Believers Say the Darndest Things: "You Can’t Prove Reason with Reason. Therefore, _____."

It appears to be impossible to use reason to prove that reason is absolutely reliable. The operation of evidence-based inquiry relies on presuppositions that were not, themselves, arrived at by evidence-based inquiry.

There are some religious believers who learn these ideas and run completely off the rails with them, mistakenly thinking that they’ve gotten hold of some knockout blow to evidence-based inquiry.

The purpose of this post is to explore the arguments that believers often make based on these ideas, with the intent to show exactly where believers go wrong.

After all, in conversations between believers and skeptics, it is very common for the skeptics to request evidence for the wacky claims that believers make (since, obviously, nobody has any reason to think that a claim is likely true unless there is evidence for it…and since the believer actually does accept the claim under discussion, the believer must implicitly think there is evidence for it).

Sometimes this request is met with honest effort on the part of believers. They’ll point to things that they mistakenly think are evidence. Other times, believers will try to redefine what is meant by “evidence,” either honestly misunderstanding or purposefully and dishonestly confusing the issue. They’ll claim that their subjective feelings are somehow “evidence” for the existence of powers or beings that, if these powers or beings were real, would have a detectable effect on the world outside of these believers’ heads.

But on some occasions, the believers will question the very idea that evidence and reason are useful tools in the first place.

“What evidence,” they sometimes ask, thinking themselves clever, “do you have that all claims require evidence?”

Another way to phrase this objection is, “What’s your rational argument for thinking that reason is an effective tool? Oho! You can’t do it without being circular!” The implication is that any rational proof of reason’s effectiveness has to begin from the presumption that reason is effective, thereby begging the question (since it assumes the thing that it’s trying to prove).

In other words, their argument boils down to “You can’t prove reason with reason. Therefore, God.” [Or whatever nutty claim they’re making]

What’s happening here is that the believers in question have learned a small bit of philosophy. But, as I’ve noted elsewhere, a little philosophy can be a dangerous thing. Their half-comprehension of this issue leads them to all kinds of confusion.

Read on for a full explanation.

Believers Say the Darndest Things 5: "You Aren't Doin' it Right!"

I’m currently involved in a relatively interesting thread on Lashtal.com about a “True Act of Magick” (read it here). On this thread, I’ve been arguing that the only “true act of magick” is bringing one’s activities in line with one’s true will. That is to say, “Magick” in the widest sense of “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in Conformity with Will” can be said to “work,” merely because all actions consist of “causing change.” Under this definition, the tricky part is not causing the change (which is usually incredibly easy) but knowing which changes to make in the first place.

As a corollary to the above, “magick” in the narrow sense (that is, ceremonies designed to cause coincidences to happen by some unspecified means) doesn’t work at all – or, at least, nobody in his right mind has any good reason to think that it does – and thus a “true act of magick” cannot consist of doing a ritual to attract money and then rejoicing once one finds a friend has decided to pay back a loan sooner than expected. In a case like this, absolutely nothing indicates that the ritual caused the so-called “result” and nobody – not even the practitioner – has any reason to suppose that his ritual did cause it.

This argument should be familiar to readers of this blog, but you can find some more information in the posts "Hey, It Works for Me!"and "A Wild Ghost Chase", among others.

Read on for a description of a religionist believer script that popped up in the thread.

Believers Say the Darndest Things 4: The Argument from Ignorance

To be ignorant of something is simply to lack knowledge of it, and every human being is ignorant about a great number of subjects. Obviously, since it’s impossible for one individual to study and become expert in every field, each person is going to be incredibly ignorant when it comes to most subjects (of course, human knowledge – taken as a whole and built up through bodies of experts using peer-reviewed methodology – is not nearly so ignorant. It should not be assumed that humans thus know “nothing” about the universe: see this post for more).

In short, there is no shame in being ignorant.

There is shame, however, in using ignorance as the basis of a logical argument, which is a fallacy called – appropriately enough – the argument from ignorance.

Read on for examples of this believer script at work. 

Believers Say the Darndest Things 3: Self-Evident Stupidity

In the vast arsenal of underwhelming and idiotic arguments that believers have at their disposal, one that starkly stands out in terms of its foolishness is used more often than would be expected.

The argument goes like this: “it’s obvious that there is a god [or insert some other supernatural claim]. If you look around you [or inside of you, or whatever], you know that this is true because it’s self-evident. In fact, you already know deep down that it’s true, you just don’t want to admit it!”

As hard as it may be to believe, that’s really the nuts and bolts of this argument – though calling it an “argument” is clearly something of a stretch. It’s really more of a tactic, one script among many that believers fall back upon when they are attempting to argue in public – in situations where they must appeal to reason and evidence – and realize that they have no rational justification for what they believe.

Those who don’t regularly engage believers in arguments might think that no believer in his or her right mind would ever appeal to “it’s obvious!” as a serious argument, but such appeals come up with shocking frequency.

Read on for examples and analysis of this script at work.

Believers Say the Darndest Things: “We know so little!”

One of the things I’m interested in exploring on this blog is the variety of “scripts” that religious believers employ when conversing with atheists and skeptics.

One believer script relies on an estimation of the amount of knowledge that humans have of the universe. It goes something like this (note: although I have created the exact wording of the passage below myself, it is a close paraphrase of several real arguments I have encountered over the years):

If you consider how much knowledge that humans could potentially have of the universe, the amount of knowledge that humans actually do have of the universe is almost infinitesimal. If we were to assign percentages to it, we could say that humans probably know less than one percent of all of the possible knowledge that there could ever be of the universe.

How arrogant of atheists to presume, on the basis of that less than one-percent knowledge, that there are no gods. Isn’t it very possible that indeed there may be gods lurking in the 99+% of the knowledge we haven’t acquired yet?”

Setting aside for a moment the fact that atheism is not a position of certainty nor a positive claim that there are no gods, the above argument confuses the theoretical possibility of the existence of gods (or demons or occult powers or whatever the supernatural claim is under discussion) with the currently available evidence for the existence of gods.

As we will see, just as believers routinely confuse the impossibility of having absolute knowledge with the process of evaluating claims on the basis of currently available evidence, believers also confuse the impossibility of “complete” knowledge with the same process.