ARGUMENTS FOR THE RATIONALITY OF BLIND FAITH

Some people fear truth and evidence so they use faith and belief to blind themselves.  When a bias goes that far, the person clearly has psychological issues.  Some try to pretend to have such faith so that others will be sucked in and develop the bias.  The kind of faith or belief that can be based on evidence but won't use it is blind.  The other type has no evidence but believes and has faith anyway.  The one who is in a credible religion but does not use evidence is one story.  The one who has faith in a stupid credulous religion is another story. 

Why would somebody blind themselves to affirm a God who would punish them and their loved ones and maybe even send them to an eternal Hell?  If they think they are magically immune and God will go after others that would explain it.  They are not going to admit it.  Plus if God is only a fantasy construct and you know that deep down then deep down you don't really accept the dark stuff.

Real belief and faith are based on what is likely.  If you respect yourself you will make sure you adopt only what is likely to be true and that means that real faith is given to you by evidence.  Evidence should teach you what to believe.  Nothing else.  No one else.  We all learn from each other so people deliberately believing lies is everybody's business.

When you have no reason to doubt something, does that mean that it is likely to be true for you?  No.  Absence of evidence is not evidence for something.  You need evidence for the idea.

I need to use my thinking ability.  Better to think wrongly than not to think at all as long as you are open to correction.   We have no reason to doubt reason or what we sense. If I make a mistake and think that 5+5=11 my reason is right but I am using the wrong kind of reason.  There is hope for me seeing the light.
 
Experience and reason are their own evidence.

Ex-Catholic philosopher Anthony Kenny rejects this. According to him, a person cannot be his own witness. “Nothing can provide evidence for itself, any more than a witness can corroborate his own story. So evident propositions are believed without evidence” (page 9, What is Faith?). This is wrong. When a person gives a testimony you have to take it as likely to be true unless something proves that it is not. More people tell the truth than what lie. If Kenny is right then there is no such thing as evidence and his belief in rational belief which he gets from reason and experience has no evidence for it.

We concede that your experience and reason might not the be greatest evidence but to say they are not evidence at all as Kenny says is a mistake.  Hearsay can in fact be right.  This error is the reason why he says that there is no evidence or justification for the belief that only what has good evidence should be believed.  To say there is no evidence that we need evidence to find Jack guilty of murder is an insane proposition. 

He is accusing the definition of faith as seeing what the evidence says to be probably true of being self-refuting or contradictory. He is wrong for to agree with him would be saying nobody really believes anything!
 
Kenny, like Plantinga, says that a belief is rational only if it is self-evident, can be shown to be true by the senses or memory and by argument or experiment (page 20). We agree with this but we reject his view that belief in this criteria has no justification.

Kenny does not believe that a self-evident truth is certain but is only a guess. He thinks the guesses need to be made for or without them we will know nothing anyway! It is irrational to have reason just because you think you need it. Needing something does not make it correct. Then you have it only because you need it and not because it is rational so Kenny is not rational at all. 

It seems we can live without believing anything as long as we go along with society.  But you may say that this shows you believe you should comply.  But you can describe compliance as a choice not a belief.  Kenny's view risks people going down that road. 

Additionally some say that we live normal lives just because we do or are programmed to and for no reason.

Or you can say that everything you experience may be trickery and illusion and your memory may be continually being altered so you don’t know what is real but you just go along with the illusion in case it is real. So, the notion of needing faith making faith logical is totally wrong.  It makes it pragmatic not logical.  It is not even faith.
 
If we are just guessing that reason and experience are reliable then we believe in nothing except that there is no evidence. If we say we believe in something then we are kidding ourselves. We are just guessing not reasoning.  He messes around with words such as rational.  One minute it means rational and the next minute he means it is guessing.

We conclude that it is true we never have great certainty but that never overthrows careful reasoning or evidence.  The jigsaw can still be seen for what it is with a third of the pieces missing.

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