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Which best demonstrates the rationality of your beliefs?

Is it ...

1. Your ability to articulate the case FOR what you believe?

or ...

2. Your ability to articulate the case AGAINST what you believe?

There's never going to be a shortage of straw men in R&S, I guess. But how can you ever be really comfortable with your beliefs if you haven't seriously considered the case against them?

Update:

likn: reminds me a bit of Keats' idea of negative capability - for which I have a lot of time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_capability

4 Answers

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  • Trisha
    Lv 5
    1 decade ago
    Favorite Answer

    mostly number 2. I can't prove there's no deity, but i can prove the evidence for one is invalid.

    EDIT: wtf is with all the tumbs down? ... no really, what did i say wrong?

    Source(s): atheist
  • ?
    Lv 5
    1 decade ago

    Being able to make a good pitch for your beliefs at least indicates you know what you believe and have some idea how to present it persuasively. But the rubber really meets the road in critiquing your own beliefs, which means testing the hypothesis. For example, lot's of people engage in "intercessory prayer" believing their religion's claims that if we pray for one another a god or gods will hear our petition and the focus of our prayer will benefit. But in double-blind statistical testing of the effect of intercessory prayer on the recovery of hospital patients we learned that those persons who were the focus of intercessory prayer by entire churches had outcomes which were not statistically different than the outcomes experienced by those for whom no one was praying. In other words, intercessory prayer was just as effective as doing nothing, and so we can state conclusively that belief inthe efficacy of such prayer is irrational and unmerited, and therefor pointless and a waste of time. By testing all of our beliefs we decide what is useful and what is not. More importantly, we can know immediately that our belief is nonsense if in fact it is not possible to test it. Fort example, if a person prays and the result they were hoping for comes to pass, they give God credit. But if they pray and nothing happens, then they say the answer to the prayer was "no" and God still gets credit. In other words, if a hypothesis is constructed is such a way that either it can't be tested or the results don't matter (which still means it hasn't been tested) then it's baloney. All religions claiming divine revelation fall into this category, and probably all religions period.

  • A Cat
    Lv 5
    1 decade ago

    Number 1. I've heard many arguments against my beliefs and there are some that are difficult to defend in anything other than spiritual ways. I believe this is a dual world, physical and spiritual. An understanding of both physical laws and spiritual laws is essential. It's difficult to describe spiritual things in physical terms...

    1 Cor. 2:14 But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.

  • Anonymous
    1 decade ago

    my ability to articulate the case that there's no way I know it all truthfully. Ability to accept ambiguity demonstrates my rationale.

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