Balancing Faith and Science

Faith is not rational by definition. Evidence of things not seen and all that.

If a belief in god is not irrational, then a belief in anything no matter how absurb is then also not irrational. So believers in UFOs, ghosts, ESP, IPU (Invisible pink or purple unicorns on Pluto), Scientology, you name it are just as rational.

I believe that gods and religion are "extraneous beliefs", with no real basis behind them except for some hairless apes with big brains started thinking such things were needed to explain the whys of existence. My feeling is that we all need to grow up and realize that there is no reason for our existence, we just exist. Now I feel we should contribute to society and "play nice", you know the golden rule and all, but I don't think we need gods and religion to do that.

For me it just does and it's a wonderful thing.

I certainly don't have the insights of a Francis Collins but I accepted the Christian faith after reading the same books that he did. (CS Lewis)

The validity of a logical argument is the reason why it is reliable.

Look, if you want to discuss, this please try to discuss it seriously.

"rational intuition" ? What do you mean ? Isn't intuition non-rational ? And weren't we talking about logic ?

And you'd better get a clearer ides of the concept of "basis" as it applies to these issues because until you do you are going to keep on making the same mistake

Is it your "rational intuiton" that causes you to beleive Lewis' arguments ?

I also have to comment that you are meant to be producing Lewis's arguments and I am criticising them

So it's more rational to say that invisible beings exist?

It is agreed on all hands that reason, and even sentience, and life itself are late comers in Nature. If there is nothing but Nature, therefore, reason must have come into existence by a historical process. And of course, for the Naturalist, this process was not designed to produce a mental behavior that can find truth. There was no Designer; and indeed, until there were thinkers, there was no truth or falsehood. The type of mental behavior we now call rational thinking or inference must therefore have been "evolved" by natural selection, by the gradual weeding out of types less fitted to survive.Once, then, our thoughts were not rational. That is, all our thoughts once were, as many of our thoughts still are, merely subjective events, not apprehensions of objective truth. Those which had a cause external to ourselves at all were (like our pains) responses to stimuli. Now natural selection could operate only by eliminating responses that were biologically hurtful and multiplying those which tended to survival. But it is not conceivable that any improvement of responses could ever turn them into acts of insight, or even remotely tend to do so. The relation between response and stimuli is utterly different from that between knowledge and the truth known. Our physical vision is a far more useful response to light than that of the cruder organisms which have only a photo-sensitive spot. But neither this inprovement nor any possible improvements we can suppose could bring it an inch nearer to being a knowledge of light.

Indeed there is no doubt that similar arguments could be made for any complex adaption - even if reasonable lines of evolutiuon are well-known to the experts they could be hard, indeed, for the uninformed layman - like Lewis - to explain (the evolution of the human eye is a common example). Thus Lewis' argument against an evolutionary explanation carries little weight.

It might be held that this, in the course of millenia, could conjure the mental behavior we call reason--in other words, the practice of inference--out of mental behavior that was originally not rational. Repeated experiences of finding fire (or the remains of fire) where he had seen smoke would condition a man to expect fire whenever he saw smoke. This expectation, expressed in the form "If smoke, then fire" becomes what we call inference. Have all our inferences originated in that way?But if they did they are all invalid inferences. Such a process will no doubt produce expectation. It will train men to expect fire when they see smoke in just the same way as it trained them to expect that all swans are white (until they saw a black one) or that water would always boil at 212 degrees (until someone tried a picnic on a mountain). Such expectations are not inferences and need not be true

To say that it is not a complex adaption is, I think, ot beg the question. Why is it not ?

when I point out that Lewis' argument is invalid by statign that it is an argument from impersonal incredulity you take it as an argument for the differnet conclusion. But that is obviously wrong - to say that an argument is invalid is simply to say that it has no value in SUPPORTING the conclusion it argued for.

Now, how reasoning evolved is certainly a difficult - and interesting - problem. And one that is not solved yet (although we have some useful evidence).