My Road to Unbelief Part V

My Road to Unbelief

Part V:Emotions and Logic

You may notice that my reasons so far for rejecting theistic ideas comes out of highly emotional responses. I'm not really talking in terms of evidence or proof. My reasons are concerned more with whether I want God to exist, rather than whether it is true.

There is some misunderstanding I believe that emotions and logic are somehow diametrically opposed. I have never understood this. Emotions have very clear causes and effects, and they have very sensible logic to them. The main issue is that certain emotional states cause people to be delirious and illogical.

As I discussed briefly in Part II, the logical grounding for most religious arguments is shaky. The best answers to a lot of theistic claims is "It does not follow" or "I don't know." For instance, the Watchmaker Argument. It basically goes like this: if you were to find a random watch, you would see that it has a clear intention and you could deduce from the watch that there is a watchmaker somewhere. Similarly, the universe must have such a designer.

However, there is no reason why this would necessarily work for everything. Take a child. If I were to find a random child, it would not imply a child-maker. It would imply parents. Parents may create a child, but they don't design a child by any normal definition of the word. And we can see how the logic falls apart: Design does not imply a designer. And you can use similar arguments to realize that creation does not imply a creator (You just make the same argument with natural phenomenon like lightning). It could. That's possible. But it does not follow.

I have always been interested in logic and mathematics. What can be invariably deduced from other statements? But I have found that simple logic isn't very useful in these discussions because it is so limited. There's not a lot statements you can definitively make. Saying "it does not follow" gets frustrating and begs the question "well what does follow?!" One needs much stronger concepts, like Occam's Razor, Model Theory, and eventually Bayesian Reasoning to use logic for these discussions.