I've been very clear on the difference between 'rational and 'justified' so I'm uncertain how that's not been clear. I agree that we can believe something irrationally and later discover new evidence, or think about it in a way that we come to have that belief rationally, and that changes nothing about examining whether or not a currently held belief has been acquired rationally.

I've also been very clear that I'm discussing whether or not a belief in god is rational, and haven't talked about it being justified at all since a view acquired irrationally can't be justified (even if it's correct), it hasn't been relevant to discuss justification.


You're going beyond whether or not a belief can be considered rational to whether or not it's actually correct. There is no definition that I'm aware of, including the one I'm using, that requires that. We can believe true things for irrational reasons, and we can also rationally believe things that are not true (as you pointed out) so as much as 'truth' is a desirable property of 'rational' I think it would be impossible to have that in practice.

I see 'rational' as doing the same job that 'Valid' does in deductive argument. Your conclusion may be incorrect but at least the reasoning behind it is not erroneous.

'Rational' is simply a property of a belief. The belief is rational, or it isn't. If it isn't, then it's irrational.

I understand what you're saying and it would be a problem except that I don't think it's possible to meet one condition and not have that mean that you are also meeting the other. "not P *OR* not Q" can't actually exist, both conditions will be met, or neither. By going beyond the evidence to some conclusion not supported by the evidence, you're necessarily going to rule out possibilities not closed out by that evidence.

ok.


Well... by introducing the idea that the source of information is a 'joke', it's become ambiguous whether or not the person believes the information in the joke to be accurate, and not obviously intended to be parody or some other such mechanism of humour, and so not intended to be taken seriously. Justified' is a property of the belief itself, and on the basis of the information available to that person, their belief is both rationally acquired, and justified IF they think the information in the joke is real and to be taken seriously and it's all the information that they have by which to form a belief.



I would prefer not to discuss inductive reasoning in any detail here but your criticism is actually one of that not even being the right type of logic. So, if I go from a small sample (one blonde) and come to some general principle about all blondes (and bearing in mind my very limited source of information, such that I couldn't reasonably make an abductive inference to the best explanation and even though I could easily construct a logically valid deductive argument it would be horrible) I think that this is an inductive conclusion. It's precisely because it's not a reasonable conclusion that my belief would be irrational and not justified and why I used it as an example.

I'm not going to keep going in circles with you. You're simply wrong. There's even evidence to show that you're being irrational because there exist scientists who believe in God and have other aspects of their lives of spirituality and religiosity. So unless you're going to go as far as saying that those people aren't doing science, you're wrong. And if you go that far, you're also wrong.

"I've demonstrated a clear understanding of the different ways in which the scientific method, with regard specifically to Methodological Naturalism, can be approached."

If you really understood this, you wouldn't be confused as to why there are religious scientists.

This is an ill-formed argument for the reasons already stated. Science does not "reject" the supernatural. It makes no comment one way or the other.

Nope.

Think what you will, but the fact that you're being stubborn about the claim that science "rejects" the supernatural and your unwillingness to accept that science can be done by religious people (that you seem to have trouble understanding how it's possible), suggests that the problem is really on your end. There's a difference between "does not admit the supernatural" and "rejects" the supernatural in the same way as "does not believe in God" is different from "rejects the existence of God." You said you understood the difference between the latter phrasings. If you did, then you should be able to understand the difference between the former.

But apparently, you have a poor concept for how science is practiced.

It's not like baby people aren't people, even if they aren't fully aware of their people-ness. In the same way, baby science is still science, even if the full breadth of the science-ness isn't understood.

You still have much to learn.

Nope. There exist conspiracy theories that are rational (according to your definition), but are irrational in my view. And not because they're wrong, but because the plausibility of the correctness is too small.

This is a bad way to look at rationality precisely because of how you've defined it. But you'll need to work through the problem of induction a bit further. You're being stubborn there, and so that's causing you problems here. You're no understanding that "reliable" doesn't mean 100% of the time.

From the point of view of your definitions, you need to flip that around. Irrational is your fundamental property, and the failure to be irrational makes something rational. It's subtle, but it's important to remember what your primary definitions are.

If this were true, then your original definition of irrational is redundant. Your failure to see this is another layer of short-sightedness that's preventing you from understanding it.

And this is a very serious problem for your understanding of the term "justified." You are the one who introduced the concept of a joke, and now you're needing to hedge against it.

Well going off the actual meaning of irrational, which is to be illogical or unreasonable. I would say the answer is no, it is'nt irrational. With the growing evidence and general agreement among scientists who study such things, like evoultionary psychologists, that there is an evolutionary component to faith. It appears to be something that is just part of the majority of us as a species. The fact we can't answer the question why does'nt make it irrational.

[Moved from new thread titled: "is a disbelief in an intelligent designer irrational?" -OrP]

I would argue that it very clearly is.

evidence shows that one of your observers in your wallaby example was wrong, therefore their belief was irrational

The belief in the watchmaker argument is rational, in that it follows the rules of logic. The fact that one of the premises is unproven, or incorrect, only makes it unsound. Lots of beliefs are based on faulty premises, but you wouldnt class them as irrational

Now you are severely conflating things.

Methodological naturalism is NOT the rejection of the supernatural, it is in fact a term that has often been used to specifically to reject accusations that it did.

By claiming science rejects the supernatural, you are literally repeating creationist talking points. They love spreading such bogus claims which allows them to jump directly to the next chapter: "science hates your belief and your god, hurr durr".

But my beef with this is bigger than. Naturalism isn't needed in science. Phenomena doesn't need arbitrary distinctions for science to do its thing. I don't care if a fish is natural or supernatural. It can be studied just fine either way.

We have evidence that complexity can arise from design. We see this in computers, cars, and other machines that we've created. I don't see how the design argument can go beyond the available evidence and fails to factor in available evidence unless you don't believe that those things are designed.

(Note: This isn't saying that the watchmaker argument is some sort of bullet-proof argument. But it's an argument that most people would generally consider to be rational even if they think it's wrong.)

What your argument here is demonstrating is that you've got very weak conceptions of things like "evidence" and it's undermining your ability to analyze arguments effectively.

The issue is that you're still way too deep into your own beliefs and understanding, and so you're stuck with a fairly myopic view of the world. This prevents you from understanding lots of things.

Here is a challenge that, if you took it seriously, would open your eyes to the real struggles you're having: Pretend you're a Christian and a scientist. Explain how it's possible for you to believe in God while still conducting scientific research. (Such people exist in reality, so we know it's possible.)

In order for you to succeed, you'll need to really peel back the layers of your "understanding" of science and your "understanding" of how religious people actually think about things. You may have to read a book like Francis Collin's "The Language of God" and several other things. You may actually need to get to know some Christians who happen to be scientists. It's not something that I can imagine you'll just be able to sit down and think through by yourself with no help.

You don't ultimately have to agree with what you're saying. Your goal is to be able to accurately express their thoughts and ideas about themselves. If you can actually get to that point, you should be able to understand many of the things that have caused you repeated and ongoing struggles in your posts.

It's so easy to stagnate in life by accepting the easy solution rather than challenging ourselves by genuinely adopting the opposing viewpoint and putting forth the effort to make the strongest case from that perspective. Because it is shifted more toward suffering rather than the opposite, reality operates in a way that rewards those of us that are willing to make that effort to look deeper than initial appearances and snap judgments. It's the only path toward meaning, I've found, while the alternative is either nihilism, delusion, or denial.

Our proclivity in this regard is exposed in how we interact with people or viewpoints that we disagree with. If we are not willing to make the strongest case we can for the opposing viewpoint regarding our beliefs, sacrificing our self preservation instinct in favor of truth, how can we expect ourselves to muster the necessary effort against the suffering that reality is capable of raining down on us? We would be sentencing ourselves to a future of bouncing between coping and uncontrollable bouts of nihilism, like a leaf in a tornado. All because we want things to be easy and simple.

Good one. What beliefs would I have to abandon?

Whether maths is man made or discovered is an interesting question, and not one I've thought about in great detail before. My very initial view is that it's not black and white.

No I'm not. Interesting though that you can 'severely' conflate things, presumably you can also conflate things just a little bit too?

MN is the application, through the scientific method, of Philosophical Naturalism which does reject the supernatural. Specifically, it makes a truth claim, that the natural world is all that there is. MN is applied, on that basis, by the majority of scientists.


If Creationists say that then they're correct, that is possible you know. And, Naturalism is not only 'needed' by modern science, but couldn't work without it. To be considered 'scientific', a hypothesis must be Corrective, Falsifiable, Predictive, Useful, Internally or Externally Consistent, Parsimonious, or Testable.

The job that those criteria are doing is to make such knowledge as can be obtained using the 'there is no supernatural' paradigm, actually Useful to us. None of those criteria can be applied to the supernatural. That's why it's rejected.

The belief would have been acquired irrationally if it was held by you since you have information that they don't have. Since their belief was based only on the evidence available to them, is is rational and justified.


Correct, a wrong belief can still be held rationally. The watchmaker hypothesis is not rational if you're aware that not everything complex has to be 'designed'. So the way to show watchmaker believers that their belief is not justified is to show that there is evidence, that complexity can arise from simple origins through Evolution, that they haven't included in their assessment.

Ok, if this is your last post then thank you for discussing this with me cordially, I've enjoyed it.

Your point about there being scientists who have supernatural beliefs and either reject the strict version of MN because of them, or work with it anyway despite the apparent conflict, is something I've dealt with twice already ITT, so it's not a new criticism and still doesn't pose a problem for anything I've said. By their definition of what science is, they are 'doing science'. But what they're doing is useless since they can never know if there is in fact a supernatural explanation for what they're studying and their explanations fail to meet a single of the criteria that make knowledge acquired through the paradigm of Naturalism, actually useful to us.

Those scientists that believe in the supernatural are knowingly offering incomplete and limited explanations if they only use the Natural paradigm.

When you can show me a mainstream scientific theory that includes a supernatural element, or show that there is a general consensus among the world's scientists that any scientific explanation could or should include supernatural elements, you will for the first time have offered something that is difficult for me to explain in the context of my understanding.

I'm not confused, see above.

This is simply another restatement of your viewpoint.

Since this part of your reply is based on the mistaken premise that I 'don't understand' how religious people can think that they're doing science, and that's not true, it's the same criticism that I've already addressed earlier in this post


Well, if I said the same thing to you, how would you prove that I was wrong? I'm curious what evidence you would offer of "how science is practiced".

I am working through induction and I'm well aware that I lack a sufficient understanding currently (although that is changing rapidly as I'm sat at the side of a pool in Italy on holiday with nothing else to do except read and reread the chapter on Inductive Reasoning, and occasionally cool off in the pool) but I think I can still address your criticism because our disagreement is actually about where in the process of belief acquisition the rational part is taking place. It seems that you consider 'rational' to be a property of the belief itself, rather than of the thinking behind the acquisition of the belief, such that a belief cannot be rational unless it also 'plausible', and 'plausible' unquestionably could only be a property of the belief itself. Your thought process can't be 'plausible', that can only apply to the results of that process.

I disagree that 'rational' is a useful property of the belief itself and my reasons are that 'plausibility' is an impractical standard to hold a belief to before making a judgement about it being rational or not, and you've also made the concept of 'justified' redundant since it would mean the same thing but without the useful distinction of applying only to the belief, rather than the thinking. Where I can show that two contradictory beliefs were acquired rationally if we can see that both were based on the evidence available to those holding the beliefs (and then we can examine that evidence in the same way you would examine the premises of a deductive argument that has been shown to be valid in it's structure), you would have to decide which belief is more plausible. To do that, you yourself would have to acquire the belief and then we would in turn need to examine how you arrived at your decision that one belief is more plausible than the other belief, and so on...

In the context of belief acquisition, 'Plausible' makes 'rational' unworkable.


I think I've remembered what my primary definitions are very well ITT. I'm not the same person that started posting here 6 years ago that would easily lose sight of where I started and sometimes even move positions without realising it, and I certainly wouldn't continue to argue a point if I could see it was wrong.


I don' think it's redundant, because I think the conditions are mutually dependent, and not separate and independent conditions, either of which could be met or not. As I said, in this context, I think that "not P *OR* not Q" can't actually exist.

No it's not, it's entirely consistent with everything I've said throughout the thread. Rational is a property of the thinking, justified is a property of the belief. I'm not even going to check that I've said something ITT that would contradict what I just said or show some kind of movement from that, and give you a slamdunk opportunity, because I'm very confident that I haven't deviated at all from my definitions or my understanding.

Since rational is a property of thinking, the nature of the evidence that the thinking is based on is crucial, and I don't know whether your example person took the joke seriously or not, because you didn't say. In my example, the belief holder did not know that the book was a joke and I made that clear when I said 'unknown to him'.


My reply was to your criticism that "the challenge is not about the acquisition, but the justification", so regardless of what I still have to learn, I've been very clear ITT on how I'm using the terms 'rational' and 'justified'. My use of those definitions has not meandered or deviated at all, and my focus has remained steadily on 'rational belief'. In that reply I also said "a view acquired irrationally can't be justified (even if it's correct)" which should further have reinforced that 'justified' is not the focus of the OP. I don't see references to what I still have to learn to be relevant.

We can also see that complexity can arise without design which makes the assertion 'complexity requires design' trivially incorrect.

Whether or not their belief is rational would depend entirely on what evidence was available to them when they acquired it, as I said to Neeel and has been discussed extensively in the other conversation so we don't need to go into it in detail here.

I think that's quite a stretch to get from what I said to your claim here. I understand 'evidence to mean "the available body of facts or information indicating whether a belief or proposition is true or valid." and using that definition I am a staunch defender of the Theist claim that there is evidence for god. I simply think that it is insufficient and so a belief in god goes beyond that evidence... etc.

I can understand that it appears this way to you.

Already dealt with in the other replies.

Since I have a scientific outlook, I can't rule out (and wouldn't want to) that I will discover new information that will change my current viewpoint. Unlike those who believe in god, my viewpoint is Corrective, Falsifiable, Predictive, Useful, Internally and Externally Consistent, Parsimonious, and Testable.

Can you say the same?

Is it "illogical or unreasonable" to go beyond what the available evidence supports? I think so, so that specific element of the definition I used in the OP, not to go beyond the available evidence, still applies even when you use words like illogical or unreasonable and I think that a belief in god goes beyond the available evidence and in doing so, does not leave open possibilities not closed out by the evidence, i.e. that there is some other cause of the universe than god.

Probably some beliefs about the intelligence of religious people. Your presentation thus far in this thread has shown a lack of intellectual reflection on the matter similar to your lack of intellectual reflection on the philosophy of mathematics.

Good. So should be your views on many other things. If something as "objective" as mathematics appears to be can still be seen in shades of gray, how much more should other things be understood as being complex and not as straight-forward as they initially appear?

You say this as if it's a problem. And that's the problem you're having.

That you keep raising this is further indication that you don't understand things nearly as well as you think you do. And until you drop that delusion, you're not going to understand anything new in this direction.

I would just shrug and say that I have nothing to prove. While I may be a mathematician, I've been a chair of a Department of Physical and Life Sciences. I've worked with scientists and have helped to establish undergraduate research labs and am currently working on the establishment of a science center in Mexico. At no point is anyone required to make some sort of assertion about natural/supernatural in order for research to be done.

Tame_deuces is spot on. It doesn't matter what your labels are (natural/supernatural).

This is objectively nonsensical. If it's not redundant, then one condition must contain information that the other doesn't. That's basically the definition of a redundancy.

There are many other problems with your presentation. But since you've already reached the point of going in circles, I'm not going to hit them up individually. Your struggles with some basic terminology and logic highlights that you still have much to learn.

And again there is mounting scientific evidence that "faith" is part of our evolution. There is nothing unreasonable to believe in a higher power when our evolution is compeling most of us to do so. No more than wanting to procreate is irrational. The difference is we understand why we want to procreate, faith not so much, yet.

There are two ways looking at this and you seem to just lump them together. One is like I stated above where it is just a function of our evolution and in of itself is'nt irrational. Two, our implementation of those beliefs which when you are sacrificing virgins, burning witches, chopping peoples heads off over it, and close your mind to the possibilities science may present, then ya that is certainly unreasonable.

But it seems that you're doing this. You have multiple people (both theist and atheist) pointing out flaws in your understanding of the nature of science. Yet you continue insisting that you're right. At what point does the information of people trying to correct you indicate to you that you've actually made a mistake? How much data do you need before you change your current viewpoint?

You should release the stranglehold you have on the idea that you've cornered science, and that you meaningfully have adopted all of these things into your perspectives. You don't actually live this out the way you claim to. This is very clear from the conversation that's happening right now.

* Corrective: You're suffering from an unwillingness to be corrected when wrong. The data is against you, but you're not taking the new data and allowing it to change your perspectives. You're holding to the beliefs you've brought to the table.

* Falsifiable: Your philosophy of science is unfalsifiable. No matter how much I can show you about science and scientists and their perspective, you're going to continue to insist that methodological naturalism necessitates philosophical naturalism.

* Externally consistent: You're not consistent with the external world.

* Parsimonious: Your inability to explain how there are religious scientists out there can be understood in a much simpler way by changing your assumptions about science. But you refuse to do that, and instead create a much more complicated understanding by retaining unnecessary features.

Yes, but I say it without random capitalization, and I don't presume that these are the only features of a meaningful philosophical perspective.

Nobody said "requires." That's your word and a mischaracterization of the watchmaker argument. The watchmaker argument is not an argument of necessity, but of plausibility.

How is a debate on whether Mathematics is man made relevant to the question? Your argument is topic A has shades of grey and therefore maybe topic B does too?

I wouldn't call mathematics objective, there are great swathes of it that are completely man made and therefore the rules are subjective.

The fact that you're only now realizing something about math (and that you would ask a question rhetorically and discover that the answer requires depth) is sufficient for me to conjecture that there's a lot you don't think about. Given the depth of the responses you've give with regards to religious beliefs in this thread, I feel justified in conjecturing that you've really not thought carefully about that topic, either.

Okay. And your evidence for your claims are... ??

I think the watchmaker argument breaks down when applied to anything we observe in the natural world. Watches don't evolve, everything in the natural world does. The stronger the evidence for evolution, the weaker and less plausible the watchmaker argument as applied to the natural world becomes by comparison.