There's really no logical reason to believe in religion.

Gelzo

There really isn't. Not sure I have much else to say.

(I think we also needed this thread.)

Aondeug

No there isn't. AT ALL. It does make for nice comfort and/or a crutch though.

Beholderess

Funniest thing is that even if the existence of God can be proven (and there were several good attempts, convincing enough for me, at least. Then again, I am not good at phylosophy at all, so my opinion on the matter proves nothing), it still does mot give any basis for this or that religion.

However, every single ethnic group has some sort of religious beliefs. Every single one. So it seems that regardless of logical reasons, psychological reasons for it's existence are damn important.

Also, one does not have to believe in supernatural to have what effectively is religion.

As for this one, my my question about religion right now is not "if this is true" (this is irrelevant), but "would it be a good thing if it was true", "are the actions required of me by religion/philosophy/ideology in question are virtuous and just ones". Wish anyone could answer that without looking at religion/philosophy/ideology itself as a justification...

Tnophelia

Why believe in religion when you can fear a God?

saladofstones

There is plenty of reason to believe in it but the key element of religion is faith and belief.  For me at least, it was some personal experiences that made me go from a pretty strong atheist to a pretty fervent Catholic, its just that I don't really feel a need to discuss or force my belief on others given how most of my examples are personal.

For me, I don't fear punishment as much as I fear not being virtuous, which to me is a greater damage than anything the fires of hell can do.

AHR

Psychology, my dear Gelzo. The placebo effect is a powerful force to be reckoned with. Also, there IS a logical reason for religion to be around -- controlling the masses.

ninjaclown

because religion is all bull amirite

Khwarizmi

I don't agree; saying that there's no logical reason to believe in religion - as in any religion, all religion, no ifs, no buts, that all religion is illogical, period - that's an enormous generalisation that I think can't possibly be correct.

I do think that there isn't a logical reason, with our current knowledge, to believe in a physical God who created the universe, or in actual reincarnation, or any of a number of other popular religious beliefs (the usual reasons given seem to range from gut feelings to just-supposes, which plainly aren't logical).

Nevertheless, I remain unconvinced that all religious beliefs are illogical, especially when we're talking about concepts which are held to exist outside the material world, as is often the case.

>As for this one, my my question about religion right now is not "if this is true" (this is irrelevant), but "would it be a good thing if it was true", "are the actions required of me by religion/philosophy/ideology in question are virtuous and just ones". Wish anyone could answer that without looking at religion/philosophy/ideology itself as a justification...

This is similarly my main interest in religion at the moment.  I think, though, that there is a problem in that there is no ethics system which doesn't require you to treat some things as intrinsically good or intrinsically bad.

I sometimes see people accuse the non-religious of avoiding religion because they are unwilling to make the effort to do the right thing; I think a distinction needs to be made between «This is difficult for me because it's hard work, even though I know it's the right thing to do» and «This is difficult for me because it seems like pure evil to me».  The former might well be a sign of weakness, but the latter isn't, and I think treating it as such can do more harm than good.

Super Lazuli

Religion isn't really supposed to be logical.

Neither is anything spiritual, for that matter.

Which is why I tend to think it should matter exactly as much as everything else that is a matter of opinion at its core. That is to say, not a whole lot.

saladofstones

AHR: Way to be a smug dick. :V

Gelzo

I'll admit to generalizing. From a perspective of- for lack of a better term- ignorance (or an environment filled with misinformation [maybe that's effectively the same thing]), I can see how a person could come to strange conclusions about the nature of existence without something like logical fallacies coming into play.

The people I normally interact with are the ones I believe have no such excuse. {{Understatement}} There's lots of information available on the internet.

Tnophelia

I guess it's good in moderation. When people devote too much time to anything it tends to get bad, correct? or when people going around gushing about how great it is and trying to get them to like it too, it annoys people and makes them feel threatened.

mathias

I think most of you are confusing "logical reason" with "empirical evidence". The two are not the same. You can think up any number of logically consistent systems that have nothing do do with the real world. Of course most metaphysics try to exlain what we see to some degree, anyways, but still. So it's no problem to make a metaphysical system in which the existence of god is indeed logical and quite a few philosophers have in fact had such systems, where the existence of god was not only logical, but necessary.

Empirism is all well and good and in fact the scientific method of empiriscm mixed with some deductive reasoning seems to work pretty well for getting information about the "real" world. It isn't logical though, for a variety of reasons. One is the simple problem of inductive reasoning, "We se something happen x amount of times, therefore it must always happen". Now there are many ways of trying to get around this, the most common one being that we find "provisional truths" that are true untill they are falsified (because, while you can't verify something logically, you can falsify it, simply by finding a counter-example). This is also the basis of Popper's famous demarcation of what is science and what isn't (it must be falsifiable). In practice things are a little different though, since we rarely see a theory falsified by a few anomalies (see Kuhn for the most famous discussion of this). Then there is of course the problem of whether empiricism can even give us information in the first place, if we can trust what our senses tell us. Rationalism instead holds up our thoughts and logic as the best way to gain knowledge about the world. Regardless of all this, science does seem to give us a progressively better understanding of the universe or at least it allows us to manipulate it, so the method seems pretty good. And it would suck if it was otherwise, what with me studying physics and all. Still, it isn't as clear-cut and without problems as some people want to make it out to be.

Now, what you probably mean is that there is no empirical evidence for the existence of god, which as I have just discussed is not the same as a logical reason. In fact empiricism and rationalism are kind of opposite, though logical reasoning does play a huge part in science too, in the actual theories used to describe the empirical data. Which is once again nice, because I like my math and theoretical physics.

Khwarizmi

Correct me if I'm wrong (which I could well be; I've never studied philosophy and I dropped mathematics and science after I finished my GCSEs), but isn't current scientific thought based on critical rationalism, which is distinct from both empiricism and earlier forms of rationalism?

Because I don't think I made my position clear earlier, I'll specify that not only do I think that under some circumstances religious beliefs may be logical for some people but not others, but that I also think that some religious beliefs may be entirely reasonable even if the person holding them has a good understanding of modern science and is not particularly ignorant (willfully or otherwise).

mathias

Critical rationalism is the theory put forward by the aforementioned Popper. The gist of it is that theory goes before experiment, IE an experiment is never made in a vacuum, it is made to test a hypothesis. Basically, the ideal way of scientific advancement according to Popper is as follows: There is a problem P1. One puts forward a hypothesis H1 to solve P1. H1 is then subjected to a uncompromising attempt at falsification. If it is falsified H1 fails, however the experiment E1 may have given rise to new information about the problem. Thus we can put forth a new hypothesis H2 based on a clearer understanding. H2 is then sought falsified and well, basically rinse and repeat. P1, H1, E1, H2, E2, H3... So we gain a continuously better understanding of a subject by always seeking uncompromising attempts at falsification. An important apsect of Popper's theory is that the "scientific value" of a statement can be measured by it's degree of falsifiability. Note that this has nothing do do with the "truth value" of the statement at all. Of course a naive application of this approach isn't sufficient to explain actual scientific methodology and if it is the only demarcation of science and non-science it seems to fall a little short. What Popper and almost all subsequent philosophy of science does acknowledge is that we can never know whether we have reached a "real truth", we have just reached a provisional one. In Popper's framework, one that hasn't been falsified yet (and may never be).

I you are an instrumentalist it doesn't really matter,
since the best theory is simply the one that decribes most data in the best way possible.
Whether the objects of it really exist or if the world really works
like that is irrelevant and it is meaningless to talk about whether one
theory has more to do with the "real" world than another.

Of course Popper's philosophy has been under criticism almost from the day it was made and today there are a lot of other theories of science that may use elements of Popper, but doesn't exactly conform to it all. As I said before, the most obvious problem is that an anomaly in and off itself rarely falsifies a theory, everything is compared within the confines the current paradigm (socialogical context, the accepted science of the time etc.) as Kuhn noted. Some of the people who have worked on these things in the last 50-60 years are Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn and Imre Lakatos, though the last two are decidedly more decriptive than normative like Popper.

And no I don't think that believing in god is necessarily an uneducated, stupid opinion. There can be plenty of philosophical reasons for doing so. Painting it as something for the stupid, ignorant people who don't understand science is a strawman at it's finest. For full disclousure, I myself am agnostic.