03.31.08

On Rationality and Religion

Posted in Economic at 9:30 pm by

I’m amazed that National Review published the following by Jason Lee Steorts:

Imagine that scientists in a lab have engineered a perfectly rational robot. This robot appears human in every way: He speaks articulately and spontaneously, is capable of advanced learning, and can pass for human in all social commerce.

The only difference between the robot and human beings is that the robot is perfectly rational. Rationality is here defined as the refusal to form beliefs without having sufficient reason to think they are true. It is the nature of reasons that they are capable of clear expression. To believe something rationally is to be able to say why you believe it and to say so in such a way that an intelligent listener would understand how the why supports the belief.

Now imagine yourself trying to persuade our perfectly rational robot that the following statement is true:

Everything was created by an all-powerful and all-knowing being who exists outside of space and time. This being impregnated a human woman through non-physical means and was born as her offspring. Within space and time, the being was executed as a criminal and spent three days in a tomb. But then it came back to life and went up to a place called Heaven, which we cannot detect or observe. We eat this beings body once a week. By doing this and sundry other things, such as getting sprinkled with water by a man in a robe who utters an incantation, or telling the man in the robe all the bad things we do by doing this, we too can go to Heaven after our own bodies come up out of their graves.

What will you tell the robot? Can you marshal empirical evidence demonstrating that these claims are true? Can you show their truth by logic alone?

Utterly necessary analysis below the fold . . .

Steorts provides us with his thought experiment as a kind of “so there” to Christians who find Mormonism unbelievable. I would suggest that Mr. Steorts has put his question forward in a way that misses the most important parts of why Christians believe what they do.

First off, don’t be offended, Christians think that every religion other than Judaism is completely unfounded. The Christian faith makes exclusive claims. Let’s avoid the side issues and go to the central feature. Christians believe their faith for one simple, at least somewhat rationalistic reason. They think that Jesus REALLY did rise from the dead. There are evidences that explain why Christians think it happened.

1. The historical existence of Jesus and his crucifixion by the Roman Empire are not seriously disputed.

2. Something significant happened to alter the behavior of his disciples after his death. They were quivering jello before he died. Afterward, they went out and established the Christian church at the price of persecution and death. How to account for this transformation if he was just rotting in the ground and that was it?

3. Contemporaneously to the period when Jesus was killed, Paul boldly claimed that the resurrected Christ had been seen by many witnesses (1 Corinthians 3-6 referencing some 500 witnesses). Why put that out there if easily disproven?

4. If Paul were lying about the witnesses, then no one would pay any attention to him and the cult would fail as did virtually all others. Instead, the church grew at a startling rate, despite the fact of intense persecution that grew with time.

We could go on in this fashion. I don’t claim that this constitutes a bullet-proof case for the resurrection of Christ and the truth of the Christian religion, but I do claim that it provides some basis for a rational belief. At the same time, I claim that Mormonism, Islam, and a number of other faiths cannot hope to rise to anything like this level of evidence. In short, the Christian faith was based on a claimed fact that could theoretically be proven false. That is not the case with Mormonism. Steorts makes a mistake in conflating the two as though they occupy similar ground with respect to reason.

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