Which would be a great point if what religious people had was actual knowledge. It isn't. It's just faith. It's belief based on emotion, not on evidence, critical thinking or logic.
I'm going to assume that by "actual knowledge" you mean "knowledge of that which is true/real". Please correct me if I am misunderstanding you on that point.
I have in a previous post in this thread (I believe in this thread, anyway) something about critical thinking and logic in relation to religion. Part of that post is in agreement with you in that it is true that many a religious person is not very capable of critical reasoning and is not only largely incapable of logical analysis but confuses quite different senses of the term. I would (and I believe have) argued that the reason this is so is because that's the way that
people are.
The research within the cognitive sciences (including evolutionary psychology) on this general “failure” to think critically or apply logic is older, more detailed, better understood, and far more extensive than the literature on the specific relationship between religion and critical thinking, logic, & analytic reasoning. There are, though, several good books intended for the layperson which summarize & package much of this research while explaining what actual analytic reasoning and logic really are (and sometimes why it is thought humans aren’t particularly prone to thinking logically). Rather than just give you some citations that are of no use because you’d have to buy the books, I thought you might be interested in what I found to be an interesting opening “preface” to this kind of book:
I would be interested in your answers (except to 7), of course, but I don’t wish to put you on the spot and certainly don’t want to ask you to do something you don’t wish to (I find such questions rather fun, or at least when they are challenging). But I would be grateful if you would look over the questions, and perhaps take a few second to think of what your answer might be and why. The reason for this is simple: most of the time when we say that something is or isn’t logical we mean in the most general and least formal use, i.e., “it doesn’t make sense”. Even when someone refers to fallacious arguments (and even when they name these), often times there is no relationship between these fallacies and logic.
On a similar note, and regarding faith vs. evidence, I’d like to share a quote from a favorite childhood book of mine: “This how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones we
really believe, and those we never think to question.”
After teaching others logic, probability, statistics, analytic writing, etc., I have come to think that the above is overly optimistic. I would say instead that we humans tend not to question most things except those that conflict with our beliefs.
For example, you state above that religious people rely on faith, not evidence or critical thinking. I think there are two problems here. The more important is that you portray as a strict division what is really a continuum. I would hazard to guess that you have never seen an electron or proton nor any evidence that they exist, still less a black hole or the Higgs boson or a proof that pi is irrational. I would bet that if I asked you to explain what “global warming” (by that I refer mainstream climate science or “anthropogenic global warming” (AGW) or the theory that most scientific organizations have endorsed about humanity’s activities on the climate). And whether you believe the theory to be true or not, I would bet a lot more that you aren’t really aware of most of the evidence.
Rather, you do what we do much if not most of the time: you take things on faith, either you are accepting something is true because it comes from an expert, or someone you trust, or you just didn’t think to question it (and even if you did, it might be that you accept it as true because it is a well-constructed fallacious argument).
There is an opposite side to this tendency of we humans to accept uncritically much information and a general difficulty when it comes to the real use of logic. My go-to example is Kurt Gödel. You probably know of him for his incompleteness proof. He was a brilliant mathematician and probably the greatest logician who ever lived. Towards the end of his life, he came to believe that people were trying to poison him, and he trusted only his wife to prepare his meals. Unfortunately, she grew ill at one point and had to spend an extended amount of time in a hospital.
Gödel, however, was nothing if not logical. He had two premises:
P1) People are trying kill me by putting poison in any food I eat.
P2) The only food that I can believe isn’t poisoned is food provided by my wife.
From these premises follow this conditional proposition:
3) If my food isn’t provided by my wife, I can’t believe that it isn’t poisoned.
So he reached the valid conclusion that if he ate food his wife couldn’t provide (as she was hospitalized) he ran the risk of certain death. He died of starvation, surrounded by food, because he weighed the possibility of death by starvation against the (near) certainty of death by eating. All very logical, granted the premise.
Gödel also furnished a proof of God’s existence, one in a long line of similar proofs going back to the ancient Greeks but especially to the scholastics like Anselm. The problem with almost all of these proofs is the same: you have to accept the premises as true, or the proof fails (often I believe they fail anyway, but that doesn’t matter here). The point is that Gödel’s logic may have been air-tight given his premises about poisoned food, but nobody else believes anybody was trying to poison him. He reasoned himself to death.
The point about believing experts on faith isn’t to equate belief in god with belief in subatomic particles, but rather to illustrate that we too frequently fail to realize how much we take on faith. Radical skepticism would likely kill us, as we’d spend time wondering whether if we were justified in believing that there really was a car coming towards us. Our epistemologies, or beliefs about the world, are formulated largely on relationships between beliefs, such as the belief that I can trust the IPCC to tell me about climate change but can’t trust the Bible or the Pope to inform me about “God”.
The point about Gödel highlights another component of epistemic justification. Gödel’s conclusion may have been valid, but he had no good evidence to believe his premises. This, of course, raises the question of what “good evidence” is or when and why one is or isn’t epistemically justified in some claim.
Dogma isn’t found only in religion, critical reasoning is only as good as the premises you start with, and the evidence for these premises is only evidence if it justifies them but such justification is already intertwined with what we believe. Hence a continuum, not some strict division (nor is the continuum one of “rational, logical, and sane” at one end and “religious” at the other; I know two people who think the idea of God is nuts but believe that dinosaurs never existed).
