Friday, January 27, 2023

Who's Irrational?

People who believe that the physical world is not all there is, who believe instead that the world is the product of a transcendent Mind which is involved in world history are sometimes called “irrational” by secular folk who believe that the physical world is indeed all there is.

Dennis Prager has a piece at PJ Media in which he asks who is it, really, who’s irrational. He writes that examples can be found in every area of life of the non-religious actually believing what's irrational if believing what's irrational is defined as believing something that's contrary to common sense or lacking in any scientific justification.

For instance, it's mostly non-religious - or secular - people who believe that men can give birth; that males — providing they identify as females — should be allowed to compete against girls in women’s sports; that children conflicted about their identity should be given puberty-blocking hormones; and that young girls who think they're boys should have their healthy breasts surgically removed.

Prager believes that it's mostly non-religious folks who believe that it's okay for men in drag to dance in sexually suggestive ways in front of children; that it's racist to emulate Martin Luther King's aspiration to judge people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin; and that fewer police, fewer prosecutions and lower prison sentences (or no prison time at all) lead to less crime.

One could add to Prager's list that it's mostly secular folks who believe that there are a near infinity of other universes, all different, which lie beyond our own universe. They believe this despite the complete lack of empirical evidence for any universe but our own.

Furthermore, it's mostly secular people who believe that our universe sprang into being out of essentially nothing, and it's mostly secular people who believe that the equivalent of an entire library of information needed to create the first living cell somehow self-assembled by accident into a metabolizing, reproducing unit of life.

Again, thery believe this despite the utter dearth of evidence that it's even possible let alone that it happened.

Prager also touches on a few social and moral issues that are not actually related to the main topic of rationality, but since he brought them up I'll add one to his list:

We've seen dozens of mass murders over the last few decades, some of which seem to be completely unmotivated by anything other than the killer's desire to kill other human beings.

How many of these murderers are deeply religious Christians and how many of them have no belief in a God? I have no data to support my suspicion, but I'll go out on a limb and speculate that almost everyone, excluding Islamic terrorists, who has committed these horrific crimes has no significant belief in God at all.

I'd be willing to bet, too, that the same applies to those who commit almost all the other crimes afflicting our society - all of those, for instance, responsible for the fentanyl epidemic, all those who steal other people's property, and all those who engage in sex-trafficking.

The non-religious can claim that religious believers are irrational, but when it comes to matters of simple science and/or common morality, irrationality is often, and moral evil is almost always, found among the non-religious.