Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
For other Christians on here, or seriously religious people, how do you handle the paradox of belief? I was talking to a friend today about my recent experience joining an Orthodox Christian church, and it's just so interesting. The 'logical' part of my brain relentlessly attacks what it sees as the foolishness of religion, ritual and sacrament.
And yet, when I partake and do my best to take it seriously, I feel healed. The spiritual water that Christ talks about in the Bible slakes my thirst. It's almost impossible to conceptualize, but damn it I've tried so many different ways to heal my inner wounds throughout my life, and this one works better than anything, by far.
How do you make sense of a serious religious practice, while keeping the ability to be seriously rational?
For my part, I'm not sure I experience the "paradox of belief." I've never understood why some rationalists act like "faith" is irrational, as if you're only permitted to believe in things that are epistemically certain. Beyond "cogito ergo sum," there's not much knowledge available to us that's not ultimately based on pragmatic leaps of logic. I can't prove that the world outside my head really exists, or that the past and future really exist, or that causation is real. I don't pretend to understand Godel's incompleteness theorem, but my layman's understanding of it is that even math relies on unprovable assumptions to work. And most of what we call "scientific knowledge" is far more tenuous than these propositions: we say that we know, for example, that an oxygen atom has eight protons, but I've never actually checked. I just assume the scientists who say that know what they're talking about and have no reason to lie. (These are not always safe assumptions to make about scientists.) I'm told that a lot of chemical reactions would not work if oxygen had more or less than 8 protons per atom, but again, I have no personal way of knowing whether that's true, beyond my mostly-uncritical acceptance of scientific consensus. In the face of pure, uncompromising skepticism, scientific "knowledge" is just as untenable as religious belief.
We ultimately rely on faith for almost all the knowledge we use--because otherwise we couldn't use any knowledge. Epistemic certainty has to yield to pragmatic utility. Therefore, as long as my religious beliefs aren't provably false (which would be utility-decreasing, because it would cause me to make predictions that turn out to be incorrect, to my detriment), and if those beliefs make me better off (consensus seems to be that religious people tend to be happier and more mentally healthy than nonbelievers), I don't see why it's "irrational" to continue being religious.
Finally, plenty of prominent rationalists have beliefs that seem just as strange and unfalsifiable as my own religious beliefs; some believe that we're living in a simulation, some believe in panpsychism, some believe we inhabit a multiverse where every possible reality exists at once, etc. I don't see why Christianity is any less compatible with rationalism than these other weird ideas.
Like you, I find Christianity imparts meaning to my life in a way no other worldview can. It has unequivocally improved the quality of my life. The smart thing to do--the rational thing--would be to go on believing it and acting accordingly. I have further thoughts, but I've got to go now.
Because faith is defined as believing something without having a good reason to believe it. If you have a good reason to believe it, then you'd just appeal to the reason and have no need to bring faith into it.
In my experience, atheists/rationalists don't claim that certainty is required to be justified in believing something. As you correctly point out, that would be an absurdly high standard that would commit you to a useless stance of Cartesian doubt.
Not all leaps of logic are equally justified. You may not know anything about the original research that demonstrates how an oxygen atom has eight protons, but you know that scientists have developed systems (that you can distill down to "the scientific method", if you like) to test and discover what things happen to be true about the world we live in and what hypotheses happen not to be true. Planes fly, magic carpets don't. You also know that in general scientists are open about their methods and others who are knowledgeable about the subject matter have the opportunity to replicate and, if appropriate, refute previous findings. If you challenged a scientist of the relevant specialty about whether an oxygen atom has eight protons, you'd know that they'd have the receipts to back it up.
At this point you may be waiting to blurt out "but the replication crisis and the politicization of science!" And you're absolutely correct. But our confidence in any given proposition that comes out of science is proportional to, among other things, how reliable we consider that subfield to be. If we have good reasons to distrust scientists in a particular field of study or doubt a particular finding -- whether because the scientists are politicized (social science) or because figuring out a way to tease out what's actually true is fucking hard (again, social science) -- then we modulate our confidence in any given proposition coming out of that field ("such-and-such remains unclear, more research is needed" is a cliche for a reason.)
The only reliable alternative to bad science is better science. What else could there even be? Holy books? Podcasters and substackers trying to work it out from first principles? Vibes?
It's irrational if don't have a good reason to believe that it's actually true. It may be that believing in a falsehood can be beneficial, but that's a separate argument from whether it's true. If you want to argue that people should believe falsehoods because they're beneficial, you can make that argument (and in this paragraph you seem to be), but be very aware that that's a separate argument from its truth and therefore from whether it's rational to believe that it's true.
And, as an aside, I can't fathom how it could even be possible to believe something that you recognize you have no good reason to be true merely because you think it's beneficial. Belief is an uncontrollable state of being convinced of the actual truth of something, so I can't imagine how belief could even be possible without being convinced of the truth value.
Yes, they do. So don't add to the list.
It's not often that I find myself retreading ground from the Great Atheism War of the Aughts in this era where wokeism has become such a threat that I gleefully find myself allied with evangelicals and even married one and moved to the heart of evangelicalstan to get away from it. But man, I still can't let this shit stand unchallenged.
No. What is faith?
"Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen."
Do I have faith in Jim? Have I good reason to trust him? Why do I have confidence that he will do what he promises?
Do you have faith in reason? What is the basis of your confidence and belief in its efficacy and veracity?
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