I really am having trouble doubting my conviction in rational thought. I can’t visualize an alternative. I can visualize an alternative to my atheist philosophy though, since if God descended from heaven and handed me a bunch of concrete evidence that He exists, I wouldn’t say ‘ah, rationality was wrong.’ I would say ‘Oh, so you exist. I’ll eat my hat on that one and concede that my confidence in your non-existence has been defeated, but to be fair until just now you’ve given me no rational reason to believe in you.’ I’m a rational atheist because all of the convincing evidence is in that bucket, but even if a religion came along that was rigorously provably correct I would just be a rational theist. And I would have many pointed questions for that deity about the way life in the universe seems to be ‘designed’ in the sloppiest, most reckless way possible, like a programmer trying to compile all of the text from Wikipedia and then making random edits until it returned with no errors. Yes, I stole a joke from xkcd.
Well, imagine the world was such that “rational thought” (whatever you mean by it) tended to result in incorrect beliefs, and a different type of thinking (say, choosing positions randomly) always achieved better accuracy. You can’t fool it either; pretending to choose beliefs randomly won’t work unless you actually believe them.
I really am having trouble doubting my conviction in rational thought. I can’t visualize an alternative. I can visualize an alternative to my atheist philosophy though, since if God descended from heaven and handed me a bunch of concrete evidence that He exists, I wouldn’t say ‘ah, rationality was wrong.’ I would say ‘Oh, so you exist. I’ll eat my hat on that one and concede that my confidence in your non-existence has been defeated, but to be fair until just now you’ve given me no rational reason to believe in you.’ I’m a rational atheist because all of the convincing evidence is in that bucket, but even if a religion came along that was rigorously provably correct I would just be a rational theist. And I would have many pointed questions for that deity about the way life in the universe seems to be ‘designed’ in the sloppiest, most reckless way possible, like a programmer trying to compile all of the text from Wikipedia and then making random edits until it returned with no errors. Yes, I stole a joke from xkcd.
Well, imagine the world was such that “rational thought” (whatever you mean by it) tended to result in incorrect beliefs, and a different type of thinking (say, choosing positions randomly) always achieved better accuracy. You can’t fool it either; pretending to choose beliefs randomly won’t work unless you actually believe them.
...I’m having trouble imagining how such a world would work even in principle. It seems logically self-contradictory.
There is a God/simulator, and he inspects your thought processes, making the world such that rational thinking fails.