Is Biblical Faith Rational

A response to a christian claiming biblical faith was rational.

This notion that faith is rational is a new invention recently promoted by apologists who increasingly find the irrational faith happily promoted for centuries untenable in a world that increasingly values rationality. This might be considered a good step in a good direction were it not so mendaciously inconsistent with what the bible says about faith. Until recently, faith was proudly considered to be an irrational commitment to some god, and the more the gulf between your faith an the evidence, the more virtuous you were. Luther called reason a “whore”, a consistent notion throughout all the history of christianity. Were the millions of christians consciously and proudly accepting Jesus based on this irrational faith actually damned to hell? Are you willing to say that, those now admitting their faith is irrational, can not be real christians?

In the bible you actually have a man coming to Jesus to request that he heal his son. When Jesus asks whether he believes, he actually responds, “Lord, I believe. Help thou my unbelief”. This is biblical faith; when in doubt about the credibility of someone, ask that someone to help you believe more. Jesus also blesses those who believe without actually seeing the evidence rather than those who request evidence.

Your claim that your faith is rational would seem much less dishonest if you were first teaching little children the foundation of rationality BEFORE you introduced them to your particular god. However, what you are doing is the opposite; you first get them to commit to “Jesus”, then build your “rationality” around that. Do you understand how absurd it then sounds when you claim your faith is based on rationality?

Finally, simply consider where prior commitments to faith or rationality take people. Those who contemplate gods prior to learning rationality often end up believing quite the opposite to someone doing the same on the other side of the world. In contrast, those who are first introduced to the basics of rationality BEFORE they are introduced to various notions of god tend to converge in their conclusions; most consider a personal god improbable, and an Einsteinian god uncertain. Simply consider the converging philosophies of all the world’s scientists who grew up in various religious contexts, yet were taught the proper need for rationality prior to assessment.

So, this silly claim that your faith is rational does not stand up historically, biblically, nor experimentally, and runs counter to your own practice of promoting your god to children before equipping them with the tools of rationality.

Rationality and the impossibility of absolute knowledge for subjective beings.

This essay will be dealing with the concepts of rationality and knowledge, and the abuse of these terms by presuppositionalist apologists.

I will first make statements of my own personal beliefs that will be clarified and defended in subsequent expanded arguments.

1. I have no absolute knowledge of anything outside my subjective perceptions, nor does anyone else.
   ^{(This will be true of every statement in this essay. But read the next point carefully.)}
2. Having no absolute knowledge does not equate to an inability to assess the likelihood of various propositions since I have access to my perception of regularity.
3. Making statements about things for which I have a high degree of belief does not require that I have absolute knowledge in those statements since the default conventional definition of truth does not imply absolute knowledge.
4. A rational position does not necessarily equate to an objectively true position.
5. I am rational in my high degree of belief that an objective world exists based on the high degree of regularity I perceive.

Sye Ten Bruggencate and His Mendacious Pals

A case study in the inherent dishonesty of presuppositional tactics

(More about Sye now at http://syetenbruggencate.wordpress.com.)

Sye Ten Bruggencate is a Christian presuppositionalist. He does not think you have any basis for rationality other than his choice of a god. After centuries of emphasizing faith, Christianity was forced by the success of science to focus on its “evidences”, and having manifestly failed there, is now justifiably cowering in the face of scientific scrutiny, and is desperately employing increasingly absurd tactics in an attempt to destroy the utility of rationality in order to salvage a god who, most Christians admit, would eternally torture all those who follow a nature they neither requested nor can avoid. Sye is a prominent promoter of a new tactic that attempts to wrest the right to rationality away from those rational enough to reject the bible myth by irrationally suggesting that, in the very use of rationality, those promoting rationality must acknowledge the god of the bible as the author of rationality.

The Irrational Foundation of Faith

They were passing out bibles just outside Shibuya Station the other day, and I thought I’d stop by for a chat. The young American man heading the operation (we’ll call him Tom) was kind enough to engage me in dialog, and soon both of us were presenting our positions on the question of the existence of the biblical god.

I began by questioning the very notion of faith, suggesting that, unless the degree of belief matches the degree of the evidence, the belief is irrational and certainly not anything any creator of rational humans would consider virtuous.

Tom countered by suggesting there was more than sufficient evidence to

The Logical Absurdity of Biblical Redemption

This 6-stage debate I’m posting on a sister blog found here.

---

You Know

So the Almighty God of the universe decides He wants to communicate His desires to humans.

He could presumably just appear walking beside you, and after doing a bit of magic to convince you that He is who He claims, tell you directly what He wants you to know.

But, no. Instead, He chose to write a book…well, He actually dictated a book to a few special humans since, in His divine mysteriousness, He can not write it Himself.

Now you might question whether

Jehovah Is Not Your Friend

There is no necessary connection between “holiness” and cruelty. If your god chooses to hurt someone before he can forgive, that makes him a monster, inferior to the natural altruism and bloodless forgiveness of most humans. And if he also claims to be loving, he is a lying monster. Fortunately, he is also as mythical as the monster under your bed.