/lit/ - Literature

>>22794044
who cares?

>>22794044
Open a book by Al Ghazali

You can be led to faith by reason, they are not opposed. There will always be required some faith, however, even if it is to a small extent. This is by design: if God sat on a throne in Washington, you wouldn't truly love Him or your neighbour, you would fear him and act nicely out of fear of retribution.

>>22794044
faith and rationality contradict each other...
for a rationale thinker wants to actually be able to get what was said... he wants to make sense of it in a rational reasonable way...

a faith dood though... well... he just believes everything he is being told just because...

>>22794044
>Can faith be ever rational

Yes

>>22794044
Depends on your reasons. Say you were born a hundred years ago, had limited access to academic resources, weren't particularly bright, and were inducted in a Christian epistemic bubble. Your belief set would warrant faith in God, and if every epistemic authority maintained the faith, then it would be unwise not to defer to them in matters beyond your scope. However, circumstances nowadays are different. Unless you're retarded, per the internet you have the means to inquire into the validity of your beliefs, or at the very least, update your prior probabilities (to inhibit unwarranted dogmatism). If you're unable to make use of the internet to critically evaluate your views, that would constitute deliberate ignorance (irrational behaviour). I will say that having direct access to a spiritual experience would warrant increasing the probability value of God's existence, so long as you keep in mind that you're fundamentally unreliable with regard to memory (for whatever supernatural phenomenon you could point to, there's a naturalistic explanation, and when it comes to memory, it's incredibly unreliable, plus we misattribute concepts to things all the time).

>>22794093
>I will say that having direct access to a spiritual experience would warrant increasing the probability value of God's existence

that is true, also i saw some shadow guy walking before personally i didn't find a good explanation for this yet

>>22794102
Well there are multiple. Certain mental disorders or afflictions can cause visual hallucinations (intense anxiety, BPD, BD). Alternatively, maybe you were sleep deprived, or wired on too much caffeine. Also, a transcendent God isn't needed as an explanation for seemingly supernatural phenomenon. You could be a Perennialist and Absolute Idealist, in which case there is no issue with experiences that conflict with Physicalist assumptions. Even Spinozism could work to integrate such experiences; whatever is conceived (within thought) has a correlate in extension, and as thought is infinite, so too must there be infinite correlative bodies (I admit that's a stretch).

>>22794121
but this shadow guy was searching for something i'm not sure that this is hallucinations i was fully conscious this shadow guy looked like a demon it's like what i read in bible that this entites are not reachable by our consciousness but they exist and can mess with us

>>22794044
No faith cannot be rational or logical but that is the point.
Rationality and logic are not the be all end all. This has nothing to do with God or religion either.
Faith is simply an important aspect of all life. You put faith in people and things every day. You would struggle to live otherwise.
An obsession with logic and scientism only makes your life more difficult. Science is never settled. At some point you must decide for yourself and thus faith becomes necessary.
What many people fail to realize is that logic and rationality will lead you astray just as much as faith. But the harsh reality is that they are more dogmatic than faith. People believe more strongly that logic and faith cannot let them down which only makes it more devastating when it does.

>>22794176
>No faith cannot be rational or logical but that is the point.

Faith can be rational and logical

>>22794183
Fine you can have it your way.
If you want faith to be rational and logical that is all the worse for faith.

>>22794044
It depends on what one understands faith to be. More modern Protestants will tell you that we can rationally. For instance, we believe in the existence of our universe because the information our senses delivers to us gives us good reason to have faith in the existence of our universe.

However, I personally find this a little bit disingenuous since that is how I would describe rationality, not faith. In other words, rationality is to make reasonable assumptions about the world. On the other hand, faith, to me, is believing in an outcome despite of unfavorable odds.

If my child is both intelligent and diligent, it's simply reasonable to think that it will pass the academic challenges it faces. On the other hand, if my child is not so intelligent or maybe terribly lazy or already had downfalls or is simply extraordinarily nervous, then despite of these hurdles, I might still have faith in my child's success.

>>22794044

>>22794044
It's not. If you believe something on pure faith, it is not based in rationality. Sorry, champ.

>>22794380
Nothing can be pure as faith

>>22794044
Sure, on many levels. One could consider pragmatism, that it helps to accept certain beliefs.

No one has a perfect, or arguably even a good argument that refuses Hume's argument against induction. Thus, the sciences have to be grounded in faith to some degree.

So too, the supposition that we are not brains in a vat, have free will, that the external world is real, etc. require some degree of faith. No one has ever been another person, so how do we overcome solipsism?

As Saint Augustine points out, we often have to accept to most basic things on faith. Are our parents really our parents? Are our kids really our kids? Maybe they were switched at birth?

You need look no further than /sci/ to see how impossible it is to learn things if you question everything. If you want to learn physics you need to have faith in the intro textbooks before you begin doubting everything.

Was the world created seconds ago with all our memories as well? Was our world created by a random universe and it only appears to exhibit rationality and law-like regularities? The Multiverse is supposed to fix the Fine Tuning Problem, but the problem is that random universes that happen to mimic ours vastly outnumber the law-like universes that would produce observations consistent with our sciences. Under determination is always a problem.

Science is methodological. Scientism is ontological, and it makes some pretty bold ontological claims in many of its forms, particularly the Boomer versions that are wedded to existentialism and the idea of man gaining his value by facing absurdity as a Nietzchean overcomer.


But perhaps we should ask even more basic questions. What possible world would make our lives meaningful? Even if we ruled over a galactic empire and lived 40,000 years, wouldn't this be absurd too? We rule just one galaxy out of countless galaxies. We live for but a hair's breadth in cosmic terms.

Only union with the true infinite, transcendence, can have meaning. "God became man that man might become God." Christ invites us to be "one in him as he is one with the Father."

>>22794500
Perfect, God bless you

>>22794045