Religious and Rational?

Could be much worse than that. I'm sure babies don't start with a Bayesian prior which assigns some probability to induction working, but nor do they start with object permanence. That may be a conclusion.

You know I have actually not read that in Christian apologetics. I believe its there but in the context of this article it came out of discussion with Gleb.

Religious folks start from sensory experience as well, but they start rationalizing rationalizing from concepts of the divine

Not sure what you meant by the italicized rationalizing and repeating it there, can you expand on that?

Having said that, in my experience Christians are more rational than most where their "concepts of the divine" do not intrude, and this fellow is doing "God's work" in trying to bring a conscious commitment to rationality to Christians.

Yup, this is one of the reasons I'm glad Caleb is participating in Intentional Insights - he's a great bridge across the secular-religious divide in bringing rationality to Christians.

C.S. Lewis addressed the issue of faith in Mere Christianity as follows:

In one sense Faith means simply Belief—accepting or regarding as true the doctrines of Christianity. That is fairly simple. But what does puzzle people—at least it used to puzzle me—is the fact that Christians regard faith in this sense as a virtue, I used to ask how on earth it can be a virtue—what is there moral or immoral about believing or not believing a set of statements? Obviously, I used to say, a sane man accepts or rejects any statement, not because he wants or does not want to, but because the evidence seems to him good or bad. Well, I think I still take that view. But what I did not see then— and a good many people do not see still—was this. I was assuming that if the human mind once accepts a thing as true it will automatically go on regarding it as true, until some real reason for reconsidering it turns up. In fact, I was assuming that the human mind is completely ruled by reason. But that is not so. For example, my reason is perfectly convinced by good evidence that anaesthetics do not smother me and that properly trained surgeons do not start operating until I am unconscious. But that does not alter the fact that when they have me down on the table and clap their horrible mask over my face, a mere childish panic begins inside me. In other words, I lose my faith in anaesthetics. It is not reason that is taking away my faith: on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other. When you think of it you will see lots of instances of this. A man knows, on perfectly good evidence, that a pretty girl of his acquaintance is a liar and cannot keep a secret and ought not to be trusted; but when he finds himself with her his mind loses its faith in that bit of knowledge and he starts thinking, “Perhaps she’ll be different this time,” and once more makes a fool of himself and tells her something he ought not to have told her. His senses and emotions have destroyed his faith in what he really knows to be true. Or take a boy learning to swim. His reason knows perfectly well that an unsupported human body will not necessarily sink in water: he has seen dozens of people float and swim. But the whole question is whether he will be able to go on believing this when the instructor takes away his hand and leaves him unsupported in the water—or whether he will suddenly cease to believe it and get in a fright and go down. Now just the same thing happens about Christianity. I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it. That is not the point at which Faith comes in. Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.

Although many religious people use the word differently, this is how I use Faith, and I propose that it would be an acceptable one to facilitate this discussion: a determination to hold on to what you have already established a high confidence level in, despite signals you may have received from less rational sources (i.e. emotions).

It may help to point out which conception of faith you have in mind. For example:

• faith as a feeling of existential confidence
• faith as knowledge of specific truths, revealed by God
• faith as belief that God exists
• faith as belief in (trust in) God
• faith as practical commitment beyond the evidence to one's belief that God exists
• faith as practical commitment without belief
• faith as hoping—or acting in the hope that—the God who saves exists
• etc...

What I was hoping for with it was to show an example of faith that secular people can relate to.

While I believe "faith" as a concept is insufficiently defined, I suspect its definition would have to be expanded too much for it to occupy some of the space of secular epistemology.

No worries, delays happen!

Regarding secular experiences relating to religion, you might want to check out the discussion here about the article written in response to yours. Might pick up some good ideas there for relevant points to make.

The article is aimed at both. Yes, it is probably more aimed at believers because as a minister that the audience most receptive to me. For believers I hope to show that rationality is not always antithetical to religious practice. For secular people I hope to show that there are things in common between the religious and the secular. We dont have to always be at odds. Your right and others who have pointed it out are right that we all start with sensory experience.. It would be interesting to discuss where sensory experience begins to lead religious people to faith.

I think it's fine to call it faith in sensory experience - I choose to use it as data.

The second is the stronger argument, IMO.

Actually, if the Rev made that argument to religious people, that would be a strong argument in favor of basic empiricism. You only get to God through empiricism.

Though that's probably a better argument for a Deist than a Methodist.

All your conceptions of the divine were learned via some sensation (reading, conversation, etc.).

I think the underlying assumption--that internal experiences are also 'sensory' in some sense--is a better place to start here, because discussing that clearly requires a non-unitary view of the mind. A mind could start out believing in the divine for only internal reasons, and so we would like to have a viewpoint that can see which pieces cause and propagate that belief.

I think I explained that above the piece itself - Caleb Pitkin is the only Minister who is also an aspiring rationalist, and I thought LWs would find his perspective enlightening.

One of the objectives of LW is to fight against biases. I've seen several comments on this site in previous topics, which paint an almost strawman-like image of religious people (especially Christians - probably as they are the largest group in the countries where most LW readers live), and a strong disbelief against the possibility of faith and rationality co-existing. Therefore an article or a discussion about the compatibility of religion and rationalism might have its merits here.

People downvoting that? Really?

So what? Let's not talk to a Christian rationalist? Christians are too icky for you?

Looks like that's happening now

I think Augustine would be an interesting candidate. John Wesley from my own denomination. Many of the early church theologians. We live with a fairly well developed system of theology and Christian belief . However, the early church had to define and articulate the faith. For this they used the methods of logical inquiry available to them based on the idea that theology had to be understandable and had to be internally consistent. So many of them used tools of logical and reason to examine the Christian faith. Were many of them rationalist in the modern sense, no but were they in their time and place yes.

'reverend bayes'

Oh, nice idea! I'll see how Caleb feels about it for future articles.

I would add group C: people who do not make a personal choice, but rather just become whatever the social circle around them (which can be defined more narrowly or more widely) expects them to be. They just say whatevs... and take the default offering.

I agree with this assessment. I often think of it using the language of fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is at its core the belief that I arrived at the only/best/real answer and that anyone who didn't is either dumb or bad. It leads to disrespect of other groups and an unwillingness to see any sort of common ground. In my opinion both theist and atheist groups can produce that sort of fundamentalists. Though religion produces many more. Let's hope more people will join group A.

Seriously!