Should one reject an idea if it makes no sense, if it fails to meet the standards of rigorous rationality?
I would think yes, and I’m sure most others would agree.
But then I get to thinking that this is the wrong question to ask. I seems to presuppose that the alleged sense and rationality exists in the idea itself, and it’s up to us to discover either it or its absence.
Though I agree that ideas themselves may harbor some degree of sense and rationality, I think first one must ask whether the idea makes sense or is rational to him. In other words, I question whether any so-called “inherent” sense/rationality in an idea is at all discoverable or whether we’re always going to be dealing with our own personal and subjective understanding of an idea, and if so whether this is really what we must content ourselves with when deciding whether or not to believe the idea.
I came to this question after considering the manner in which most enlightened, intelligent, and educated individuals reject simplistic and archaic religious and superstitious beliefs in light of our more advanced (and complicated) age of scientific understanding. But I also considered how many not-so-enlightened, not-so-intelligent, and not-so-educated (no offense intended) individuals simply can’t understand our modern age’s scientific understanding, and resort to more simplistic and archaic religious and superstitious beliefs because, well, that’s all they understand.
I remember encountering tons of people like this in high school. Grade 10 math, grade 11 science, grade 12 social studies, etc.–a lot of this stuff just flies right over the heads of a lot of those students. Try as they might (and some of them did try), they just have a hard time grasping such complex material.
How many of us really understand quantum physics and Einstein’s relativity? Should we expect everyone to see the “blatantly obvious” rationality and sense in these sciences?
More to the point, how are we ever to decide whether an idea really doesn’t make any sense, and therefore claim justification in rejecting it, or it simply doesn’t make sense to us, and therefore claim justification in trying harder, over time, to understand it? Should someone who doesn’t understand science reject it, because it doesn’t make sense and seems irrational to him, in favor of religious/superstitious believes?
NOTE: another question I’d like to pose as central to this thread is whether this poses a problem for science. Is it a problem that modern science has become too advanced/complicated for the average person to grasp such that it is becoming indistinguishable, to the average person, from senseless and irrational religion and superstition.
There’s a saying that hope springs eternal, that people always hope for the best, even in the face of adversity. If you try and convince someone that you have the best ‘truth’ to offer them, what? … are they supposed to take hook line and sinker? Is gullibility to be taken advantage of? What’s wrong with the ‘idea’ that hope has nothing to do with anything and you just take what is? The intellect and all its thinking is no match to the intelligence, meaning, purpose and functioning of the human organism and all the life therein. You find interest and meaning in everything if you do not deliberately seek it.
But go on please gib. Don’t let my lack of intellectual discourse bother the thread.
You seem to be saying that we shouldn’t be judging ideas on their sense/rationality, or even judging ideas at all, that we should look more towards the world itself and decide for ourselves what seems real and there. Is this what you’re saying?
Trust in your own self. Don’t depend on anything outside you. You are not going to sink or drown if you latch on. Basic needs is enough … anything wanted beyond that is the beginning of self trickery and being misled.
Do you have any other questions that I need to answer?
You don’t need to answer anything finishedman, but I assume as a participant on a discussion board, you’ll want to (or just will) answer questions put to you.
Also, do note that what prompted this thread wasn’t a question of whether or not we should buy into the ideas of others, but whether we can blame someone for believing in something we consider irrational or superstitious when what we think they should believe in, though rational to us, may just be too complicated for them to understand.
I mean, I’m sure you’ve seen the argument before here on ILP: people shouldn’t believe in irrational religious/superstitious beliefs because we now have science which proves these beliefs wrong with evidence and more rational theories. Although I agree with this line of reasoning, I sort of have a soft spot for the religiously devout I guess, and I see more factors at work here besides an unwillingness to be rational or to look at the evidence. I also see an incapacity sometimes to even understand the evidence and scientific explanations of things in the first place. I think this is often overlooked when we criticize so-called “irrational” religious/superstitious beliefs. In fact, it must seem to these religiously devout believers (some of them anyway) that the science we are trying to shove down their throats is just as irrational and nonsensical as we see their religion–only for different reasons.
Do you mean the justification for the idea is poor, or the idea itself makes little sense? Since there are plenty of things that seem to be true that make little sense to me. Even the existence of, well, anything, kinds shocks me, when I mull it over that is.
I think it needs to be acknkowledged that intuition is a large part of why most educated people believe certain scientific ideas. This is not the reason most scientists (in the appropriate fields) believe in these ideas, but the truth is the methodology most believers in evolution have used to arrive at their belief in evolution has little to do with how biologists arrived at their belief. If they are not foolish, then we are opening the door for intuition. Which I think is inevitable, but we should not pretend that everyone with the ‘right belief’ has the ‘right epistemology’. And I think this is an implicit belief and a hypocritical silence in many theist atheist debates.
I agree that you can’t separate reason from emotion. Emotion decides for us what’s important to reason about.
What we feel strongly about will determine what premises we choose to start with (or perhaps what conclusion we’d like to arrive at and therefore what premises we need to start with). It makes no sense to say that we choose our premises because they’re reasonable–what were the premises that started that line of reasoning?
Not as such, but I can tell you that left-brain thinkers can become right-brain (and visa-versa).
Since we know nothing for sure about it, as all we have are theories, we tolerate the different ways we look into the mystery of life itself. We recognize other people’s right to have different beliefs or practices without attempting to suppress them. Heck, the extraordinary things that go on in the brain, the glands and the sensations that are constantly bombarding the body would most likely be as mysterious as are the notions and feelings that are in the persons that have them and that cannot articulate precisely what they are experiencing. If these experiences are unique to a particular individual, then no one else would be in a position to accept or deny an explanation given by that individual as to the reasons why and from what cause they are having them.
Well we’d eventually get around to touching on a lot of approaches to things we do and don’t know about. Assumptions will fly about along with those who wish to scrutinize and reduce them not even knowing for sure where they’re supposed to arrive at. If we did know, then where would be the entertainment, learning, and maybe even the power and satisfaction associated with knowing a lot …… a lot more than the other guy? We seem to want a perfection of means to a questionable or vague end.
It seems to me that arguments make sense or do not, meet standards of rigorous rationality or do not. Ideas, alone, don’t really fit with these criteria.
Ideas may not sit well with other currently accepted ideas, but that is somethign different.
Unless we actually mean something like
Death am ignorvebling.
It seems like you are agreeing with me, though I would focus more on how the idea coheres with our other ideas (coherence theory of truth, or in this case, coherence testing, often partially intuitively, of an idea)
I think some examples would help here, because it is not clear to me that what get called religious and superstitious ideas need be simple. In fact they can be incredibly complicated.
Well of course not. In fact I don’t think most people who fall on the Science is the only good methodology, all religion is delusion, have come far past Newton and their ideas about Darwin and very sketchy and even in part wrong. I am speaking about college educated people.
and what does make sense mean? It means it fits with what we know.
Now an important distinction here is between ideas that do not fit because they contradict what is considered true and those ideas that simply don’t seem justified and imply processes or states that if true are not understood (by say, scientists).
Often an idea that does not currently have justification within science is treated as if it was the same as an idea that is directly contradicted by science. This happens within science of course also, and using your example of QM, was a gauntlet that and other ideas had to go through.
Lamarkism! Lamarkism!
Oh, sorry, epigenetics.
Or, Popp’s ideas about organisms intra-communicating with light. Nutjob, nutjob. Oh, ok, possible. Oh, yeah it’s there.
Or Rogue waves: Can’t happen say oceanographers and fluid scientists. People are imagining. Oh, it does happen. Well, hm, let’s see how.
Current science plus deduction is a tricky process even for professionals.
Individual intuition. Which is fallible. But I doubt any infallible rational heuristic can be developed.
It might be the right choice for someone, given the later effects of doing it or not doing on their, specific, individual life. But the deeper questions is how does one get objective about one’s ability to judge coherence and to distinguish between the odd and the impossible.
IOW I think deduction is overrated. People often argue that this or that ‘supernatural’ (terrible word) or theist idea is impossible given scientific theory. But this is much harder to determine and then current science - at various periods - would and DID argue that phenomena we now know exist or can exist could not. There is a hubris is this ‘science shows this is impossible via…’ type of deduction. I would like to say this hubris is especially present in the arguments of laypeople, but scientists can engage in this kind of deduction quite a bit, despite it precisely not being empirical and further their own knowledge of the history of science should make them hesitate to make such pronouncements. I understand why geologists make anti-Biblical pronouncements regarding the age of the earth. I am not saying they cannot weigh in on stuff with confidence based on scientific epistemology and research. They can and should. It’s the speculative stuff that is not acknowledged as speculative.
NOte: there is a difference between, I consider it unlikely (or I am not convinced) because of X and Y
and
This is not possible
Believers are deluded
etc.
It’s a problem for some people around some scientific conclusions.
In a way, that actually bolsters my point. Many hardnosed atheists, for example, scoff at the idea of God itself, not any argument in defense of His existence, but the idea itself, as being irrational or incoherent. But this all depends on whether or not such an idea can fit into a whole network of other ideas that, overall, make sense out of the world or something therein.
They can get complicated, sure, if one demands ever deeper understandings of them, but usually one doesn’t make such demands. More simpleminded folk typically don’t have a problem accepting the account of the universe’s existence or coming into being that appeals to God and His omnipotent supernatural ability to bring existence into being. Most religious people just accept this without feeling the account is that counter-intuitive. Contrast this with the implications that fall out of relativity theory (for example, that the faster one travels, the more time slows down for him), or those that fall out of QM (for example, that causes can sometimes come before effects), and you get some very counter-intuitive ideas indeed.
But then there are those who, also being religiously inclined, see the idea of God’s supernatural abilities and omnipotence puzzling, and want to dig into these ideas deeper. I would think, however, that if these people have a sophisticated enough mind to grasp some of the deeper implications of these ideas, they would also be able to grasp some of the more sophisticated concepts of science.
This reminds me of an ironic article a theologian posted online criticizing Richard Dawkins’ attack on the religious concept of godly omnipotence. Is was the one we all know and love about God being able to create a rock He Himself cannot lift. The idea behind this argument is typically that the whole notion of godly omnipotence is irrational and naive, and a more sophisticated mind (like Dawkins’?) would be able to dig up some of the contradictory implications that fall out of it (the unliftable rock being one such example). What this theologian pointed out, however, turned the tables on Dawkins and made it seem that it was Dawkins whose understanding of the concept of godly omnipotence was too simplistic, and theologians and many other religious believers have a deeper grasp of the concept such that the unliftable rock argument really isn’t a problem. It went like this: when theologians talk about God’s omnipotence, they are not talking about a power so great it can trump the laws of logic itself. The unliftable rock argument is one that undermines God’s omnipotence by way of demonstrating a logical impossibility. So yeah, God can’t do things that are logically impossible. But so what? That never was the intention of theologians when they talked about God’s omnipotence. By “omnipotence,” they only mean an ability to do anything whatsoever so long as it’s logically possible–God can move mountains, He can make them disappear; He can extinguish the universe or make another one appear. He can make anything happen, or stop anything from happening, in the physical/natural world, or even the spiritual/supernatural world. But He can’t make 2 + 2 = 5, for example. Nor should He be able to, this theologian was saying. No one ever thought He should (well, no one who really understood the deeper underpinnings of the concept of godly omnipotence). So in this case, I saw the irony of a scientifically sophisticated thinker (Dawkins) betraying a mere superficial level of understanding on the concept of godly omnipotence while a presupposed superficial theological thinker turned out to be the actual deeper thinker.
That is a good, but extremely difficult, dinstinction to make. It’s the difficulty that’s the problem. Einstein’s concept of spacetime, for example, would seem to not fit with the layperson’s understanding of space and time, but in order to see how (or if) it fits in, she must understand the justification behind it. How is she ever to know, if she can’t grasp the justification on a first go, whether it just isn’t justified (and therefore it simply doesn’t fit in with what she knows) or it is justified (and therefore, somehow, does fit in) but she has to go through a few more rounds of trying to study the justification first in order to see it?
Your examples of such cases in science are enlightening.
I think there’s some more nuanced points that you’re making here but my brain just isn’t working right at the moment . Maybe we can sift through this a bit more in your next post:
I see that you’re making a certain distinction here, and I think I can understand what that distinction is. I’m also making a certain distinction. I don’t think the two are the same though, and my brain is not cooperating at the moment–I think these two distinctions can be mapped onto each other, but I’m not seeing how.
Definitely “yes”, but with the addendum that the person simply couldn’t make sense of it at that time.
In other words, “it might be right, but so far, it is not acceptable.”
Logic and the definitions of the words tells if it is “rational”.
And I am often amazed at how they think they can rule it out. I mean, we can’t even rule out we are in a secular simulation - iow something made by an race of scientifically advanced beings. A ‘state’ that would have many parallels to a universe+god set up.
Right, though those have not filtered down into many people’s brains and in fact should give pause when using deduction to say something is not possible, not the case. Deduction before these theories (or really set of theories in the latter case) would have confidently dismissed both Relativity and much QM phenomena.
Sure.
Yes, that whole thing is a straw man attack on religious ideas held by the very portion of theologists who helped bring in Enlightenment. Far away from the kinds of power that most believers on the street, but even mystics and prophets had, they came up with more mathematical, absolute concepts of power and awareness, and then everyone thought they had to defend these abstracted ideas, even though it was not what they really believed.
Right, it is very hard to demonstrate a lack of coherence to anything near a level of certainty. Nevertheless in philosophy forums people write with great confidence when they use deduction to demonstrate a lack of coherence with current science. Showing that Newtons very useful formulas, which are based on ideas of space and time that Einstein at least seems to have overthrown, actual do cohere with Einstein’s Relativity - since they are effective locally and in the range we tend to use them,d espite being based on false metaphysics - is very hard for most people to do. How does this wrong metaphysics lead to such a useful set of forumulas that rocket scientists still use every day?
.No, you are right. I am off topic. Or it’s an interrelated topic, but it is not the distinction you are making in this thread.
You are saying something like is it fair to expect religious people to accept extremely complicated ideas, so complicated that really they need to accept them via intuition or authority, two methodologies ‘we’ criticize them for depending on.
I am saying that deduction is overrated.
Once we move into a dicsussion of theism vs. atheism or supernatural entities vs. skeptics, the two topics roll all over eachother.
I am not disagreeing with you. In a sense your thesis fits with mine. One clear overlap is that you agreed earlier that many people, perhaps most, who believe in some of these complicated scientific ideas, probably do some on some combination of following authority and intuition. There is an illusion of deductive analysis as the method.
The same way all religions have always done it, “it works well enough for now”.
And “she” has to weigh her personal value in attempting to discern possible sense out of what appears to be non-sense.
The bottom line is that if you are not being Rational, then you are necessarily being Irrational.
But what you don’t know is how much time you have to become rational and by how much.
Thus the rational pursuit is the pursuit to discover how rational you are actually being and have the opportunity to be.
Of course a good place to start would be to learn what “rational” actually means (or at least in the way I just used it).
One of the key false dilemmas of late homo sapiens. that there are a whole set of non-rational, very positive processes we depend on all the time is something some people think they have managed to do away with and yet survive.
I’d be interested in at least a short explanation of you use of the term. Otherwise we will likely write past each other. Given how enormous such a topic might be, even in concise form, perhaps you could contrast your use with how ‘the defenders of rationality’ in forums like this one might use the term.
Frankly, I’m completely in the dark as to how some people mean that word.
When I say it, I am specifically meaning; Rationale == the logically rationed steps toward a chosen goal.
And in the case of life itself, that goal is very definitive as well.
An idea is rational if it complies to logical coherence within the rationed logical steps toward one’s goal.
…ain’t rocket science.
)
. Maybe we can sift through this a bit more in your next post: