Are religion (christianity) and rationality mutually exclusive to one another?

Nature is strange. In its order. And getting stranger (accelerating with the expansion of spacetime for a start). Unapprehendable. With a strangeness, order that does not suggest, let alone require, meaning. Theism explains less of reality than metaphysics. Why choose stars? They are easily explained. As for Leibniz’ question, there is no answer. Therefore there is no question. It’s no claim. It’s a fact. About the ergodic multiverse. Pretending like WLC that there is only one universe (possibly conceived by the clash of 11D branes, not in a brain in a vat or anything else as silly as many worlds) can’t help. It makes God out to be absurdly stranger than it. And by Kolmogorov He’s not. And He can’t be unique either of course. He has no way of knowing.

I don’t see how we are justified in not accepting naturalism. I.e. meaninglessness. How are you different to Platinga’s specious doubt of doubt?

NOTICE

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is an indispensable companion to all those who are keen to make sense of life in an infinitely complex and confusing Universe, for though it cannot hope to be useful or informative on all matters, it does at least make the reassuring claim, that where it is inaccurate it is at least definitely inaccurate. In cases of major discrepancy it’s always reality that’s got it wrong.

This was the gist of the notice. It said “The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.”

This has led to some interesting consequences. For instance, when the Editors of the Guide were sued by the families of those who had died as a result of taking the entry on the planet Traal literally (it said “Ravenous Bugblatter beasts often make a very good meal for visiting tourists” instead of “Ravenous Bugblatter beasts often make a very good meal of visiting tourists”) they claimed that the first version of the sentence was the more aesthetically pleasing, summoned a qualified poet to testify under oath that beauty was truth, truth beauty and hoped thereby to prove that the guilty party was Life itself for failing to be either beautiful or true. The judges concurred, and in a moving speech held that Life itself was in contempt of court, and duly confiscated it from all those there present before going off to enjoy a pleasant evening’s ultragolf.

The fact that rationality deconstructs itself in the strangeness of nature does create space for God in its ergodicity by making Him only marginally infinitely stranger by comparison.

You can add that to this perfect list if you like.

I’m reminded of the staggering hubris of a preacher I heard 40 years ago, who said that with regard to the universe, in the resurrection we’ll go ‘Doh! It’s so simple!! THAT’S why!!!’.

Even if there is transcendence because nature is in (the mind of) God, how can anything other than God understand what He’s had to do for forever?

Life is impossible to describe in terms of unguided natural forces, let alone supernatural ones. So what? That’s about us. Our pathetic egoism with its inherent inability to explain. We have no justification whatsoever in doubting the ineffable power of nature. To suggest that God has to sprinkle fairy dust on the trillions of life worlds in this fairy dust nucleated infinitesimal universe from eternity because we want to feel significant is very sad. And rather funny.

Well I’m a Christian and so I’m not a naturalist.

But no matter how you cut it, natural explanations are far more rational then supernatural ones for everything that we observe. The things we have no explanation for are either things we read of miracles in the Bible that can’t be proven, or either it’s stories of a friend of a friend of a friend which can’t be proven because no one is preforming , or able to, these miracles in front of experts or either it’s something that we’ve simply not developed enough data on by enough experts to study.

So when science can’t explain something, because there is no data, the rational thought is simply we can’t explain this at the moment , the irrational explanation is that a supernatural entity that we can’t prove did it.

Christianity is a religion. A religion reauires faith. It’s faith because you can’t prove it. If you believe in something you can’t prove, it’s automatically irrational, regardless if it’s right or not. Anyways, I’ve stated my opinion and you’ve stated your opinion, and it’s the same opinions again and again, and so this is my last statement. I don’t need to write my opinion out for a fourth time saying the same thing countering you saying what you have been. By the title something circles around this many times and neither person has budged that means the best thing is for one of them to stop reading and responding to the posts and so that’s where I’m at.

It seems to me that one major difference is the ability to make predictions. Naturalism can predict when a probe will land on Mars. Natural explanations of weather can tell you it might rain on Friday, and these days short term forecasts are remarkable accurate, whereas supernatural explanations have no predictive power. (You might protest that prophesy is an exception, but really that is a different subject not regarding the physical workings of material things)

4 Likes

Natural explanations also have mechanisms, which is another major difference. We can understand how antibiotics can heal us, but we can’t understand how the supernatural can heal us. This is why it is hard to describe claims about the supernatural as explanations because they really don’t explain why or how something happens. With supernatural explanations we are left with as big of a mystery as when we had no explanation.

1 Like

No I wouldn’t. I’m not aware of any in the foretelling sense. Apart from Daniel 2 and 7…

This topic was automatically closed 6 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.