Rationality

I still find the notion that defining an automobile as something that "automatically mobiles" is not at all helpful. But this argument really applies to Plantinga, and he's not debating here, so there's no point in pursuing it. Instead, I will try to focus on the elements that matter.

Perhaps the only value of attempting to define rationality is expressed precisely in Mr. Latar's footnote: yes, faith is irrational, by definition. If you have reason, logic, and evidence to believe in a fact, then no one calls that faith -- it's just plain old knowledge. Faith, by definition, means something other than ordinary, commonplace knowledge. Of course, the word faith has multiple meanings, so let me make clear what I think those meanings are, and which definition I am using in this debate.

Faith is the knowledge of things unseen, the assurance of things hoped for. (cf. Hebrews 11:1)
Confidence is expectation based on past experience.

Because reason and evidence have been so successful in the past, we induce that they will continue to be successful. We have confidence in the conclusions we reach with this method. Faith, as in the religious sense, expressly asserts that we can obtain knowledge without using this method, without restricting ourselves to the limits of reason and evidence.

Thus we can see that faith is not rational, and does not require evidence. Nor does faith necessarily require the principle of parsimony (although one must note that religious practitioners seem quick enough to apply this principle to other people's faiths). But we are not talking about faith here; we are talking about the rationality of believing in God. Faith is the answer one invokes after one has conceded that rationality cannot get you there.

Another point about rationality must be made clear: it is in fact irrational to believe in things that are true, if you lack reason and evidence for your view. Scientists are well aware of the fact that truth often comes in flashes of intuition; however, they don't expect anyone else to accept their truth until they've conducted an experiment that proves it. As I said in the opening argument, we are not talking about what is true, we are talking about what is rational. They are different. Truth is what is; rationality is what we can know about what is. [1]

Of course I did not mean to imply that your memory is untrustworthy to the point where you are irrational for believing you had chicken for dinner unless you carry the bones around with you. But having chicken for dinner is a wholly ordinary claim; merely ordinary evidence (such as memory) generally suffices. Only extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence; for example, if your credit card statement says you were in a steak house last night, and they don't serve chicken, and the police are attempting to determine your whereabouts at the time of a brutal murder -- you can bet merely remembering you had chicken isn't going to cut it.

The experience of God, of course, is an extraordinary claim, and hence requires better evidence than mere (known to be fallible) personal memory.

As far as I understand Mr. Latar, he seems to be arguing against the requirement of parsimony as a component of reason. I think his objection falls into two categories:

Multiple states of affairs could exist.

Well, yes, but that's hardly rational. If I ask you where my car keys are, and you say they are simultaneously under the couch and behind the dresser, no one is going to construe that as a rational (or even helpful) response.

Again, rationality is about what we can know, not about what is. We cannot make sense of multiple conflicting states of affairs, so even if that does somehow describe the ultimate underlying nature of the world, it is of no use to us. Rationality is a human endeavor. Arguing that the world itself is at some root level incomprehensible does not affect the question of whether it is rational (as we understand and have defined rational) for human beings to believe in a specific proposition.

Indeed, if the world itself is irrational, one has to wonder why rationality works so well. I don't think Mr. Latar intends to argue that rationality doesn't work, or that we cannot have knowledge of the world. In that light, I find his statement to be very confusing, since it implies that it could be simultaneously true that God exists and that God does not exist.

There is no parsimonious reason to accept parsimony.

This fails on two counts.

Firstly, there is an argument for parsimony: without it, we cannot make sense of anything. Since we can clearly make sense of things, then there must be some mechanism like parsimony that allows sense to be made. I tried to show that we all intuitively apply parsimony when faced with invisible elves; Mr. Latar has not yet explained how he dispenses with elves without resort to parsimony.

Secondly, just because we are required to take some things on faith (such as the principle of parsimony), that does not mean all propositions can be taken on faith. Since all thinking beings apply the rule of parsimony, and since rational beings are thinking beings, we can safely conclude that being rational includes parsimony (even if we cannot offer any logical proof of parsimony). This is why I originally introduced the three laws of logic as an example: there is no logical argument for why we must accept them (indeed, how could there be, since logic cannot be practiced prior to the assumption of the laws of logic!), and yet no one disputes they are part of rationality. But belief in God is manifestly not on the same level; not all thinking beings necessarily make use of it.

So to be rational does not mean to have a logical, deductive proof for everything, including the premises of logic. However, to be rational does mean having evidence for everything. Our evidence for logic is that it works; our evidence for the laws of logic is that without them logic doesn't exist; and our evidence for parsimony is that without it "true" and "false" have no meaning, since both can exist as "multiple states of affairs." For belief in God to be rational, we need some evidence for it, some phenomena of the world (such as refuting invisible elves) that is incomprehensible without the concept (as elf elimination is impossible without parsimony).

Mr. Latar again confuses the difference between evidence for and proof of induction. We do have evidence of induction: all of our past history. And we can test induction: you are free at any time to drop a pencil, and observe if it falls just as it did the last time you dropped it. Now, it is true you cannot prove that the next time you drop the pencil, it will fall: but you can certainly test the proposition, as often as you'd like.

We can and do test the laws of logic on a regular basis: we routinely build computers that instantiate those laws, and the fact that those computers continue to function (Microsoft notwithstanding) is a constant test of those laws. [2]

This is outside the scope of our discussion. We are concerned about is whether it is rational to believe in God, not what it takes to score a conversion. For the purposes of this discussion, showing that evidence is not necessary is adequate to demonstrate that belief in God is rational; alternatively, showing that adequate evidence exists is also a successful defense. But inadequate evidence, however helpful to the faithful, need not concern us at the moment.

As for (1), there are rational defeaters to the Bible; indeed, every claimed miracle is one of them (virtually by definition). Reading the Bible, and having a personal reaction, is not experience of God; it is merely experience of reading the Bible. And again, induction has plenty of evidence.

As for (2), what does it even mean to discover something without evidence? Arguably God designed our minds in such a way as to allow us to discover guilt or innocence at a court trial, but that hardly entitles us to reach a conclusion unsupported by the evidence presented.

Mr. Latar continues to argue that parsimony is not integral to rationality (the audience can be forgiven for being confused by our personal terminology: we have, through the course of this debate, used evidence and parsimony interchangeably, since lack of evidence is the parsimonious reason for rejection of a proposition). However, he has not yet replaced it. Given that I have shown that parsimony is a sufficient tool for dispensing with infinite elves, Mr. Latar needs to show that either (a) some other tool suffices (but without also dispensing with gods), or (b) that we need not dispense with elves.

In claiming that multiple states of affairs could exist, he seems to be claiming that the theory of Condensation and Evaporation is no more or no less true than the theory of C&E plus an infinite iteration of elves. I assert this position is an admission of defeat [3]: by the general and pragmatic definition of rationality we started with, believing in contradictory numbers of invisible elves is irrational.

Notes

[1] One could reasonably ask what the value of being rational is, if it is not a guarantee of truth. That is a different discussion -- indeed, I envision a follow-up debate, "Is it good to believe in the irrational" -- but the reader is invited to consider how he would react to his neighbor choosing irrationality, regardless of how true or false his position might be.

[2] I also disagree that the laws of logic precede the external world: in my view, they merely reflect it. There are, I think, two positions: one holds that the world derives from truth, and the other, that truth derives from the world. But this is outside the scope of our discussion, and does not significantly affect either of our positions.

[3] It is also self-defeating, in that it asserts that both (a) multiple states of affairs could exist, and (b) multiple states of affairs cannot exist (since the impossibility of multiple states of affairs is itself a state of affairs!). I think this manifold confusion is a reflection of just how important parsimony is to reason.

Micheal Planck

Words: 1500 approx