Just getting back to this now - I was away for the weekend...
OK, but if a person includes a supernatural, untestable God in their worldview, and maintains an internally consistent system of belief and ethics around this, this would then fit your definition of rational. Right?
I touched on this before: if a belief is untestable, then it might not be irrational (in that it hasn't failed any tests) but at the same time, it's not particularily rational (in that it hasn't passed any tests either).
Are you sure that anything that makes a claim about objective reality can potentially be tested? How about: A supernatual God Created and Sustains the universe.
Yes, potentially. Why wouldn't it be?
See also my example about the Virgin conception to PH.
I missed that one - could you give a post number so I don't have to go through the whole thread?
You would say yes because you reject the supernatural out of hand. But, if someone accepts the supernatural (outside the scope of even theoretical testing), is it really intellectually dishonest or irrational to hold these beliefs?
Well, yes, because I think this definition of "supernatural" is itself intellectually dishonest.
It's one thing to believe that there's some invisible realm where God lives. It's another thing to claim with certainty that this realm will
always be off-limits to us for even a peek.
Also, IMO, if a belief isn't testable in some way, then there'd be no reason to ever think it was true in the first place. If there really is this "barrier" between the natural and the supernatural that prevents us from seeing the supernatural at all, then why would anybody ever hypothesize the supernatural as an explanation for anything? Why would they ever think to suggest the idea at all?
If you divest the supernatural from rational inquiry, then IMO you also implicitly declare all statements about the nature of supernatural things to be utterly made-up. If we can have no knowledge of the supernatural whatsoever, then knowledge claims like "God is good", for instance, can be rejected as completely unsupported.
Also, when we add into the mix the tenets of faith of pretty well any religion at all, then we also add the idea that while this invisible realm itself may be beyond our powers of observation, it and its occupants still have observable effects in the natural, visible realm: angels, prophets with messages from gods, kami, burning bushes, dragons, tree spirits, etc., etc.
Is it simply intellectually dishonest to accept the possibility of the supernatural?
Is it intellectually honest to say that you know that there is nothing in addition to the natural universe that we can (potentially or theoretically) test?
I think you're misinterpreting what I'm saying. I'm not claiming that the supernatural doesn't exist.
In reality, I'm doing two things:
- I'm saying that if the supernatural does exist, there's no good reason to think that it's completely off-limits for all time to human inquiry observation the way you're portraying it. At the very least, if it actually is the way you describe, then we can throw away the Christian religion (among many others) as completely false.
- I'm saying that regardless of whether such an invisible, untestable realm exists, if it actually does exist,
you don't know it does.
IMO, testability and knowledge are two sides of the same coin. If we can't investigate a claim and rule out the possibility that it's false, then we can't say with certainty that the claim is true.
I'll get back to this below. You are hung up on the word know, as in 'certain knowledge.' To know can also be a personal, non-transferable experience.
Only of the experience itself. Of conclusions drawn from the experience, not necessarily.
Really? How can this be tested?
Off the top of my head:
- one of the things that science is concerned with is figuring out the origins of the universe. Assuming they continue investigating this, we could conceivably reach a point where we actually figure it out. Maybe we find that, for whatever reason, the universe never actually "came into being"; this would exclude the possibility that it was deliberately made to come into being... IOW that it was created. By definition, a thing that is not created has no creator.
- alternately, science could conceivably find that the universe did come into being, and then figure out the actual causes. This lists of causes would either include God or not.
- as for the idea of eternal judgement, this creates several sub-claims. First, that there is something about a person that can be properly called "the person" that survives the death of the body - the existence of a soul is a prerequisite for souls to be judged. Second, that there is some sort of invisible realm (or realms) where Heaven and Hell lie, and that some sort of tranference (of what, I have no idea) as souls leave the Earthly realm and go to these other invisible realms; conceptually, this hypothesis isn't that different from the hypotheses behind the germ theory of disease or radiation, before the mechanisms for each were discovered - both of those proved to be testable.
I did not mean that either. Exactly what conceivable test would measure the mystic's union with God in a way that would support or refute that what he experienced really was God? Even if all the brain-chemistry could be artificially reproduced, and sociological, psychological, and evolutionary factors could be 100% defined, how could you still rule out that it was an authentic experience of God, as 'real' as any other objective reality we experience?
By itself, it probably couldn't be. IMO, some sort of hallucination probably could never be ruled out.
However, such an experience might be externally testable: a prophet could come up with prophecies that actually come to pass, for instance. If the experience has some sort of bearing on the natural world, then we could probably figure out some way to test it. If it has no bearing on the natural world at all, then I'd personally be inclined to dismiss it as irrelevant.
So, you accept subjective knowledge from your own personal experience for yourself, but others must show a higher standard, some kind of objective evidence, to be considered rational or reasonable.
No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that all subjective knowledge is a unique slice of objective knowledge. If I think that my opinion is based on a piece of objective knowledge that was available to me but not to someone else - IOW that the other person doesn't have all the relevant facts - why should I throw away my opinion and replace it with that other person's?
I understand your stance. Frankly, I would react in the same way, with a healthy dose of skepticism. However, I think it would be rather arrogant and presumptive, and intellectually dishonest, if I were to add that last remark about the other person not knowing that it was God. How do I know it was not God?
You realize you just flipped the words around, right?
I don't bring this up to be a pedant; I think it's an important point: "I don't know that it was God" is not equivalent to "I know that was not God".
As I said above, personal experience is not transferable. But, I do not see how that makes it either irrational or intellectually dishonest for the mystic to believe that he has experienced God.
Personal experience itself is not transferable, but the logic that takes us to a conclusion given a particular experience
is. We can't see what another person sees, but we
can consider what the implications would be if we were to see what someone else did see.
In that regard, even if we can't directly evaluate whether a particular experience claim is true, we
can evaluate,
taking as given that the experience is true, whether it would be the proper basis for some claim or conclusion. If it doesn't logically lead to the conclusion that the person who had the experience is making, then that's it: we don't even need to evaluate whether the experience is true, because it wouldn't support the person's claim anyhow.
You approach it from the view that God does not exist and can't influence humans. If God 'exists' and can influence humans, and those humans wrote the story of how this played out over time, then you would gain some knowledge about God. Testable? No. Rational? Yes.
But which humans? There's the rub: with no way to test which religion is correct, we can't say that any of them actually have knowledge of God. They conflict in many fundamental ways and (from where I sit, anyhow) each has about as much going for it as any other, so there's no rational way to choose between them.
