In reply to Rod Dreher’s recent post explaining his decision to train his children’s wills to be faithful since the intellect was not a firm foundation of faith, I critically characterized his position as essentially boiling down to the following: So, the solution is not to train your children to be intellectually scrupulous but to [...]
In a previous post, I discussed how theist Rod Dreher was led to some introspection and cultural criticism based on reading he was doing about the pervasiveness of distortive rationalizations in our thinking. In that context, he tried to compare religious and atheistic rationalizations as similar in kind, as both kinds of faiths. In that [...]
Rod Dreher confronts psychological research which illustrates the pervasive role of rationalization in our thought processes, which leads us reflexively to seek out information that confirms preexisting beliefs rather than challenges them among other techniques for seeing only what we want to see. Turning to the implications of the realities of rationalization for the religious [...]
Evangelos asks another excellent question in reply to my latest installment of the ongoing “Disambiguating Faith” series: I hope you can do an entry on the practicality of rationality. As you know, human beings are by default not rational beings; as a psychology professor once told me, “our brains have evolved for survival, not calculus”. [...]
In previous posts (which you will not need to have read to understand this one, but which I recommend you catch up on if you have the time now or later), Adam has tried to argue that irrational ways of thinking may be indispensable means of getting at truth. In response, I have tried to [...]
In this third reply to Adam (you can read the first two here and here, but need not in order to follow this post), I will examine his following suggestions: When I asked if it is rational to cease rationality, what I meant was the following. Since it is only rational to explore all possible paths [...]
In reply to my latest installment of the “Disambiguating Faith” series in which I replied to Adam’s query about whether an episode of House M.D. provided an example in which a choice to think irrationally (to eliminate symptoms when diagnosing an illness) might prove the more rational course. I argued that if eliminating symptoms helped [...]
On Facebook (where you can also be my friend if you’d like), Adam replies to the latest installment of the “Disambiguating Faith” series with this question: Hate to be corny, but in an episode of House M.D., every rational road runs out and a case is seemingly unsolvable. Finally, by eliminating a symptom (which is [...]
We hold beliefs with various degrees of justification and the demands of rationality dictate to us that we proportion our degree of belief to the degree of our justification. If I am looking at evidence for two sides of a position and I find that 60% of the evidence seems to favor side A, whereas [...]
Faith is a form of loyalty. But more than that, faith is a form of trust which does not calibrate itself to objective standards of trustworthiness but trusts people despite their limitations as provably trustworthy people or even despite counter-evidence to the notion that they are worthy of trust at all. Even more than that, however, faith [...]
Tuesday, I began my series of posts attempting first to disambiguate the various senses of the word faith, to explore how the various practices referred to under this one word’s umbrella all relate to each other and how they can be ethically and epistemologically assessed, both as they occur individually and in various combinations with [...]
Earlier this week I began this series of posts attempting first to disambiguate the various senses of the word faith in order to explore how the various practices referred to under this one word’s umbrella all relate to each other and how they can be ethically and epistemologically assessed, both as they occur individually and in various combinations with [...]
Yesterday I began my series of posts attempting first to disambiguate the various senses of the word faith, to explore how the various practices referred to under this one word’s umbrella all relate to each other and how they can be ethically and epistemologically assessed, both as they occur individually and in various combinations with [...]
The word faith is an ambiguous one and its various connotations get hopelessly confused with each other in ways that muddle many arguments about the ethical and epistemological justifications for holding beliefs on faith. Because of this, I want to write several posts here which disambiguate faith’s various senses and evaluate the worth of each [...]