Ozzie said:
Would you agree that learning is amenable to reason?
I have lab bench experience mapping learning in rats on to mathematical models of learning, an interesting if inexact scientific enterprise.
That experience taught me that theories rarely map directly onto subjective phenomena, rather science has a tendency to cluster phenomena together in order to verify theory. Believe too strongly in the theory and the results will contain bias.
Theory is a predictive prism for interpreting phenomena, as is God. Both address a human need to predict the future, and express a human capacity to do that to some extent if only imperfectly.
Learning and God are alike in that they are only available to reason indirectly, by hypothesis. Demanding a strict rational or scientific proof of these phenomena is a useless exercise. One can only exact truly objective proof in learning studies (through examining brain slides and so forth) by killing the subject. Similarly your criticism of religious thought as irrational kills the subject, and the discussion if you demand objective proof.
But your critique is a no-brainer. The most difficult part in science is to develop methodology that can test theory applied to the phenomena in question. Do you know of any methodology to test your theory that religious thought is irrational, and which might therefore render your theory falsifiable? Without that methodology, God as a predictive theory should stand.
Like learning, religious thought has to be studied in vivo by observation. Against the theory you have of religious thought as irrational, behaviour motivated by religious thought seems wholly systematic, organised and rational. You are not being a good scientist by reaching into your own theory of the way religious minds work in order to interpret the belief/mental states of others. You betray your own rationality by citing subjective criteria in support of your theory.
Oz
Since you have some 'lab bench experience mapping learning in rats', Ozzie, please allow me the honour of addressing you as a
scientist.
I'm sure you won't mind
too much if I do that. No?
Very well then. Here goes....
As a scientist, Ozzie, you are aware that Science is concerned with the investigation of the physical world, the world of phenomena - the world of
appearance, if you like - and that in consequence any knowledge it provides us with is wholly empirical in nature. Science does not seek to provide us with knowledge of a metaphysical realm which might lie beyond the world of appearance since by definition such a realm falls outside the scope of its enquiry. Therefore, questions concerning metaphysical stuff like 'God' or the 'soul' or 'transcendent reality' or 'the meaning of the universe' (i.e.,
why it is as it is) are of no interest to Science because these things literally do not
touch upon Science.
You, as a scientist, are aware of this. You are aware that the human mind can only have knowledge of the physical world - the world delivered to us by the senses - and none whatsoever of a
meta-physical one. This is because the mind - being organized the way that it is - has no access to non-physical things which supposedly exist outside of sensory experience. Thus, if anything metaphysical can be said to exist at all then it necessarily remains a Great Unknown to us. Now, given the fact that you know that metaphysical claims about the universe
cannot be established one way or the other then you must concede that when the religious person claims, for example, that there is a 'God' he has no way of knowing this and that he makes this claim not on the basis of reason but on the basis of
something else. Now, what might that be? Maybe he makes this claim on the basis of intuition or maybe simply because it makes him feel better - in the same way that it makes some children feel better believing they have an imaginary play-friend or that fairies live at the bottom of their garden...Who knows?
I dare say that you are aware that Immanuel Kant
demonstrated over two centuries ago in the
Critique of Pure Reason that human beings have no
rational basis for believing metaphysical claims since the faculty of human reason has application only to
phenomena or the things of this world and not to
noumena or the things-in-themselves which supposedly constitute the mysterious metaphysical world. (Incidentally, this is why the Germans call Kant
Der Alleszermalmer - 'the all-destroyer' - because he demolished the rational foundation of metaphysics in its entirety. And why theologians ever since have wanted to crucify him.) Therefore, it shouldn't surprise you, Ozzie, that the religious person is devoid of any
reason for his belief that there is a 'God', or that the universe is 'divine', or that there are 'angels' and 'demons', or that he has a 'soul', or that he will meet up again with his dear departed ones in 'the life to come', etc.. But, as Nietzsche once said, why should the religious person bother about that as long as he doesn't
need to.
