that his or her beliefs are rationally justified and the atheist is sure that they aren't.
Very often atheists will flat out ignore deism and natural theology as rational sources for knowledge of gods existence in debates. Instead they create a (historically) artificial divide between religion and reason because they hold it is impossible for these to be relevant to discussions of religious "faith" as a result of the way they have defined the term.
I don't personally ignore deism; I've evaluated it, found it to be irrational, and rejected it on this basis.
Here's the thing with deism: it sort of makes sense for someone who started as a classical theist and is in an environment where belief in God is taken for granted. If classical theism is your starting point and you want to make it more rational, then it does make a sort of sense to strip away the stuff that's obviously irrational. However, deism ultimately fails to be rational because deists fail to apply the same critical eye to belief in God as they do to things like miracle claims.
Deism makes sense as a transitional phase between classical theism and atheism. It doesn't make sense as an endpoint.
Effectively, deists end up giving up a belief that would be justified if the premises were true (but that they believe are false) - i.e. classical theism - and accepting in its place a belief where they've rejected all the premises that would serve as rational justification for that belief. IOW, they've traded one brand of irrationality for another.
There's a somewhat clear path from classical theism to deism, but there's no reasonable way to get from atheism to deism.
