Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Why should I believe as I do?

Tonight I had the pleasure of attending a debate between two of my favorite professors here at GMU about the rationality of religion. It was unfortunate that one debated the rationality of religious action and the other the rationality of religious belief, but the debate was fantastic nonetheless. I believe that the debate will be made available as a podcast (digital recording) for dispersal, and when it is I will link to it. Why should you listen to it? Because it provides excellent examples of a fantastic speaker (Dr. Larry Iannacone), the types of anti-religious arguments you hear all the time in academia (Dr. Bryan Caplan), and some good, non-experiential based, arguments for why religion is a rational action (again, Dr. I). Why non-experiential? Well, simply because if you base your entire argument for religion on experienced phenomenon you leave yourself open to counter-arguments such as "well, that's your experience and that's fine for you, but I've never experienced that", or, "are you sure you didn't just see/feel/experience what you really really wanted and expected to - kind of a mind-over-matter sort of thing."

All right, that's enough for now. I have many more thoughts on this though, so if you're interested, ask me.

God bless,

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