"Your belief in God is not based on rationality." - a rational belief based on expierence, you can question the expierence if you like but it is entirely rational to believe things based on your own experiences - that is how scientists come to conclusion careful observation - setting up experiments which create experiences to test their theories.

Logical deductions based on experience.

I'm not saying they are responsible for atrocities.

The point I'm making is that faith supersedes reason. And once that happens, it is far easier to commit atrocities. And in this case, the faith need not be in a God, (Stalinist political thought could be described as a faith in the same way) but the danger remains the same.

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. "

I fear that people would rather blindly believe in a comforting lie than question and investigate and try to find what is real.

"that is how scientists come to conclusion careful observation - setting up experiments which create experiences to test their theories."

Yes, and they can reproduce them. I can do these experiments, if I so desired (and in some cases, had the particular education). They are reproducible.

A personal experience with God is of no more or less value to anybody else than a crazy person wearing a tinfoil hat on the street in Manhattan. He sure believes in it, but we call him crazy, but people who claim to talk to an invisible man in the sky, they're rational?

I think not.

"No, I know Newton's laws work. I've tested them.

I can also show others tangible proof of how they work.

You cannot show me tangible proof of your encounter with God."

yes this is Science, but a belief in God based on personal experience is just as rational, reasonable and perhaps delusional - now you might want them to ask why it s that some people don't have the same expierence of God, you might even be able to test these religious expierences with some new brain scanning device - but these expierences will still be open to interpretation.

@Jack Klein, you said: "You cannot show me tangible proof of your encounter with God. " There are many things that one experiences that cannot be tangibly proven to others... The lack of proof does not make it untrue.

That said, where physical evidence directly contradicts a religious view (such as with Creationism), the physical evidence wins. Believing in biblical Creationism does not make it true... it is false... provably so. Never the less, belief in Christ being a miracle worker and a god is not provably false. I think it is pretty tenuous... but it is not probably false. Those who believe in Christ (or some other religious tradition) but don't attack science and rationality should probably be left alone... debated certainly, but accepted just as we are accepted by them. The religious moderates are not the problem... any more than atheists are the problem... It is the fanatics that are the problem.

You can have rational belief which is wrong. I give up. You have some different definition of 'rational' than i do.

ra·tion·al (rsh-nl)
adj.
1. Having or exercising the ability to reason.
2. Of sound mind; sane.
3. Consistent with or based on reason; logical: rational behavior. See Synonyms at logical.
4. Mathematics Capable of being expressed as a quotient of integers.

I think 3 would apply in this situation.

2 would also apply to the tinfoil bag gentleman I discussed previously.

is it reasonable to believe the things you experience are real/true?

Experiences are based on sensory data. How we interpret them is how we get into trouble.

Yes, if one can reconcile this with everything else.

Simple put, why are "normal" individuals who claim to have a personal experience with God sane, and people like L Ron Hubbard, or David Koresh, etc seen as nuts?

Why is one deserving of respect, and the other scorn? Is it because the one has a lot more people willing to buy into the same delusion? From an objective standpoint, neither is. They're both equally crazy. And thus, not rational.

Jack_Klien - It is not possible for you to "know" that Newton's laws work, even if you have tested them. To do so, you operate under the assumption that there even are laws of nature, and even if there are laws, that they are always inviolate. This is something which we assume to be the case, but can clearly not prove (as we know from science, while it is possible to disprove something, you can't actually prove anything, just show that is it highly likely to occur that way the next time because it has always done so in the past).

@Jack Klein, is someone who claims to love someone else nuts? One can certainly not prove scientifically their love. Of course their actions are evidence for or against... but one cannot get inside one's head and prove or disprove someone else's love.

it depends on popularity - if you are one of their followers then they are not crazy, but that many people believe you are 'crazy' doesn't make it true or correct - that many people voted for Bush, TWICE, doesn't make them right, or him the bast man for the job (it does make him the elected man for the job, and apparently we're not allowed question democracy any more; so people seem to forget the mob is not always right)

so if a cult leader is less popular it doesn't mean he is wrong/crazy, it just means you are more likely to be one of those people who thinks that he is wrong/crazy.

And we all hope people are capable of protecting themselves from scam artists fraud and lies; you can't force people to change their views, and you can't prove there is no God, so you don't know you are right, you believe it based on your own experience and your interpretation of the same.

@nola2172, are you arguing that no one can ever know anything?

that should have been:
"if you are one of their followers then they are not crazy to you."

I am not arguing that we can not "know" things in the "they are likely to occur" sense or in the present sense (since we can know about the present). What I am arguing is that we "believe" that nature is governed by laws (because it appears to us to be that way), and it is this belief that allows us to "know" how things work.

@Jack - I think we actually agree that faith is not rational. As I stated before, faith is transrational:

transrational
adjective
(context, of thought etc.) Beyond the rational; believed without logic or evidence.

I go to the NT for a definition of faith:

Hebrews 11:1 NIV: Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.

As for faith in Newtonian physics - the predictability structures do not hold up under all circumstances. Does this mean Newton is wrong? No - just that there are in existence, that which can not be governed by traditional natural law.

Newton was wrong, he thought his rules were fnudamental to the universe, explaining how thing really work, but Einstien proved there is no absolute reference frame, and completely re-worked newtonian mechanics to apply to the idea of a relative reference frame (hence relativity)

It is hard to do these experiments because you need to be moving close to the speed of light to notice the effect - though electrons (electricity) moving near the speed of light does have a noticable effect in the form of magnetism - which was discovered/explained in the decades preceeding Einstien - and which happens to be explained by Relativity without the need to invent a new force (very cool stuff, Einstien not only extended Newtons laws he simplified/reduced the number of seperate things in the universe - or explained how one thing expresses itself in two different 'experience's)

oh, and moving things at close to the speed of light is very expensive...

@Rare Eagle,
for me, transrational suggests some kind of superiority over being rational... a transcendence. Irrational, though a completely valid description of faith (irrational: not governed by or according to reason), on the other hand, has negative connotations... I suggest "arational":

arational: Not within the domain of what can be understood or analyzed by reason; outside the competence of the rules of reason.
"Scientific knowledge is conceptual, rational, and testable. Mystical knowledge is usually aconceptual, arational, and does not lend itself to interpersonal testing."
- Ervin Laszlo, "Why Should I Believe in Science?", 1974, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 34, no. 4, p. 484

@orathaic, Newton was no more wrong than Copernicus was wrong. His view was merely modified/improved to fit the data better by later scientists (Copernicus believed the planets rotated around the sun in circular orbits, rather than ellipses).

There is a difference between having a model that is close but does not account for all the data and having a model that is made up whole-cloth.

@orothaic, but English has unpleasant cultural connotations for many, is needlessly complex, and one might say, unfair to non-English cultures.

@Dexter - I think that arational as defined above is a reasonable landing place.

@orthaic - I have a very limited understanding of the theory of relativity and/or quantum mechanics so I cannot really discuss with any real insight.

@dexter - no, (and here i scramble to find my copy of newton's principia - whicih i can't find...) newton went beyond saying his model was described such things of motion and rigid bodies - he supposed without any evidence for or against the idea that there was an asbolute space and time which was this external thing, this theatre wall against which all the interactions of the universe play against - and this is incorrect - he model is accurate to a very high degree for speeds much less than the speed of light, and objects do appear to have absolute positions on scales above the quantum - that leave's newton's model as useful (the calculations take less time and give pretty good answers, and by pretty good i mean to ~99.999% of the correct answer for 'everyday' things...) but fundamentally flawed in the way it looks at the universe itself (and i might argue that all other models have some flaws in that sense aswell)

@Rare Eagle
Quantum mechanics (QM) does not account for gravity (but fortunatey without doing so it can do a pretty good job describing almost everything excluding blackholes and the possibility of wormholes, and of course the big bang) - but we can only really solve the equations in QM for simply things - like the Hydrogen atom - above that the maths becomes very hard and we start making approximations anyway...

General Relativity (GR) describes Gravity very well, which makes it useful for describing the orbit of planets, the effect of black holes on the stars around them, and again fails within blackholes and the bigbang.

But each fails to take the other into account (GR takes space-time to be this thing which changes shape - depending on the energy/mass contained in said space and QM takes energy to be broken up into discrete units - which also breaks up position into discrete positions for items bound to each other (like electron bound to atoms) - the way you count discrete things is different from how you describe a curved surface which varies as a field... and the two things seem to not met up very well in any compromise - which we can work out at least.

@stukus: Yeah, i've heard that english spoken by someone to whom it is a second language can be understood by all, while someone to whom it is their first language can be understood by all those are first language english speakers - but it is harder for anyone to whom it is a second language.

c'est la vie; i guesss

Who would have guessed that this would turn into a discussion about newtonian physics... because I sure wouldn't have! lol.

I meant to say something concrete, it was the first thing that jumped into my mind, for the purposes I meant before switch physics with say... the fundamental theorems of calculus. You can have faith in calculus. My point is that the word faith doesn't exclude rationality because calculus is obviously something that we should have faith in.

calculus is true in itself - logically consistant.

And Newton's application of it to how objects move, and forces affect things was a huge improvement of our understanding in the field of physics / natural philosophy (as it was then called)

But calculus being true, doesn't mean you have a True model of the universe when using calculus. Newton was great...

but i think my arguement was that bilieving in God is (or at least can be) logically consistant with itself (and thus rational) - this can even be useful - but in any case i don't think it is True.

Assuming God exists we can get a glimpse of an understanding of it, (i don't say he becouse i don't think it is fair to ascribe gender when we don't know what God is) So even if we get a useful idea of God, that doesn't mean it is correct - but neither does it mean it is irrational.

@orathaic - you just described Kantian philosophy in a nutshell. He said that even if there is no God (he was a believer), the very idea of God has merit in and of itself, and practical applications in a society.