July 7, 2013
THERE ARE NO RATIONALISTS:
All That Is the Case : 6 arguments against the existence of God (William Deresiewicz, The American Scholar)
I wrote a recent post about what I called the persistence of faith--the difficulty even hardheaded rationalists appear to have accepting, as I put it, "the fact that this is all there is." Several readers pounced on the phrase. "The fact?" one asked rhetorically. Another said, "By 'this' you mean what we happen to experience with our senses and understand with our intelligence?"1. The criticisms are valid: we can't indeed say anything about what lies beyond our senses and intelligence. But I'm not sure that changes the argument. If there are things that can't impinge upon our senses or intelligence--if they can never become known to us in any way, direct or indirect, now or in the future--then they cannot be said to exist for us. "This," in any meaningful sense, is still all there is.2. Besides, the argument cuts both ways. If we can't know whether there is something more, then why are the religious always claiming otherwise? Why do they regale us with their certain knowledge of the deity--of His laws, and His attributes, and His children, and His glorious plan for humankind? "You believe in the Big Bang?" people have challenged me. Well, I wouldn't say believe, exactly, but go on. "So where did all the matter come from?" To which the only reasonable response is: how the hell am I supposed to know? Whereof we cannot speak, like the man said, thereof we must be silent.
Mr. Deresiewicz, for all the usual reasons, overstates what we can know. The fact is that it is his own argument that cuts both ways--if we limit ourselves to speaking rationally, we can't say anything about our senses and intelligence.
But, of course, it would be impossible to live a life organized around such perfectly reasonable doubt about our own existence, so we accept our senses and intelligence on faith. The alternative is simply too ugly to be an option. Having chosen to eschew Reason and accept Faith on such purely aesthetic grounds, we've established the terms of the argument and he no longer makes any sense at all. As, indeed, the Rationalists never have.
Posted by Orrin Judd at July 7, 2013 5:43 AM
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