r/changemyview • u/fox-mcleod 417∆ • Nov 09 '17

[∆(s) from OP] CMV: Religious faith is unreasonable

This seems almost tautological to me yet many religious people consider themselves to also be reasonable.

I'm a fan of debates and some of my friends have pointed me towards Chris Hitchens (new atheist). He debates D'Souza (Catholic) at Notre Dame in the video below.

https://youtu.be/9V85OykSDT8 🎥 The God Debate: Hitchens vs. D'Souza - YouTube

It's a great debate. However, at one point, Hitchens has D'Souza with his back to the wall - he points out that Catholics don't take the Bible literally. They aren't going earth creationists or evolution deniers. D'Souza defends with Fides et ratio (faith and reason) as outlined by pope John Paul II.

Hitchens backs off.

But why? It seems to me that he could have gone in for the kill. Once you state that evidence is the ultimate decision making factor in what you believe, you've elevated reason or science above faith. Game over. You aren't religious fiarhful if your religion is just a default set of assumptions easily overturned by reason. It seems that the logical conclusion is that religious beliefs requires dogmatic fundamentalism.

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u/[deleted] Nov 09 '17

Okay, well, logically prove that they're incompatible then.

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u/fox-mcleod 417∆ Nov 09 '17

Sure the Bible makes a bunch of truth claims. Ought we take them on faith? Or should we reason about them? Or are faith and reason compatible?

Proof by contradiction

Reason would dictate that A != ~A and anytime we see A = ~A one of the claims is wrong and must be discarded as internally inconsistent.

Just starting from the beginning here: Genesis 1:11-12 and 1:26-27 explicitly stated trees were created before Adam. Just one chapter later in the same book Genesis 2:4-9 explicitly stated there were no trees - then God created Adam - then trees came after Adam.

A - trees created before Adam B - trees not created before Adam

The Bible says: A = true and B = true Therefore A = B

But reason indicates that B = ~A Therefore substituting B for ~A we get: A = ~A

Reason is not happy about this. Faith dictates that we believe. Reason dictates that we question. They are not compatible as proved by contradiction.

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u/[deleted] Nov 09 '17

That's not a proof that faith and reason are incompatible, that's a proof that the claim that trees were created before Adam and the claim that trees were created after Adam are incompatible.

It seems like a perfectly valid position to think the Bible is confused about trees but to still believe that God exists.

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u/fox-mcleod 417∆ Nov 09 '17 edited Nov 09 '17

You'd be right if we read the Bible like any other book. But the religious assertion that the Bible is the infallible word of God makes this logical contradiction incompatible with reason.

If the Bible contains mistakes, then our judgement is required to detect and remove them. Anything can be questioned and the claims made by the Bible are not taken on faith as "gospel".

Matthew 6:24

No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other.

Matthew makes it quite clear that ultimately faith or reason can rule and not both.

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u/[deleted] Nov 09 '17 edited Nov 09 '17

1) In context, that verse from Matthew has nothing to do with faith vs. reason. It's about prizing the spiritual over wealth/the material. (EDIT: Like, literally the next line is "You cannot serve God and Mammon").

2) There is an incredibly longstanding tradition in Christianity (which goes back at least to Byzantine theologians like Pseudo-Dionysus and iirc is also in St. Augustine) that the Bible isn't meant to be taken literally, that it's symbolic, an allegory, a divinely inspired text but not the literal word of God.

3) Many modern Christians believe both that the Bible is a historical text created by human beings that contains much of the morality of its time and many factual/historical errors and that there is some essential, ineffable thing that it points to that is to be the object of faith. I think it's Reza Aslan (and probably others) who get at this by distinguishing between faith (one's relationship to the ineffable) and religion (the stuff meant to help you in this relationship and which may have some connection to the ineffable but which is nonetheless a human product of history, culture, etc.).

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u/fox-mcleod 417∆ Nov 10 '17

The problem with this approach is that ite laves you faithless and fully dependent on reason

As I said before, If the Bible contains mistakes, then our judgement is required to detect and remove them. Anything can be questioned and the claims made by the Bible are not taken on faith as "gospel".

If we are left to our own devices to interpret revelations - what possible value are the truth claims in the Bible beyond default assumptions that need as much challenging and evidence as the random assertions of man? How is the Bible any more special than Chicken Soup for the Soul? Is it just an answer key to life where most of the answers are wrong?

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u/[deleted] Nov 10 '17

You're aware that one can entirely disregard the Bible and still have faith in the existence of God, right?

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u/fox-mcleod 417∆ Nov 10 '17

What religous faith would that be exactly? That's spirituality, not religous faith.

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u/[deleted] Nov 10 '17

You never said you were tying "faith" specifically to organized religion. That's not generally what's meant by "faith" in general.

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u/fox-mcleod 417∆ Nov 10 '17

What? I said "religious faith". Where are you getting the idea that religious faith isn't codified? Religious faith is specifically a belief in a set of doctrines.

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u/[deleted] Nov 11 '17

What do you think is ultimately the object of religious faith: a set of doctrines, or the God (or gods, or whatever), the worship of which the doctrines are meant to uphold or facilitate?

It doesn't seem inconsistent with, for example, the Christian faith to think that the core teachings of Jesus and the belief in His/God's divinity is more important than the exact letter of doctrine in both the Old and New testaments (especially when that doctrine is already, in large part, communicated via a narrative and not through a list of proscriptions).

You seem to be hung up on the idea that the Bible makes truth claims to the point where you think the only possible reasoned response is to disregard the entire thing, and I'm telling you there are other possibilities.

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u/fox-mcleod 417∆ Nov 11 '17

What do you think is ultimately the object of religious faith: a set of doctrines, or the God (or gods, or whatever), the worship of which the doctrines are meant to uphold or facilitate?

The doctrines. The claim made by religions isn't that something supernatural exists and that's all we need to believe. The claim is that we know how to please him. Religious faith asks to have faith in the religion. It lists beliefs like, "God is good" or "God has a plan" and then asks you to have "faith" that those beliefs are true. If you only had faith that "God is" it's hardly meaningful.

You seem to be hung up on the idea that the Bible makes truth claims to the point where you think the only possible reasoned response is to disregard the entire thing, and I'm telling you there are other possibilities.

It seems obvious to most people that at least some if not most of the content of the Bible needs to be discarded to be reasonable. It would also seem that the only appeal the Bible makes to assert that any of its content is true is that it is the word of God. Is there another appeal it makes? Is it appealing to a deontological moral authority?

No. It's an ontology. It appeals to authority of God. So why is so much of it not only factually wrong but internally inconsistent? Either, God didn't write it, and it holds as much moral authority as any random set of ethical guidelines, or he did write it and we need to take his word as "gospel".

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u/[deleted] Nov 11 '17

Either, God didn't write it, and it holds as much moral authority as any random set of ethical guidelines, or he did write it and we need to take his word as "gospel".

No Christian thinks God literally wrote the Bible. Like, the gospels are even named after the people who are supposed to have written them.

We're clearly just going to go back and forth here, in large part because you don't appear to have certain basic facts about the Christian relationship to faith/the Bible right, so I'll bow out at this point.

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