Saturday, July 15, 2017

The Impossibility Of Faith In Reason

No matter what protesters claim otherwise, it is impossible to have faith in reason.  If one means by the two words anything remotely similar to the definitions ascribed to their normal usage, to say that someone has or must have faith in reason is an oxymoron, a contradiction of terms, a complete misrepresentation of the concepts most people mean by them.

I'm going to highlight an example of the stupidity that results when one confuses logic/reason for faith:

"In fact, faith is a prerequisite for reason. In order to reason about anything we must have faith that there are laws of logic which correctly prescribe the correct chain of reasoning. Since laws of logic cannot be observed with the senses, our confidence in them is a type of faith [1]."

This excerpt from an article on the Answers In Genesis website is gravely erroneous.  The three laws of logic are grasped by the mind, not the senses, meaning that even if I were a disembodied mind with no corporeal substance or senses whatsoever I would still comprehend them.  If I were a disembodied mind, I would still know that a thing is what it is, for example (the law of identity).  There is no way that logic can be false, and logic and deductive reasoning are self-evident, self-verifying, and inescapable [2].  Logic proves what follows and does not follow from certain propositions and can verify or falsify many propositions merely through inward reflection, apart from any sense experience or knowledge of the external world.

Faith is trust in something beyond what can be proven.  Reason (logic) is the only way to prove something.  Therefore it is utterly impossible for someone to have faith in reason.  As someone who is committed to Christianity, I understand how controversial this may sound to other Christians.  But I'm not saying that something that can't be proven isn't true, or that Christianity isn't strongly supportable using external arguments, or that faith is not trust in what evidence points to [3], or any similar things which amount to fallacies and falsities; I am demonstrating that to know something through reason--to grasp logical proof of it--is something one cannot do while believing in it on faith.

Faith and reason are mutually exclusive in that no one has faith in what they know by logic, for the very concept of faith only makes sense when applied to something one trusts in beyond what can be established by reason.


[1].  https://answersingenesis.org/apologetics/faith-vs-reason/

[2].  See here:
A.  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-self-evidence-of-logic.html
B.  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-error-of-presuppositions.html

[3].  Evidence is not proof.  Proof is only found in logic and its companion and extension mathematics, and thus trusting in something which has an extraordinary amount of evidence behind it still involves faith, whereas knowing something by reason does not.

No comments:

Post a Comment