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PhilGoetz comments on Anti-rationality quotes - Less Wrong
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That's much better evidence than my list.
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.
the thing that really truly differentiates all these arguments from anything we would call rationality is that all the effort takes place after the bottom line has been written. There's already been a decision that God exists, that the pope is infallible, etc. The arguments written above the line are chosen based on whether or not they support the bottom line. That is the mark of rationalization, and not rationality.
This criticism would be valid if they were using evidence to argue above the line that god exists (the bottom line). However, the Catholic Church would not use evidence to assert that God exists, as the dogma is that the existence of God cannot be proven or demonstrated.
Hell yes.
Yes.