Imran Hussein speaks to an atheist about belief, and how conversations regarding belief have to be grounded in rationality!
Filmed in the world famous Speakers Corner in London’s Hyde Park!
I'm enjoying this...got to about the 18 minute mark...my initial impression here is that Hussein is coming from a human values perspective while the atheist is coming from a more logical perspective...and this is the main distinction between the value of scientific and religious truth.
I expect that Hussein is not a Jungian and so will not mention Jung's notion that there are two distinct types of rational cognition: thinking and feeling. My own definition for reason and rationality is thus...
Rationality is the process of making consistent truth statements in a way as comprehensive and simultaneously as consistent as possible through the medium of human language. There are two types of rationality or two foci for the integration of truth statements: logic and value. Logic attempts to make whole and consistent the meaning and relationship between terms or words in the human language between individuals such that each "holds" the same understanding. Value attempts to make whole and consistent the meaning and relationship between "importances" and their instantiation within the individual that "holds" these "importances".
People develop psychologically a personality that becomes biased toward one mode of being rational over the other. Additionally, within certain spheres of human culture and interaction, a mode of rationality can predominate over another.
So in science we have a "thinking" mode where scientific terms must be well-defined and precisely understood (to the detriment of the "softer" sciences) as well as reproducible as experiences that anyone may have. In religion (at least in the Abrahamic religions) we have a "feeling" bias which is to say that the understanding and integration of values or "importances" is what is sought and the inclusion of the individual's subjective perspective as a member of a community of knowers and an entity within a great creation is what is the focus.
These two systems use the same words in the same language but the underlying cognitive-brain systems involved generate different goals that two individuals, unknowingly speaking across this cognitive divide, will never settle into a mutual united understanding.
We, human beings, are not mono-modal truth knowers but we contain both rational and irrational brain-based cognitive facilities for knowing truth and these cognitive facilities are differentially applied in different communities which themselves represent different ways of knowing.
I will try to come back and finish the video at a later time.
Thanks!