Which Rationality?

Timothy Keller, in his book The Reason for God writes the following:

"I want to show that there are sufficient reasons for believing Christianity. Priminent disbelievers in Christianity today - Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennet, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens - insist that sufficient reasons do not exist for the existence of God. Dawkins, for example, says that the claim of God's existence is a scientific hypothesis that should be open to rational demonstration The God Delusion, p. 31ff. He and his co-skeptics want a logical or empiral argument for God that is airtight and therefore convinces almost everyone. They won't believe in God until they get it.

Is there anything wrong with that? I think so. These authors are evaluating Christian arguments by what some have called "strong rationlism." Its proponents laid down what was called the "verification principle," namely, that no one should believe a proposition unless it can be proved rationally by logic or empircaly by sense experience. What is mean by the word "proved'? Proof, in this view, is an argument so strong that no one person whose logical facutlies are operating properly would have any reason for disbelieving it. Atheists and agnostics ask for this kind of "proof" for God, but are not alone in holding to strong rationalism. Many Christians claim that their arguments for faith are so sotrong that all who reject them are simply closing their minds to the truth out of fear or stubbornness.

Despite all the books calling Christians to provide proofs for their beliefs, you won't see philosphers doing so, not even the most atheistic. The great majority think that strong rationalism is nearly impossible to defend. To begin with, it can't live up to its own standards. How could you empircally prove that no one should believe something without empirical proof? You can't, and that reveals it to be, ultimately, a belief. Strong rationalism also assumes that it is possible to achieve "the view from nowhere," a position of almost complete objectivity, but virtually all philosophers today agree that is impossible. We come to every individual evaluation with all sorts of expierences and background beliefs that strongly influence our thinking and the way our reason works. It is not fair, then, to demand an argument that all rational people would have to bow to.

The philospher Thomas Nagel is an atheist, but in his book The Lat Word he admits that he can't come to the question of God in anything like a detached way. He confesses that he has a "fear of religion," and he doubts that anyone can address this issue without very powerful motives for seeing the arguments go on way or the other.

The philosophical indefensibility of "stron rationalism" is the reason that the books by Dawkins and Dennett have been getting such surprisingly rough treatment in scholarly journals. As just one example, the Marxist scholar Terry Eagleton wrote a scathing review of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion in the Londong Review of Books. Eagleton attacks both of Dawkins's naive ideas, namely that faith has no rational component, and that reason isn't based to a great degree on faith.

Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that. For mainstream Christianity, reason argument, and honest doubt have always played an integral role in belief... Reason, to be sure, doesnt go all the way down for believers, but it doesn't for most sensitive, civilized non-religious types either. Even Richard Dawkins lives more by faith than by reason. We hold many beliefs that have no umimpeachably rational justification, but are nonetheless reasonable to entertain....

If we reject strong rationalism, are we then stuck in relativism - without any way to judge one set of beliefs from another? Not at all. Complete relativism is impossible to maintain. "Critical thinking" assumes that there rare some arguments that many or even most rational people will find convincing, even though there is no argument that will be persuasive to everyone regardless of viewpoint. It assumes that some systems of belief are more reasonable that others, but that all arguments are rationally avoidable in the end. That is, you can always find reason to escape it that is not sheer bias or stubbornness. Nevertheless, this doesn't mean that we can't evaluate beliefs, only that we should not expect conclusive proof, and to demant it is unfair. Not even scietists proceed that way.

Scientists are very reluctant to ever say that a theory is "proved." Even Richard Dawkins admits that Darwin's theory cannot be finally proven, that 'new facts may come to light which will force our successors...to abandon Darwinism or modify it beyond recognition." But that doesn't mean that science cannot test theouries and find some far more empirically verifiable that others. A theory is considered empircially verified if it organizes the evidence and explains phenomena better than any conceivable alternative theory. That is, if, through testing, it leads us to expect with accuracy many and varied events better than any other rival account of the same data, then it is accepted, though not (in the strong rationalist sense) "proved."