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The History of Demanding a Rational Basis for Religious Truth-Claims

74x12

Well-Known Member
Not everyone appreciates rational thought. Some prefer simple, comforting platitudes. They need their opiate.
For many people it's more comforting to think there is no God. No consequences. Just live your life and do what you want and then you die and there is no reason to worry about right or wrong. No fear when you die. You just cease to exist (as a consciousness).

So, that is actually the "comforting platitude" for many.
 

mikkel_the_dane

My own religion
For many people it's more comforting to think there is no God. No consequences. Just live your life and do what you want and then you die and there is no reason to worry about right or wrong. No fear when you die. You just cease to exist (as a consciousness).

So, that is actually the "comforting platitude" for many.

Evidence of that please.
 

SomeRandom

Still learning to be wise
Staff member
Premium Member
For many people it's more comforting to think there is no God. No consequences. Just live your life and do what you want and then you die and there is no reason to worry about right or wrong. No fear when you die. You just cease to exist (as a consciousness).

So, that is actually the "comforting platitude" for many.
Atheism is not the same as libertinism (or extreme hedonism.)
And indeed it’s not like everyone who followed the philosophy or were even linked to it were irreligious.
Rodrigo Borgia anyone?
Pope Alexander VI - Wikipedia
 

Wandering Monk

Well-Known Member
For many people it's more comforting to think there is no God. No consequences. Just live your life and do what you want and then you die and there is no reason to worry about right or wrong. No fear when you die. You just cease to exist (as a consciousness).

So, that is actually the "comforting platitude" for many.

Except that there is no evidence for life after death and there is irrefutable evidence that everything dies.
 

lewisnotmiller

Grand Hat
Staff member
Premium Member
I am a functional Scandinavian social democrat for what it is worth.

Regards
Mikkel

I have quite a few friends who would describe themselves similarly (with varied theistic and non-theistic beliefs).

I'm almost certain our respective religious positions wouldn't matter much to each other in terms of how we view the world and people.
 

mikkel_the_dane

My own religion
I have quite a few friends who would describe themselves similarly (with varied theistic and non-theistic beliefs).

I'm almost certain our respective religious positions wouldn't matter much to each other in terms of how we view the world and people.

Yeah, I know. Some of us are more united in our common view of the world and humans in practice, than we are divided by religion or not.

Regards
Mikkel
 

atanu

Member
Premium Member
Do you think it's a good idea to demand a rational basis for religious truth-claims? Why or why not?

I think that it is for the religious to test the claims before committing.

OTOH, what is there to prove? Essentially religions teach "I Am" is God. Either you can believe that chemicals have awareness of "I am". Or you can believe that "I am" awareness is foundational. I think that the former belief requires more explaining.
...
 

PruePhillip

Well-Known Member
As I understand it, the notion that religious truth-claims (such as "the gods exist", etc) need to be justified by some rational means dates all the way back in Western thought to Thales of Miletus, who lived around 600 BCE in what is now Asia Minor.

As with most things, the details are sometimes disputed, but it seems most scholars agree that Thales began the Western tradition of assuming that all natural events have natural causes which can be discovered by reason. (This 'assumption' appears to be strongly supported by the explanatory success of the sciences.) It should be easy to see how such an assumption can morph over time into a demand that even religious truth-claims make rational sense. Indeed, the rise of theology in the West is almost certainly a consequence of Thales' revolutionary idea that the nature of things can be discovered by reason for theology is basically an attempt to figure out rational reasons for religious truth-claims (whether it succeeds in doing that is up to you to decide).

Do you think it's a good idea to demand a rational basis for religious truth-claims? Why or why not?

Quote, "all natural events have natural causes which can be discovered by reason."
This is true, but only to a point.
The bible tells us that life came out of the sea at God's "command." This fact is
uncomfortable to creationists.
But it's the FIRST EVENT which has no natural cause. Whatever that event was,
be it the Big Bang or something further back, had to be caused by something
external to the (non-existent) universe. And could it have been done without any
reason?
 

Vouthon

Dominus Deus tuus ignis consumens est
Staff member
Premium Member
@Sunstone I truly hope that you are in good health of mind and body at this trying time of global pandemic.

A couple of points, first of all, on Thales (before I address your question substantively):

I don't necessarily concur that Thales "began the Western tradition of assuming that all natural events have natural causes which can be discovered by reason". In fact, I think this is strongly contradicted by the surviving textual evidence from the later secondary classical sources on him. One of the greatest deficiencies of classical, Greco-Roman thought (for all its sophistication and profundity) was that they really lacked empiricism and any comprehension of the need for making testable predictions. Thales was no exception.

Read:


Panpsychism | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy


We see evidence of this at the very beginning of philosophy, in the few remaining fragments of Thales, the man widely regarded as the first philosopher of ancient Greece. Thales believed that the lodestone (magnet) possessed a psyche or soul: “According to Thales…the lodestone has a soul because it moves iron” (Aristotle, De Anima, 405a19). Furthermore, the power of the lodestone was seen as a particularly powerful manifestation of a divine animate quality shared by all things: “Certain thinkers say that soul is intermingled in the whole universe, and it is perhaps for that reason that Thales came to the opinion that all things are full of gods” (Ibid, 411a7).


Thales was certainly an innovative thinker in the ancient Greek, pre-socratic tradition. But he is also famous for having stated, according to Aristotle, that:

  1. The magnet has a soul. (De Anima 405a19)
  2. All things are full of gods. (De Anima 411a7)

In 45BC, Cicero, in his On the Nature of the Gods, described Thales view on god as follows:


“Thales said that water was the first principle, and that god was the mind that fashioned all things from water.”​


While Thales did try to reduce nature to a single animating cause within it ("water"), and this was certainly a positive step towards a more reasoned worldview, he regarded water as something divine either in principle or as Cicero suggests in origin.

To understand him as a rationalist or even more than that as a sort of proto-methodological naturalist, is quite groundless. Thales was what he was, a bold pre-socratic philosopher who challenged conventional understanding in his day. But he didn't make any rational, testable predictions like Einstein's general relativity, nor could he have conceived of the very idea of experimentation and the possibility of varying initial conditions, because he regarded nature not as a "physical" complex of particles but rather as 'divine', full of gods.

If you believe that "nature is full of gods" and that magnets are propelled by active "souls" as Thales did, then you simply cannot engage in testable, experimental science because varying initial conditions (a necessity for conducting controlled experiments) would be viewed as violating the "static", cyclical divine order of nature. And the belief itself is not a 'rational' one but rather speculatively philosophical / religious.


As the Israeli physicist and philosopher of science Max Jammer explained in a 1997 study:


Foundations Of Quantum Mechanics In The Light Of New Technology: Selected Papers From The Proceedings Of The First Through Fourth International Symposia On Foundations Of Quantum Mechanics


Greek science was not experimental science. During the twelve centuries, from Thales to Philoponus, virtually no serious experiment had been performed. In fact, the very idea of an experiment was unacceptable to the Greek mind.

The world of nature, according to Greek metaphysics was a world alive and divine...Any interference with the course of nature was for the Greek an act of violence...The performance of an experiment performed under artificial or unnatural conditions could consequently never increase knowledge of nature.


Now, onto your question more specifically...

If the religion in question is making truth-claims about something within the natural order which can be falsified through the criterion of testability, then yes - one should certainly demand that there be a justifiably rational and evidenced basis for such a belief.

Purported miracles or interventions of God in nature, if sufficient material exists to subject the alleged miraculous happening to due scrutiny, should receive this treatment.

A number of key religious beliefs - say, the doctrine of a transcendent, ineffable and incorporeal God - make claims that are explicitly supramundane and beyond the ken of scientific enquiry. These cannot be 'tested'.

There is a maximal limit to what humans can know definitively about even physical reality through the use of testable predictions, let alone something allegedly spiritual. The limit of observability in our universe is set by a set of cosmological horizons which limit—based on various physical constraints—the extent to which we can obtain information about various events in the Universe. The most famous horizon is the particle horizon which sets a limit on the precise distance that can be seen due to the finite age of the Universe.

As Professor George Ellis, a cosmologist, notes:


Well, science does have its limitations...

Cosmology deals with all that was, is and ever will be, but as a science, he says, it has limitations.

"The universe has only been existing for 14bn years. Light can only travel a certain distance in that time and we can't see anything further out. So there is a whole mass of stuff ... in the universe we know nothing about and we never will know anything about, because the light will never get to us in time for us to know anything about it."

With that being said, truth-claims in general must still be subject to reason.

We can differentiate - using good non-empirical arguments - between hypothetical things "beyond the limit" that are more consistent with the logic and workings of the world we do see (and so extrapolate into that "unknowable" based upon a set of known laws and factuals) and those that are closer to being utterly fanciful because they lack any explanatory power at all in terms of what we do see (i.e. the tangible, observable data).

Yet, there comes a point where even 'reason' may have an ending.

States attained through 'prayer and mysticism' are states of consciousness, that is "qualitative" phenomena. Science, as presently constituted, pertains to "quantitative" phenomena and methods of investigation / enquiry.

Brain scans of reported visionaries and contemplatives in an alleged mystical state, only show regions of the brain light up - say the amygdala, which has a role in processing emotion - but this is just a neural correlate, a quantitative measure.

You can show a neural pathway light up in the brain when someone tastes paprika (quantitative) but you can't, through any current scientific instrument, capture the feeling or subjective experience of the spicy taste of paprika itself (qualitative). You have to rely on the report of the individual for what that quality feels like, and that's inherently subjective.

Have we 'cracked' how complex electrochemical signaling in neurons gives rise to subjective experiences? No, because we don't yet know how to get from the quantitative (which is properly, or traditionally, the domain of science, describing matter in terms of its quantitative properties like size, shape, motion or whatever) to the qualitative (qualia, subjective feelings - how it feels to be something, how a bunch of electrochemical neurons can have a sense of awareness) in an underlying theory. Koch calls this, "the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the physics of the brain and phenomenal experience".

At the moment, science has no useful means of bridging the gap between "quantitative" and "qualitative": the complex electrochemical signaling on the one hand (that we absolutely can scientifically analyse) and the subjective inner world of colours, sounds, smells, tastes and subjective states (which we can't), of which the 'mystical / religious' experience is the most bizarre.

Spiritual experiences, by their very definition, fall into this latter category - conscious qualitative experiences.

And God - in most theisms - is posited as a pre-existent mind or 'ultimate consciousness', making him "super-qualitative". Not quantitative.

Simply put, questions about subjective experience - including spiritual experiences - can't be answered quantitatively at this moment in time. Science is rationalist and quantitative (dealing with the exterior world, matter and the neurons of the brain); spiritual experiences are experiential and qualitative (dealing with the interior world, qualia and the mind).

When you study 'objective' observable data, you conduct experiments to test whether what's observed matches what your theory predicts. But with something unobservable like conscious experiences (of which spiritual experiences are a subset), such a methodology doesn't work.

I don't see how you can, at present, treat it like every other scientific question that one can 'discard' for lack of quantitative evidence - because its qualitative in nature, and we don't yet have a scientific understanding of that.

William James, at the end of his classic study The Varieties of Religious Experience, put it thusly:


Page:The varieties of religious experience, a study in human nature.djvu/439 - Wikisource, the free online library


"As a matter of psychological fact, mystical states of a well-pronounced and emphatic sort are usually authoritative over those who have them. They have been 'there,' and know. It is vain for rationalism to grumble about this [...] It mocks our utmost efforts, as a matter of fact, and in point of logic it absolutely escapes our jurisdiction. Our own more 'rational' beliefs are based on evidence exactly similar in nature to that which mystics quote for theirs. Our senses, namely, have assured us of certain states of fact; but mystical experiences are as direct perceptions of fact for those who have them as any sensations ever were for us."


Thus Professor Philip Goff, a philosopher of consciousness, has argued in one of his studies that: "The appropriate attitude to mystical experiences for those who haven't had them is probably one of agnosticism".
 

GoodbyeDave

Well-Known Member
As I understand it, the notion that religious truth-claims (such as "the gods exist", etc) need to be justified by some rational means dates all the way back in Western thought to Thales of Miletus, who lived around 600 BCE in what is now Asia Minor. As with most things, the details are sometimes disputed, but it seems most scholars agree that Thales began the Western tradition of assuming that all natural events have natural causes which can be discovered by reason.
Actually, I don't think that most scholars believe that — and we certainly don't have enough data about Thales to decide the matter.

Your post also raises the question of what you mean by "rational means".

Philosophers generally distinguish rationalism from empiricism. The obvious contrast, in the sciences, is between Descartes, who thought that he could work out the nature of the universe by logical argument, and Newton, who disagreed. We all know how that one ended. We can see the same thing in theology: Aquinas and Shankara thought that you could prove religion by pure logic, Kierkegaard and Ramanuja rejected the idea. The only way you can learn about anything is to consider the evidence.

If by rational you mean "acceptable to reason", then surely everyone aspires to be rational — people didn't suddenly decide it was a good idea in 600 BC.
 

Sunstone

De Diablo Del Fora
Premium Member
@Sunstone I truly hope that you are in good health of mind and body at this trying time of global pandemic.

A couple of points, first of all, on Thales (before I address your question substantively):

I don't necessarily concur that Thales "began the Western tradition of assuming that all natural events have natural causes which can be discovered by reason". In fact, I think this is strongly contradicted by the surviving textual evidence from the later secondary classical sources on him. One of the greatest deficiencies of classical, Greco-Roman thought (for all its sophistication and profundity) was that they really lacked empiricism and any comprehension of the need for making testable predictions. Thales was no exception.

Thank you so much for the well-wishes, Vouthon. I hope you too are doing well and will continue to do so through these "interesting" times.

I should clarify the OP. First, I do NOT mean to imply that Thales was an empiricist. Your criticism that he "lacked empiricism" is substantially accurate (although perhaps not precisely so), but it is also irrelevant to the OP as I had no intention of implying such. I meant that Thales was a rationalist. He thought the nature of things could be discerned by reason. That is, logic (Although what passed for logic in his day was very primitive compared to what passes for logic in our day).

My reference to the explanatory power of the sciences in the OP was not meant to be taken as implying that Thales was some kind of proton-scientist. Only that one wing of science -- the use of reason as a component in explaining the nature and causes of things -- can be traced back to Thales. (I consider the other wing of science to be empiricism -- and I would not trace that back to Thales, but rather to the Arabs.)

Second, I am at fault for saying that Thales thought all natural things had a natural cause. That was sloppy of me. I was trying to convey the thought that he believed all things had a cause that could be discovered through -- and discerned by -- reason, and somehow let the bit about "natural causes" slip in without thinking too much about it. Thales was only sometimes of the opinion that things had natural causes, but not always of that opinion. Arguably, he probably thought supernatural causes were the ultimate causes.

Put negatively, Thales is the first person we know of to -- in effect (albeit probably not explicitly) -- argue that we did not need the word of authorities nor the confirmation of traditions to know what were the nature and causes of things. Instead, anyone capable of reasoning 'logically' about it could discern for themselves what were the nature and causes of things. Moreover, he seems to have set in motion a whole movement based on using reason (logic, as it came to be) to discern the nature and causes of things -- a movement we now call "Ancient Greek Philosophy". In turn, ancient Greek philosophy had a huge influence on a number of things -- including the perception in the West that religious truth-claims needed to be rationally justified. That is, justified through reason, through logic.

To sum, Thales' influence on Western thought seems to be that he was the first person we know of to assert that the cause and nature of natural things could be discerned by reason. That is not the same as saying their nature and causes could be discerned via an empirical study of them.
 

Sunstone

De Diablo Del Fora
Premium Member
Philosophers generally distinguish rationalism from empiricism. The obvious contrast, in the sciences, is between Descartes, who thought that he could work out the nature of the universe by logical argument, and Newton, who disagreed. We all know how that one ended. We can see the same thing in theology: Aquinas and Shankara thought that you could prove religion by pure logic, Kierkegaard and Ramanuja rejected the idea. The only way you can learn about anything is to consider the evidence.

Yes, I agree.

If by rational you mean "acceptable to reason", then surely everyone aspires to be rational — people didn't suddenly decide it was a good idea in 600 BC.

You start out strong, then end up wholly missing the point.
 

Vouthon

Dominus Deus tuus ignis consumens est
Staff member
Premium Member
Thank you so much for the well-wishes, Vouthon. I hope you too are doing well and will continue to do so through these "interesting" times.

The old curse goes "may you live in interesting times".

And yes, humanity is unfortunately living through very interesting times, to say the least, the nearest historical parallel being, of course, the 1918 Influenza pandemic - although our interwar ancestors didn't introduce lockdowns of the global economy and enforced social distancing in those days, hence the tens of millions of fatalities from that older and (thus far) deadlier pandemic.

You are in my thoughts and prayers, as are all of my other RF friends. Keep safe!

Second, I am at fault for saying that Thales thought all natural things had a natural cause. That was sloppy of me. I was trying to convey the thought that he believed all things had a cause that could be discovered through -- and discerned by -- reason, and somehow let the bit about "natural causes" slip in without thinking too much about it. Thales was only sometimes of the opinion that things had natural causes, but not always of that opinion. Arguably, he probably thought supernatural causes were the ultimate causes.

You are not at fault, it was an ambitious thread title and the fault may lie with me for misinterpreting your meaning. It was indeed the 'natural causes' element of your OP that gave me pause, since the available evidence is strongly indicative that Thales regarded 'causes' in nature as being ultimately spiritual and godly (i.e. magnets were propelled by active souls, water is a divinely-sourced element from which everything derives). He was not in any sense a naturalist.

The reason that I raised empiricism - a branch of rational enquiry which relies upon testability and sense-based proofs of reasoned theorems - is because the investigation of natural causes for natural events (which featured in your OP) is, well, empirical basically and the classical philosophers didn't generally do this. It took many, many more centuries for naturalism to emerge from a pre-scientific, preternatural worldview.

But now that I do understand where you're coming from, I agree to an extent that Thales "did not need the word of authorities nor the confirmation of traditions to know what were the nature and causes of things", so long as we clearly distinguish this from naturalism. He was a 'monist', which is fundamentally a religious idea not derived from a rational perspective which presupposes the order we find around us to be purely 'natural'. Thales, like all of these ancient thinkers, did not hold to a naturalist presupposition as we do today - rather, he thought nature was the realm of the gods and from divine origin.

If I were to give my own appraisal of Thales's contribution to the Western rational tradition, I would venture to say that he was the first of a long intellectual tradition of speculative theorists who dared to make 'new' pronouncements - from their own minds, rather than tradition - about fundamental features of the universe.

I don't really see him as the earliest person to "demand a rational basis for religious truth claims", as he didn't question gods or spiritual entities, nor did he subject his own belief in 'gods' and the claim attributed to him by Cicero that "god was the mind which fashioned everything out of water" to such rational scrutiny and standards. He just accepted these as prior given postulates. He wasn't really discussing 'religion' or 'religious claims' (which did not exist in his day as a distinct category from natural philosophy, his worldview was innately religious in a way our own isn't).

If I were to suggest a historical thinker as the earliest person to demand a rational basis for religious truth claims, I would personally go with the Epicurean philosopher-poet Lucretius in his De rerum natura ( 99 BC – c. 55 BC). He took Greek Atomist and Epicurean theories to their 'logical' conclusion, in a way I don't think many (if any) philosophers had before him - even of his materialist school of thought:


Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, BOOK I, line 146


This terror, then, this darkness of the mind,
Not sunrise with its flaring spokes of light,
Nor glittering arrows of morning can disperse,
But only Nature's aspect and her law,
Which, teaching us, hath this exordium:
Nothing from nothing ever yet was born.

Fear holds dominion over mortality
Only because, seeing in land and sky
So much the cause whereof no wise they know,
Men think Divinities are working there.
Meantime, when once we know from nothing still
Nothing can be create, we shall divine
More clearly what we seek: those elements
From which alone all things created are,
And how accomplished by no tool of Gods.

However, even Lucretius does not deny the existence of deities - he begins his poem with an invocation to Venus - he merely supposes that they don't intervene in human affairs and are uninterested in humans, existing in a heavenly sphere above us that is devoid of suffering and formed of a kind of 'heavenly' matter as well (i.e. they aren't omniscient, incorporeal beings). He also denies that they created the world or can work miraculous events. He was thus a kind of 'polytheistic deist' but with a strongly rationalist critique of popular religious devotion and myth:


Such is the power of reason to overcome inborn vices
That nothing prevents our living a life worthy of gods
.” 3. 321-22.

Lucretius: De Rerum Natura Book 3 by Lucretius, E. J. Kenney | Waterstones


The De Rerum Natura of Lucretius is a sustained and impassioned protest against religious superstition and irrationality. The poem takes the form of a detailed exposition of Epicurean physical theory - an extreme materialism designed to remove and discredit popular fears of the gods, death and an afterlife. Book III is generally accepted to be the finest in the whole poem; Lucretius argues there that the soul is as mortal as the body and shows that human response to the fact of mortality and death can be at once rational, dignified and liberating.

IMHO he's a far better candidate than Thales, in that he directly and explicitly inheighed against a number of religious practices and beliefs of his day for their perceived irrationality.
 
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Ponder This

Well-Known Member
As I understand it, the notion that religious truth-claims (such as "the gods exist", etc) need to be justified by some rational means dates all the way back in Western thought to Thales of Miletus, who lived around 600 BCE in what is now Asia Minor.

As with most things, the details are sometimes disputed, but it seems most scholars agree that Thales began the Western tradition of assuming that all natural events have natural causes which can be discovered by reason. (This 'assumption' appears to be strongly supported by the explanatory success of the sciences.) It should be easy to see how such an assumption can morph over time into a demand that even religious truth-claims make rational sense. Indeed, the rise of theology in the West is almost certainly a consequence of Thales' revolutionary idea that the nature of things can be discovered by reason for theology is basically an attempt to figure out rational reasons for religious truth-claims (whether it succeeds in doing that is up to you to decide).

Do you think it's a good idea to demand a rational basis for religious truth-claims? Why or why not?






____________________________


I don't know if it is a good idea. Perhaps, one should first have a good reason to make the demand.

Is the reason for the demand that Thales said so? Maybe this is not a particularly good reason.
 

blü 2

Veteran Member
Premium Member
As I understand it, the notion that religious truth-claims (such as "the gods exist", etc) need to be justified by some rational means dates all the way back in Western thought to Thales of Miletus, who lived around 600 BCE in what is now Asia Minor.
Thales even in ancient Greece was called a phusikos 'physicist' from phusis, in this context generally translated as 'nature'. However (says Aristotle) Thales explained motion and animation by attributing them to the action of psukhoi (psyches) meaning souls; thus he thought iron could be magnetic because it had a soul. Not a bad try at the dawn of philosophy. he also thought souls were immortal.

For Western culture, the influence of Greek thought, then newly rediscovered, on the Schoolmen, particularly at the university of Paris, from around the turn of the 12th century is key. Thus eg Thomas Aquinas used arguments from outside the bible to demonstrate his perception of the correctness of the bible, at a time when the fact of being written lent great authority to any statement, the bible being regarded as the last word. So did eg Peter Abelard. This more liberal view was vehemently opposed in some quarters, not least by the monk Bernard of Clairvaux; fortunately in the end it prevailed (though it's not hard to make a case that opposition to it has never gone away).
Do you think it's a good idea to demand a rational basis for religious truth-claims? Why or why not?
That's a question for each individual. There's be different answers depending on culture, education, experience and temperament.

My own view is that reason, and argument from examinable evidence, have proved to be, and remain, inimical to ideas of the supernatural.
 

Sunstone

De Diablo Del Fora
Premium Member
You are not at fault, it was an ambitious thread title and the fault may lie with me for misinterpreting your meaning.

You are very kind, old friend, but this is one time when I did indeed botch an OP. I dashed it off and moved on without rereading it to make sure it said what I wanted it to say. I'll edit it, but the damage is already done. Fortunately, your posts are so astute that I can at least claim to have provoked a decent conversation. There's that. :)
 
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