Who‘s to say that beliefs held because of rational reasons are indeed more justified than beliefs held because of emotional ones

Question

Sorry if this is unclear. I am having a bit of trouble formulating this question but I will try to make it more clear by use of an example. Say for example, two people hold the belief that God (let’s say the Abrahamic God) exists.

Person A believes this because of a whole host of rational arguments and he presents them to a 3rd individual. You know the arguments: Cosmological, Watchmaker etc.

Person B says he believes in the Abrahamic God because he says that when he reads scripture or looks out at nature he feels in his heart and soul a mystical connection to God which is undeniable proof for him that God exists. He also presents this as his justification for his belief.

Now I am almost certain that 99% of people, including philosophers, even if they disagree with the existence of God, will state that Person A is more justified in his belief in God than Person B. Some (positivists for example) might even state that Person B is not at all justified in his belief. My question is threefold and intertwined: First of all, what truly is rationality (as opposed to ‘irrationality’). Second, why do we believe that rationality is superior to ‘irrationality’ in justifying a belief. And third of all, why do most of us deny mystical revelations/feelings etc (I guess this is what I mean by the term irrationality) as justifications for beliefs? Perhaps human beings have a bias and we don’t actually know and never will know what the correct way to gain truth is? Any works by philosophers who discuss this specifically, as I have not seen one yet but I am sure there must be some out there? Thank you.

Answer 1

First, speaking in general and not in reference to your example, if Bob looks at evidence 1 and comes to conclusion X, and Jane looks at completely different evidence 2 and comes to conclusion Y, then we cannot say whether Bob or Jane is correct. Each of them is only examining one part of the picture.

However, suppose Jane looks at evidence 1 and 2, and can put them both in place in a unified picture that explains how both 1 and 2 arose. For this unified picture to be a good explanation, it should be parsimonious. It should explain 1 and 2 by underlying principles that are not as complex as the straight sum of complexities of 1 and 2.

If Jane achieves this, her conclusion (whatever it may be) is better justified than Bob's, if Bob is still only looking at 1. Her understanding fully encompasses Bob's understanding and also goes beyond it.

To sum up, what we want to do is unify all the evidence into the same coherent, simple model. If we can do that, we can be better justified in our conclusions.

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Person B says he believes in the Abrahamic God because he says that when he reads scripture or looks out at nature he feels in his heart and soul a mystical connection to God which is undeniable proof for him that God exists. He also presents this as his justification for his belief.

Now, some form of deep feeling is a type of evidence. All sensory information is evidence.

But, sensory information does not necessarily mean what it seems at first blush. Person B has a deep feeling about God; that is a datum. Now, we need to interpret the datum. What caused person B to have this feeling? Did God cause it? Or are there other psychological factors we can point to, that caused it?

Person A may have some profound feeling when he looks at nature, as well! It's just that B attributes this feeling to God, and A attributes it to the beauty of nature. So actually person B has the same feeling in this case as person A, he simply explains it differently. Attributing the feeling to God is an assumption, not the experience itself.

Many experiences in culture and nature can give a person a profound feeling of connectedness. Reading scripture might do it. Going to a concert might do it. Listening to a cosmology lecture might do it. Looking at the view from the top of a mountain might do it. Taking psychedelic drugs might do it. Meditating in a non-denominational way might do it.

The unified view, the best-justified view, would take into account all these feelings, and try to build a coherent picture of what causes a human to feel such things. This picture would likely involve psychology and neurology more than the supernatural. Then we would want to unify this picture with all the rational arguments from person A. Then we would be able to say we have a better-justified view than A or B alone.

Answer 2

As for your second question, there is a Christian philosopher named Alvin Plantinga who has discussed this overall idea at some length. His position is that most of us actually do accept more things than we realize, not strictly based on external evidence, but as internal "properly basic" beliefs. He argues that since belief in the existence of other minds outside our own is warranted as properly basic (as an example), so is belief in God.

I might explain it a little differently. Suppose you were friends with the president of the United States, and you knew him to be an honest man. He tells you that he knows, for a fact, that a war is about to break out in a certain region within the next week. Are you justified in believing it? Yes. Even if all the newspapers say otherwise? Even if he did not show you the evidence firsthand? Yes. The president's words to you may be a different kind of evidence than seeing raw war cabinet minutes, photos of troop locations, and encrypted communication between foreign diplomats, but that doesn't make it any less valid for you to believe it. In fact, if the details are above your head anyway, the analysis of a person you can trust, and who knows what it all means, is rightly weightier to you than if you could see all the raw data yourself.

Now further, can you use your conversation with the president as evidence when reasoning with other people? Actually, yes! (Well, assuming you won't go to jail for sharing classified information!) Even though other people can't verify your individual conversation with the president firsthand? Even though there's no recording you can show them? Even if other people claim the president told them something different? Yes, yes, and yes! Others will simply need to judge your testimony on its own merits, as they would anyone else's in matters of conflict, and give your testimony its proper and fair weight. Courts have to do this all the time in trials. Again, personal testimony is a different kind of evidence, but that doesn't make it invalid.

For myself, I would admit that my faith in Jesus Christ is deeply personal, and that this relationship is the foundation for my trust in Him. The way I see it, external evidences are one way to help point a person toward God; but once a person draws nigh to God and comes to know Him, then this new relationship not only becomes the dominant evidence, even if it is internal, but for him, it also becomes entirely sufficient.

Answer 3

Steven Pinker as an example defines rationality as "the use of knowledge to attain goals." It is valued for it's proven benefits to humans in society for science and law, as an example. Using rationality, we can examine events like a new global virus pandemic, we can find measures to reduce negative impacts, develop vaccines and so on. In law, it helps determine responsibility, and make judgements that are not discriminating.

More generally said, rationalism is the attitude that whatever your goals are, using knowledge and reason will be the safest way to achieve them (if you can afford the time and cost). It's successes in science are overwhelming and have no alternative.

Rationality does not only have benefits:

• It takes effort (time, money) to train humans to use reason and exercise it
• It is slow for decision making
• It is not immediately comforting or persuasive politically

Rationality does not have an exact opposite even though there is the word irrationality.

Second, why do we believe that rationality is superior to ‘irrationality’ in justifying a belief.

As to faith, beliefs and religion, things are not as obvious as described in the question. Most humans are members of the religion of their parents, and they typically get indoctrinated and enrolled into their religion before their training in rational thought is complete (before children can defend themselves). As such, most religious people arrived at their faith not through reason, and only some try to justify their faith later through reason.

So society does not expect humans to logically choose faith, most religions do not first teach all alternatives and then ask children to make a rational (or other) choice.

Instead, a person claiming to have been atheist but then having switched to becoming religious by reason alone would be an extreme outlier. Also rational arguments typically are for "a god", not god XYZ (even if provided by religion XYZ), so by reason alone a person would not be bound to any single faith or religion. Even for adults, it's much more common to grow in faith as a result of a personal crisis and possibly being indoctrinated on a close personal level by friends or a counsellor leading the person in crisis to religion, rather than rational teaching.

So people who go through some crisis like losing a loved one are "forgiven" (for lack of a better word) for choosing faith irrationally to find solace.

In more general matters than faith, reliability shows rationality to statistically lead to attain goals more often than any alternative, and so humans who so not use rationality are choosing a non-optimal method with respect to chances of success. Unless they can justify what else they optimize for, their behavior seems like a thinking flaw.

And third of all, why do most of us deny mystical revelations/feelings etc as justifications for beliefs?

I am not sure that this is happening. But there are reasons to be cautious. Cults use various known psychological techniques to cause "mystical feelings" or beliefs. And thus victimize and exploit gullible people. Also, in most jobs people are expected to behave rationally for the benefit of the company, and a person acting according to mystical feelings rather than reason would be seen as sabotaging their company and violating the terms of their employment. So as a society, I think we expect people to keep their mystical feelings confined to their private lifes, and to reject obvious attempts by cults to recruit them through psychological tricks. That leaves a bit, but not much, personal freedom to indulge in some magical thinking.

Still, not all humans do recognize in their lives anything that they identify as divine spirituality, and thus have no obvious way to understand people who claim to have such feelings, other than remembering maybe childhood feelings like believing santa claus will bring gifts (one of the tricks to indoctrinate children with religion).

Answer 4

I don't know that I'd say someone is "more justified" for using a fallacious argument rather than using an unreliable method. And at least some people who promote logical arguments for God's existence point out that they themselves are actually convinced for other reasons (typically more along the lines of personal experiences). But anyway.

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If our primary epistemological concern is to believe true things, then I'd argue we should stick to methods that can be shown to be reliable. That is to say, the method produces many conclusions that can be shown to be true and few (or no) conclusions that can be shown to be false. It also helps if different people can independently apply the method to the same data and reach the same conclusion.

It also helps if we can explain why the method is reliable, and when, how and why it isn't reliable in the cases where it fails.

If you consider "feeling something in your heart", pick 1000 theists who uses that, and you'd probably have 1001 incompatible conclusions about who God is and what he wants and so forth. This method leads to outright contradictory conclusions (God can't want A and not A at the same time), so we know a whole bunch of those conclusions must be false, and we don't know that any of them are true (unless you have some independent reliable means of discovering truths about God... in which case we should probably be talking about that instead). That's close to the worst-case scenario for reliability. If you expand this to intuition more broadly, you do get some true things, but you get a whole lot more false things, so we're not doing that much better.

If we compare this to something like science, you need only look at the room you're in right now and you'll no doubt see many things built on top of science, thanks to the reliability of its conclusions. You might struggle to find something science didn't have at least some part in, including like fruit.

_{* Although science models behaviour, and it's built on verification and falsification, rather than proof as such, which leads to some questions about how "true" science is, but that's another discussion.}

We can also consider something like eyesight, which is generally fairly reliable, but we also know of cases where it fails, such as if you're particularly tired (or asleep, for that matter), if you're taking mind-altering substances, if you recently suffered a brain injury, if you have one of a handful of mental conditions, if you see something out of the corner of your eye, if it's dark, etc. And human memory is also fairly malleable. So we could try to corroborate that with other evidence to get to a more reliable method.

Abstract syllogisms also seem fairly unreliable, while we're on the subject. Theists look at an argument and think it's perfectly sound, while atheists point out a bunch of fallacies. Or we just disagree on premises. Logic is certainly a helpful tool - it can help us see problems in reasoning, but it's easy enough to wrap one's preconceptions into the argument, such that the reasoning looks proper to you, but not to someone who doesn't share those preconceptions. It's especially ineffective if one (or both) of the parties aren't all that open to changing their mind, so they aren't trying to see what's wrong with the argument as much as they're trying to use the argument to convince someone else.

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If you want to be pedantic, you could point out that we can't definitively determine whether something is true, due to solipsism (we can only be completely sure of our own existence).

In response, one might bring up e.g. coherentism, where we build a coherent model of "truth" based on the evidence we have available (our sensory experiences). We could also consider predictive power, i.e. whether our conclusions lead to correct predictions, which could add confidence that the conclusions are true.

Answer 5

1. What is rationality?

   It is the capability to think along the rules of common logic and to act accordingly. To be a rational person requires to reflect one’s own experience.

2. Why to prefer rationality over irrationality?

   Experience shows that rationality decreases the probability of error and allows to learn from one’s mistakes. In particular to avoid the principle “The wish is the father of the thought.”

3. Why to dismiss mysticisms as justification for believes?

   Mysticism often indicates that the real mechanism behind the phenomenon has not yet been detected. To welcome mysticism stops further research.

All these answers need further discussion and elaboration.

Answer 6

Rationality is man’s basic virtue, the source of all his other virtues. Man’s basic vice, the source of all his evils, is the act of unfocusing his mind, the suspension of his consciousness, which is not blindness, but the refusal to see, not ignorance, but the refusal to know. Irrationality is the rejection of man’s means of survival and, therefore, a commitment to a course of blind destruction; that which is anti-mind, is anti-life.

The virtue of Rationality means the recognition and acceptance of reason as one’s only source of knowledge, one’s only judge of values and one’s only guide to action. It means one’s total commitment to a state of full, conscious awareness, to the maintenance of a full mental focus in all issues, in all choices, in all of one’s waking hours. It means a commitment to the fullest perception of reality within one’s power and to the constant, active expansion of one’s perception, i.e., of one’s knowledge. It means a commitment to the reality of one’s own existence, i.e., to the principle that all of one’s goals, values and actions take place in reality and, therefore, that one must never place any value or consideration whatsoever above one’s perception of reality. It means a commitment to the principle that all of one’s convictions, values, goals, desires and actions must be based on, derived from, chosen and validated by a process of thought—as precise and scrupulous a process of thought, directed by as ruthlessly strict an application of logic, as one’s fullest capacity permits. It means one’s acceptance of the responsibility of forming one’s own judgments and of living by the work of one’s own mind (which is the virtue of Independence). It means that one must never sacrifice one’s convictions to the opinions or wishes of others (which is the virtue of Integrity)—that one must never attempt to fake reality in any manner (which is the virtue of Honesty)—that one must never seek or grant the unearned and undeserved, neither in matter nor in spirit (which is the virtue of Justice). It means that one must never desire effects without causes, and that one must never enact a cause without assuming full responsibility for its effects—that one must never act like a zombie, i.e., without knowing one’s own purposes and motives—that one must never make any decisions, form any convictions or seek any values out of context, i.e., apart from or against the total, integrated sum of one’s knowledge—and, above all, that one must never seek to get away with contradictions. It means the rejection of any form of mysticism, i.e., any claim to some nonsensory, nonrational, nondefinable, supernatural source of knowledge. It means a commitment to reason, not in sporadic fits or on selected issues or in special emergencies, but as a permanent way of life.

Ayn Rand

Answer 7

Rationality is a process of learning/understanding/planning, be it environment, self, or anything really. The thought itself, not necesserily verbalised.

There is no "irrationality": you either think, or you are a rock who hasn't been tricked into thinking yet.

Emotions are a form of rationality; however, they are imprecise and rarely give explanations. On the other hand they are quick and require little effort.

The problem is not letting emotions guide you: the problem is to not question and improve, to not think, to not continue the process of rationality, particularly when you have time and care to do so. The care part is important. If you don't care, if it changes nothing, then to not waste time thinking is rational.

And maybe that is just the thing that the emotion is trying to tell: it doesn't matter if god exist, so might as well believe in him; don't care, have better things to do.

Answer 8

IMHO, you are using a nice argument (a rational proof is stronger than a simple belief) outside of is domain.

If you were speaking of a material fact, for example the earth is round and not flat, I would fully agree. Because here, we have a number of evidences that were discouvered ages ago, and no new fact or rational proof against that could ever be established. More exactly, as we are in the physical world, any specialist will accept the Occam's razor rule: if more than one theory can explain something, we will use the simplest one ⁽¹⁾.

But for the existence of God, you can find as many proofs that God exists as that God does not exist. Which is just an evidence that none of them is definitive and accepted by the whole community ⁽²⁾. And all that just means that every rational argument for or against the existence of God is flawed. The most common problem is using a belief or a poorly defined concept instead of a true fact as a premise ⁽³⁾.

So you are just pretending that using a solid method based on fragile premises is correct, while we know that it is not (I can remember from my mathematical studies tons of proofs that 0=1 or that the set of real numbers is empty).

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⁽¹⁾ Cartographic projections can project a sphere on a plane. By using one of them, you can build a full theory using a flat earth and still consistent with the Newtonian physics... except that is will lead to awfully complex equations!

⁽²⁾ Keeping with the flat Earth example, we know that some people do believe that the Earth is flat. But none of their argument is solid...

⁽³⁾ Syllogism were studied since antiquity: a rare item is expensive, a cheap horse is rare, hence a cheap horse is expensive...