Faithfully Logical

I could just as easily have called this, "Logically Faithful," but the fun is gone.

I wrote something a way back which mentioned a point which things keep driving home to me. I see, all the time in fact, even when I close my eyes and try to sleep (but my mental instabilities are a subject best glossed over in a parenthetical phrase) people, usually radical atheists defending their Gods, saying things to the tune of, "There is no room for faith in a logical discussion." They use this to justify their basic incivility toward anyone with a differing opinion on the subject of faith, because after all, if you can't discuss it logically it's no good, and since faith cannot be discussed logically (or rationally) then they can just brush off objections as being incompatible with their attempts at discussion.

The problem is that faith has everything to do with logic, and most people have no idea what logic is. I won't tackle that second assertion because it basically consists of me calling people stupid. However, there may be a few radical atheists in the listening audience who just suffered brain lesions at the mere thought of the first part, so I'd better forge on to greener pastures. Well, greener for me; the radical atheists might not like them so much.

Firstly, the rules of logic apply to discussions of faith just as easily as they apply to discussions of anything else. I know this is a sticking point between me and pretty much the rest of mankind, but bear with me. If two people can accept as axiomatic principle the same set of assertions, they can have a logical discussion of anything. You can have logical discussions of things which are blatantly untrue. I prefer the Socratic method, personally: "All men are immortal. Socrates is a cow. Therefore, the state of Socrates' immortality cannot be determined under this set of postulates." Logically sound. Totally false. All men are mortal. Socrates was a man. Socrates is no longer among the living. Those are the salient facts of the case. But I can discuss factually-incorrect postulates until the cows come home with Socrates.

The problem with logical discussions is that most of them aren't so trite. That's why science tries so hard to lay out its axiomatic material. Unless you agree with all the stuff asserted to be true by a scientist, you will not care about his conclusions, logical or not. And the discussions we have as humans are even harder to play "logically." Most of the time we don't begin conversations by a meticulous laying-out of everything we hold to be true for the purposes of discussion, and even were we to try, we'd be there a long time.

But if you accept logic as an axiom (and who says you have to, but if you don't, stop using its name in vain) then you must agree that, given a completely shared set of axiomatic matter (including our mutual acceptance of logic as axiomatic sometime previously in this sentence), anything can be discussed logically. Rationally, let's not debate, because rationality has baggage. But by the rules of logic, certainly.

So I can take as axiomatic a faith in God (of some sort or other) and if you would be kind enough to agree with that, then we could discuss the implications of God's existence in a logical manner. Therefore, unlike the prophets of atheism might like to believe, faith and logic are not antithetical.

The problem that arises is that radical atheists don't want to accept the axiom of God, and so they want to argue it. Silly radical atheists. You can't argue axioms logically. To say that this makes someone who holds differing axioms antithetical to logic simply shows your misunderstanding of the facts of logic, and since you claim to hold logic as an axiom, I could argue that point. If you stop claiming logic as axiom, then I'd stop arguing. It is no more correct to say that the acceptance of God's existence as axiomatic is antithetical to logic than it would be to say exactly the opposite (as some radical religious-types seem to believe): that only by accepting God's existence as axiomatic can one participate in logic.

But there's a deeper matter here, one which I've hinted at. Faith is indeed at the very base of logic. Faith in the axioms. After all, what is faith, really, but a belief in something which need not be proven. I can have faith in basic addition and subtraction and through them derive the wonders of our mathematical system. But you can't prove addition with math; it just is. Any proof must have axioms, and those axioms are not subject to proof. If you want to prove them, you have to back them up with further axioms. I know you can construct closed proofs in math, which rely on no outside axioms, but math is only a small subset of logic. I have faith in logic.

So if you as an atheist want to seek out common axioms with a theist (a word I am forced to use because "religious-type" sounds insulting) and then use those to discuss things logically, I applaud you. If you wish to accept, temporarily, certain religious axioms for the sake of argument, in order to prove that religions have acted illogically, you can do it without giving up your faith in your lack of faith. You can do it logically. People don't always act logically, and proving that is easy, but if an atheist wants to beat that horse, it would be completely within the purview of logic. At the end of the day, however, that logic, and all logic, is based on faith. And I won't even bother arguing that point. I hold it to be axiomatic.

Oh, and just because you can't discuss things logically doesn't mean they aren't worth discussing. Logic is fine, as far as it goes, but that's as far as it goes.