NihilCredo comments on Anti-rationality quotes - Less Wrong

7 Post author: PhilGoetz 17 April 2009 05:55PM

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Comment author: byrnema 17 April 2009 08:26:51PM *  2 points [-]

Someday, I'd like to describe how the Catholic Church has very sophisticated epistemological arguments for its beliefs. It rejects rationality, accepting that rationality can be used to sow significant doubt. However, the Catholic Church still uses arguments that would be compelling to a rationalist to defend its rejection of rationality.

I'm not sure I have the time or talent to prepare the argument, but I am curious if, as another Catholic-school alum, you would agree to any extent with the overall impression that the Catholic Church is a rational religion in the sense that it is actually concerned that it is epistemologically well-founded and dogmatically self-consistent?

It's my opinion, but I believe the church is sincerely motivated to be epistemologically well-founded: Catholics really do believe in truth and the application of logic and reason. On the one hand, this can make it easy to convert Catholics with a compelling rationalist argument. (I notice lots of converted Catholics on this site actually.) On the other hand, it may be still difficult to sway Catholics on particular views because they have built rationally compelling defenses for those views. Well, I guess that's not really a problem, since you can then just argue as two rationalists?

I should say here that by compelling I do not mean correct, but just that it is much more difficult to identify errors there than in, say, Creationism.

Comment author: NihilCredo 03 February 2011 07:40:48AM 2 points [-]

I'm not sure I have the time or talent to prepare the argument, but I am curious if, as another Catholic-school alum, you would agree to any extent with the overall impression that the Catholic Church is a rational religion in the sense that it is actually concerned that it is epistemologically well-founded and dogmatically self-consistent?

Hell yes.