So, based on prior evidence that rational behavior has yielded truth, you believe it is the best way to get truth.
So tell me, how many times have you used irrationality, or more accurately, faith?
Not just prior evidence but in weighing my understanding of epistemology and how to persue truth. It seems to me that even though we might never reach many more absolute truths than the basics (identity, consciousness, etc.) we can try to approach truth like an asymptote.
In evaluating different approaches to truth it seems to me that some are more likely to succeed than others. Blind faith for instance is like believing based on a dart toss: if a belief isn't tempered with epistemic justification then it seems to me that it's unlikely to be true by sheer statistics.
A leap of faith might by chance lead to a true belief but we can't know (by the epistemic definition of knowledge) that our belief is true even if so. For instance, if I didn't know what the capitol of Missouri is so I threw a dart at a spinning wheel with the names of all state capitols and it so happened to land on "Jefferson City," I would have arrived at a true belief -- but my methodology in this scenario prevents me from
knowing that my belief is true; I've just gotten lucky.
Tedious inquiry and skeptical scrutiny work as evidenced by the scientific method and how it's revolutionized our understanding of the universe. Even though it's true that not all beliefs are able to be investigated by the scientific method (such as when they aren't regarding empirically testable things); it's also true that we can still use a rigid methodology to thoroughly investigate claims for truth value. Thus I try never to hold beliefs without justification and I hold beliefs with weak justification very lightly.
To answer your question about how often I behave irrationally (on beliefs for which I have no evidence), it's close to never but I'm human like anyone else. Sometimes I discover that I have a belief without evidence without realizing it, so I'll then investigate to see whether my belief is true as far as I can know or not. If I'm unable to justify the belief I'll drop it even if it's a belief that I like. If I'm only able to justify it weakly, I will only hold the belief lightly and qualify it as a subjective opinion that I could be wrong about when I talk about it.
To be honest, I'm not an atheist by choice. I want to believe in the ultimate father figure/safety net, I want to believe that I'll live in paradise after I die and get to see my loved ones that have passed away again. When I was first losing my faith in God (I used to attend a joint Baptist-Presbytarian church) I took what I now feel to be a shameful approach to the matter: rather than approaching my investigation with an open mind, I was still assuming that what I believed was true and that my doubts simply
had to have been misplaced.
However, as I investigated further I found myself unable to defend my beliefs. First I accepted that the best explanation for the diversity of life wasn't a special, individual creation but rather descent with modification... then I lost my belief in the Genesis creation story. Little by little, I was forced into a position that I don't even want to be true -- atheism, and a disbelief in an afterlife -- but as Carl Sagan said, "
It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."
