Category: Reason and Rationality

A Van Til Response to my Anti-Presuppositionalism

This is the third in a new series on presuppositionalism. The first installment is here, and the second here. 

I've been re-reading large chunks of Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, P & R Publishing, 2008. This fourth edition, edited by K. Scott Oliphint, includes the complete text of the original 1955 edition and useful footnote commentary by Oliphint.

You will recall my claim that with respect to the existence of God there are rationally acceptable arguments for and rationally acceptable arguments against, but no rationally compelling arguments on either side. So I was pleased to find an attempt by Van Til to respond to this sort of objection. (DF 126) He formulates the objection as follows:

"While a Christian can prove that his Christian position is fully as reasonable as the opponent's view, there is no such thing as an absolutely compelling proof that God exists, or that the Bible is the Word of God, just as little as anyone can prove its opposite."

Van Til then responds:

In this way of putting the matter there is a confusion between what is objectively valid and what is subjectively acceptable to the natural man.

[. . .]

It is precisely the Reformed Faith which, among other things, teaches the total depravity of the natural man, which is most loathsome to that natural man.

Turning to p. 352, we learn that the natural man is "spiritually dead." "The natural man does not know God." Or rather, he knows God in an implicit way, but suppresses "the knowledge of God given man by virtue of creation in God's image." On p. 255 we learn that having been made in the image of God we have an "ineradicable sense of deity" within us. This of course is Calvin's sensus divinitatis. Van Til makes bold to say, further, that men's "own consciousness is inherently and exclusively  revelational of God to themselves," and that "No man can help knowing God, for in knowing himself, he knows God."  

I'll conclude the quoting with a Van Tilian slam against the 'Romanists' as he often refers to them:

It  is the weakness of the Roman Catholic and Arminian methods that they virtually identify objective validity with subjective acceptability to the natural man. Distinguishing carefully between these two, the Reformed apologist maintains that there is an absolutely valid argument for the existence of God and the truth of Christian theism. (126)

Respondeo

'Virtually' is one of those weasel words that good writers either avoid or define.  But let that pass. Speaking for myself and not for the 'Romanists,' I will say that what Van Til is doing above is simply adding a layer of psychologizing to his question-begging.  He is engaging in the opposite kind of pure metaphysical bluster as I accused Galen Strawson of engaging in. Strawson:

We can, for example, know with certainty that the Christian God does not exist as standardly defined: a being who is omniscient, omnipotent, and wholly benevolent. The proof lies in the world, which is full of extraordinary suffering. If someone claims to have a sensus divinitatis that picks up a Christian God, they are deluded. It may be added that genuine belief in such a God, however rare, is profoundly immoral: it shows contempt for the reality of human suffering, or indeed any intense suffering.

What we have here are two opposite forms of pure bluster.  Neither Van Til nor Strawson can prove what they claim to be certain of, and both psychologize their opponents,  the one by appeal to a supposed "total depravity," the other by appeal  to insanity.   

There is nothing to choose between these two opposite forms of bluster. And so, dear reader, does not my position strike you as the only sane and reasonable one?

Argumentative Circles and their Diameters: More on Presuppositionalism

The day before yesterday, re: presuppositionalism, I wrote:

We need to bear in mind  that arguments have premises and that no argument can prove its own premises. An argument of the form p therefore p is an argument valid in point of logical form in which premise and conclusion are identical, but no one will take an argument of this form as proving that p. Every circular argument of the above form is valid, and some are sound; but none are probative. By that I mean that no such argument constitutes a proof.  That ought to be perfectly obvious.

'Circularity' in respect of arguments is of course a metaphor: no argument is literally a geometrical circle. But it is a useful metaphor and I propose we extend it by speaking of the 'diameter' of a circular argument.  The logical form italicized above — p therefore p — has a 'diameter' than which no shorter can be conceived.  Its 'diameter' is zero. If a geometrical circle has a diameter of zero, then it is not a circle but a point.  The diameter of a circular argument of the above form is also a 'point,' figuratively speaking, the point being the one proposition that serves as both premise and conclusion.

A circular argument of zero diameter is said to be 'vicious.' Are there then 'virtuous' or if not positively virtuous then  'non-vicious' circular arguments?  Can one argue in a way that is circular but logically acceptable? Brian Bosse brought up this issue over lunch Sunday as we were discussing my longish entry on presuppositionalism. He may have had John M. Frame in mind.

Presuppositionalists such as Frame take the Word of God as set forth in the Protestant Christian Bible as their "ultimate presupposition." (Five Views on Apologetics, Zondervan 2000, 209) It is their "ultimate criterion of truth." (209)  This commitment of theirs is faith-based:

. . . for Christians, faith governs reasoning just as it governs all other human activities. Reasoning is not in some realm that is neutral between faith and unbelief. There is no such realm, since God's standards apply to all of life. (209)

What causes faith? ". . . God causes faith by his own free grace." (209) What is the rational basis of faith? ". . . the answer is that faith is based on reality, on truth. It is in accord with all the facts of God's universe and all the laws of thought that God has ordained. . . . The faith he gives us agrees with God's own perfect rationality." (209-210)

We want to know what rationally justifies faith in God and in his Word as found in the Bible. We are told that this faith is justified because it is true, agreeing as it does with all of the laws of thought that God has ordained. God himself, as the ultimate source of all things, including rationality, is the ultimate rational justification of our faith in him and his Word.  The reasoning here is plainly circular as Frame admits:

There is a kind of circularity here, but the circularity is not vicious. It sounds circular to say that faith governs reasoning and also that it is based on rationality. It is therefore important to remember that the rationality that serves as the rational basis for faith is God's own rationality. The sequence is: God's rationality –>human faith –>human reasoning. The arrows may be read "is the rational basis for." That sequence is linear, not circular. (210)

Frame's fancy footwork here is unavailing, an exercise in sophistry. He is obviously reasoning in a circle by presupposing the very thing whose existence he wants to prove. But he is loathe to admit that this is what he is doing. So he introduces a bogus distinction between vicious circles and linear circles.  But just as 'linear circle' in geometry is a contradictio in adjecto , so too is 'linear circle' in logic. 

You are either arguing in a circle or you are not. You are either presupposing what you are trying to prove or you are not. You are either begging the question or you are not. You are either committing the formal fallacy of petitio principii (hysteron proteron) or you are not. That is the long and the short of it. One or the other and no weaseling out via some bogus distinction between vicious and non-vicious circular arguments.

What Frame wants is a 'knock-down' (rationally compelling or rationally coercive) argument for the existence of the God of the Protestant Christian Bible interpreted along Calvinist lines.  He thinks he can get what wants by way of a transcendental argument,  one that issues in God "not merely as the conclusion of an argument, but as the one who makes argument possible." (220)  He wants God to play a transcendental role as the ultimate and unconditioned condition of the possibility of all our intellectual operations including reasoning, whether valid or invalid, sound or unsound. (If his God does play the transcendental role, then Frame can say that the arguments of atheists, just insofar as they are arguments, prove the existence of God!) 

Now it must be granted, as I granted to Brian over lunch, that if Frame's God exists, then he does play the transcendental role. The question, however, is whether it can be proven that nothing other than Frame's God could play the transcendental role. It can be proven that there is a transcendental condition of all our intellectual operations. (See my earlier entry.) Where Frame goes wrong is in thinking that from the fact that there is a rationally compelling argument for the existence of a transcendental condition of the possibility of all our intellectual operations (forming concepts, defining terms, making judgments, giving arguments, replying to objections offering hypotheses, etc.) it follows immediately that his God exists beyond the shadow of a rational doubt.  How does he know that his God alone could play the transcendental role? Frame may be taxed with  giving the following invalid argument:

a) If the God of the Protestant Christian Bible exists, then he plays the transcendental role;

b) It is objectively certain that something plays the transcendental role;

ergo

c) It is objectively certain that the God of the Protestant Christian Bible  plays the transcendental role. 

The premises are true, but the conclusion does not follow from them. For it is not objectively certain that nothing other than the God of the Christian Bible could play the transcendental role. This is because no non-transcendental argument — Frame mentions the "causal argument" — for the existence of God is rationally compelling. Hence no non-transcendental God argument can assure us that the existence of God is objectively certain. 

Here is another way to see the matter. It is rationally demonstrable that there is a total and unique way things are. (For if you assert that there is no way things are, then you are asserting that the way things are is that there is no way things are.) Now if Frame's God exists, then he is the concrete and personal metaphysical ground of the way things are. But how do we know that Frame's God exists? We cannot simply assume that the transcendental proof of the existence of the way things are is also a proof of Frame's God.  So non-transcendental arguments must be brought into to take us to Frame's God, Frame's "causal argument" for example. But these arguments are none of them rationally compelling. They do not generate objective certainty. So how do we know that something else is not the metaphysical ground of the way things are?

The Presuppositionalist Challenge to My Position

The presuppositionalism of Cornelius van Til, Greg L. Bahnsen, John M. Frame and others sets me a challenge given some long-held views of mine. I will here explain one of these views and then explain why it is incompatible with presuppositionalism. After that, I will begin to explain my reasons for rejecting presuppositionalism. This third task will require additional posts.

I have maintained that both theism and atheism are rationally acceptable by beings like us in  our present state. Theism is the view that there is a supreme transcendent being of a personal nature who created ex nihilo everything other than himself.  Atheism, then, is the view that there is no such being. Because the competing views thus defined are logical contradictories, they cannot both be true and they cannot both be false. Not everyone will accept the above definitions of 'theism' and 'atheism,' but if I am not mistaken presuppositionalists do accept them.

So on my accounting theism and atheism are both rationally acceptable. To appreciate my thesis you must understand that truth and rational acceptability are not the same. Some propositions are true but not rationally acceptable.  It is also easily shown that some propositions are rationally acceptable but not true.  This is because truth is absolute whereas rational acceptability is relative to various indices. Rational acceptability can vary with time and place and other factors; truth cannot. That there are four elements, air, earth, fire, and water was rationally acceptable to the ancient Greeks. It is not rationally acceptable to us. If one were to identify the true with the rationally acceptable, one would have to say that the number and nature of the elements has changed over time.

To claim that both theism and atheism are rationally acceptable is to claim that good arguments  can be given for both.  A good argument, as I use 'good argument,' is one that has plausible premises and commits no formal or informal fallacy. A good argument, then, is not the same as a rationally compelling or rationally coercive argument.  Every rationally compelling argument is of course good, but not every good argument is rationally compelling. A well-reasoned case for a proposition needn't be a rationally compelling case.  If it is well-reasoned, then I call it 'good.'  Here are the details. (The reader may want to skip the next section (in Georgia 12-pt) the better to catch the drift of this entry, and then come back to it.)

Excursus

Philosophers make reasoned cases for all manner of propositions, but their colleagues typically do not find these arguments to be compelling.  But what do I mean by 'compelling'?   I say that a (rationally) compelling case or argument is one that forces the 'consumer' of the argument to accept the argument's conclusion on pain of being irrational should he not accept it.  I will assume that the 'consumer' is intelligent, sincere, open to having his mind changed, and well-versed in the subject matter of the argument. Now it may be that there are a few arguments that are rationally compelling in this sense. But there are no rationally compelling arguments available to us here below (in our present state) for or against the existence of God. Or so I claim.  I do not claim to have a rationally compelling argument for this meta-philosophical claim. I claim merely that There are no rationally compelling arguments for or against the existence of God is rationally acceptable.  It follows that I will not tax you with irrationality if you reject my meta-philosophical claim. I tolerate your dissent: I allow that you may reasonably disagree with me about my meta-claim.
 
We need to bear in mind  that arguments have premises and that no argument can prove its own premises. An argument of the form p therefore p is an argument valid in point of logical form in which premise and conclusion are identical, but no one will take an argument of this form as proving that p. Every circular argument of the above form is valid, and some are sound; but none are probative. By that I mean that no such argument constitutes a proof.  That ought to be perfectly obvious. Equally obvious is that one cannot prove a proposition by presupposing it. I trust that the reader understands the standard definitions of 'valid' and 'sound.'  Proofs are demonstrative; they establish their conclusions with  objective certainty. There is of course non-demonstrative reasoning, inductive and abductive.  But no inductive argument, no matter how strong, amounts to a proof. This is a point I share with Greg L. Bahnsen: "Inductive arguments are always inconclusive . . . ." (Presuppositional Apologetics, American Vision, 2021, p. 302) Since every argument has a conclusion, what does it mean to say that an argument is inconclusive? It means that the argument does not amount to a proof of its conclusion.
 
Now given that no argument can prove its own premises, what reason could one give for accepting the premises of a given argument?  Suppose  argument A has P1 and P2 as premises and that its conclusion C follows logically from the premises.  Why accept P1 and P2?  One could adduce further arguments B and C for P1 and P2 respectively.  But then the problem arises all over again.  For arguments B and C themselves have premises.  If P3 is a premise of B, what reason could one give for the acceptance of P3? One could adduce argument D.  But D too has premises, and if you think this through you soon realize that you have brought down upon your head an infinite regress which is vicious.  The regress is vicious because the task of justifying by argument all the premises involved cannot be completed.
 
To avoid argumentative regress we need premises that are self-justifying in the sense that they are justified, but not justified by any proposition external to themselves.  Such propositions could be said to be, not just evident, but self-evident.  But what is self-evident to one person is often not self-evident to another.  This plain fact forces a distinction between subjective and objective self-evidence.  Clearly, subjective self-evidence is not good enough if our concern is with things external to consciousness such as God as opposed to what Roderick Chisholm calls self-presenting states such as the state I am in when I feel pain.   In the case of felt pain, subjective and objective self-evidence coalesce. Felt pain is an internal state: to feel pain is to be in pain. Felt or phenomenal pains are such that their esse (their to be) is identical to  their percipi (their to be perceived) But with respect to propositions that are about external things, things that exist independently of finite consciousness, if it merely seems to subject S that p is self-evident, that does not suffice to establish that p is objectively self-evident.  Trouble is, when someone announces that such-and-such is objectively self-evident that too is a claim about how it seems to that person, so that it is not clear that what is being claimed as objectively self-evident is not in the end itself merely subjectively self-evident. 
 
Example.  Suppose an argument for the existence of God employs the premise, 'Every event has a cause.'  Is this premise objectively self-evident?  No.  Why can't there be an uncaused event?  "Uncaused event,' unlike 'uncaused effect,' is not a contradictio in adiecto. So how does one know that that premise is true?  It is a plausible premise, no doubt, but plausibility is not the same as truth.  (There are implausible truths, and false plausibilities. Exercise for the reader: give examples.) And if you do not know (with objective certainty) that the premises of your argument are true, then your argument, even if logically impeccable in every other way, does not amount to a proof, strictly speaking.  A proof of a proposition is a rationally compelling argument for it.
 
My point is that there are hardly any rationally compelling arguments for substantive theses about matters external to consciousness.  But one can make reasoned cases for such theses.  Therefore, a reasoned case is not the same as a compelling argument. Again, I do not claim to have a rationally compelling argument for the bolded thesis.  I claim merely that the thesis is rationally acceptable. The thesis is both substantive and self-applicable; it implies with respect to itself that is not provable, strictly speaking, or compellingly arguable. I accept that consequence as I must.
 
Because people are naturally dogmatic and crave doxastic security, security in their beliefs, they are unwilling to accept my meta-philosophical thesis that there are hardly any compelling arguments for substantive theses about such matters external to our consciousness as the existence of God.  They want to believe that their pet beliefs are compellingly provable and that people who do not accept their 'proofs' are either irrational or morally defective.  Their tendency is to accept as probative any old argument for the conclusions they antecedently accept, no matter how shoddy the argument,  and to reject as non-probative arguments that issue in conclusions they do not accept.  I am not saying that all give in to this tendency in its crude form, but the tendency is there and is operative.
 
One way to refute what I am saying would be by providing a rationally compelling argument for the existence of God, or a rationally compelling argument for the nonexistence of God.  You won't be able to do it. Or so I claim. But I am open to challenge. If you think you have a rationally compelling/coercive argument for or against the existence of God, send it to me. 
 
The reader might suspect that it is the fact of disagreement among highly competent practitioners that leads me to hold, or at least plays an important role in leading me to hold, that on the theism-atheism issue (and on many others) both sides are rationally acceptable, but neither is provable, demonstrable, compellingly arguable. If that is what the reader suspects, then he is on the right track. My position is close to the one articulated in Henry Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics (Hackett, 1981, 7th edition; originally published in 1907):
. . . it will be easily seen that the absence of such disagreement must remain an indispensable negative condition of the [objective] certainty of our beliefs. For if I find any of my judgments, intuitive or inferential, in direct conflict with the judgment of some other mind, there must some error somewhere: and if I have no more reason to suspect error in the other mind than in my own, reflective comparison between the two judgments necessarily reduces me temporarily to a state of neutrality. (342, emphasis added)
 
End of Excursus: Back to the Main Line
 
Neutrality is the key word here. A stock claim of presuppositionalists is  that there is no neutrality with respect to the existence or nonexistence of God, which for them is the God of the (Christian) Bible.  That is to say: there is no neutral point of view from which to evaluate impartially the arguments for and against the existence of God and thereby objectively adjudicate the dispute between theists and atheists. There is and can be no neutrality or impartiality with respect to God because the existence of God is taken by them to be the ultimate presupposition of  all reasoning such that, were God not to exist, neither would the possibility of correct or incorrect reasoning.  No God? Then no correct or incorrect reasoning. According to John M. Frame,
 
. . . our [apologetic] argument should be transcendental. That is, it should present the biblical God, not merely as the conclusion to an argument, but as one who makes argument possible. We should present him as the source of all meaningful communication, since he is the author of all order, truth, beauty, goodness, logical validity, and empirical fact. (Five Views of Apologetics, Zondervan 2000, p. 220)
So if God were not to exist, there would be no meaning, truth, or logical validity. And if that were the case, then atheism could not count as rationally acceptable as defined above. Atheism is rationally acceptable, i.e., reasonable, only if arguments can be adduced in support of it. But if "God makes argument possible," then any argument the atheist gives would presuppose the existence of the very entity against which he is arguing. If "God makes argument possible," then atheism cannot be rationally acceptable, but is instead ruled out ab initio by the ultimate presupposition of all reason and argument, namely, the existence of God.  By "God makes argument possible" I take Frame to mean that the existence of God is a necessary condition of the possibility of both correct and incorrect reasoning about any topic including God.  Following Kant, such a necessary condition of possibility is called a transcendental condition.
 
The reader should pause for a moment to appreciate just how powerful this presuppositional strategy is assuming it stands up to scrutiny.  If it so stands, then to deny the existence of God would be like denying the existence of truths. Anyone who denies that there are truths presupposes that there is at least one truth, namely, the truth that there are no truths. There is thus a clear sense in which the existence of truths is rationally undeniable.  Surely, there is no neutral point of view from which to evaluate impartially the arguments for and against the existence of truths and thereby objectively adjudicate the dispute between those who assert that there are truths and those who assert that there are no truths. That there are no truths is not rationally acceptable.
 
Similarly, presuppositionalists think that there is a clear sense in which God is rationally undeniable: anyone who denies the existence of God, presupposes the existence of God.  This is a powerful argument strategy if it works, and vastly superior to the fallacy — the 'logical howler' — of thinking that one can prove a proposition by simply presupposing it, which is what some presuppositionalists sometimes do or at least seem to do. It is perfectly plain that a circular argument for God is probatively worthless. But a transcendental argument for God is not a circular argument.  Might it do the trick?
 
Here then is the precise place where my long-held view that there are rationally acceptable arguments on both sides of the God question collides with presuppositionalism. If I am right, then the presuppositionalists are wrong, and if they are right, then I am wrong. This is why my intellectual honesty requires me to confront the presuppositionalist challenge. 
 
The issue is this: Is the God of the (Christian) Bible the ultimate transcendental condition of meaning, truth, and logical validity? That there is such a transcendental condition  I do not deny. What I question is whether the God of the (Christian) Bible is this transcendental condition. Thus I do not deny that we must presuppose the existence of truth in all of our intellectual activities. To seek the truth is to presuppose that there are truths to be discovered.  If someone were to assert that there are no truths, that person would be asserting it to be true that there are no truths, thereby presupposing what he is denying, namely, that there are truths. We, therefore, cannot fail to presuppose the existence of truths when we prosecute our intellectual activities which include forming concepts, making judgments, and drawing inferences.
 
But this is a far cry from presupposing the existence of the biblical God. There is clearly a logical gap between
 
1) We finite cognizers in pursuit of our cognitional goals must presuppose the existence of truths
and
2) We finite cognizers in pursuit of our cognitional goals must presuppose the existence of the biblical God.
It is easy to understand how (1) could be true without (2) being true. I will mention two ways. It might be that the truths that we must presuppose, such as the necessary truths of logic,  have a 'platonic' status: they just exist as abstract or ideal objects whether or not the biblical (Christian) God exists. These necessarily true propositions necessarily exist: they don't just happen to exist.  Since they are non-contingent, one cannot sensibly ask why they exist, any more than one can sensibly exist why a necessarily existent God exists. 
 
The second way is the one suggested by Martin Heidegger in the notorious section 44 of Sein und Zeit (1927), Dasein, Disclosedness, and Truth. Roughly, the truth we must presuppose arrives on the scene with us and leaves the scene with us. I do not endorse this second way and will say no more about it here.  
 
On the face of it, then, (1) can be true without (2) being true. But Frame seems to think that they stand and fall together. He seems to think that a  transcendental presupposition in a broadly Kantian sense of the term could be identical to a transcendent metaphysical entity such as the biblical God.
 
Thinking this, however, Frame conflates two different senses of 'transcendental.' In one sense, 'transcendental' means transcendent. The God of the Bible is transcendent in the sense that he is other than the created realm and in no way dependent on it for his own existence. The biblical God exists in himself and from himself, a se.  In a second sense, 'transcendental' has the roughly Kantian sense invoked by Frame when he describes God as "the one who makes argument possible." By conflating the two senses of 'transcendental,' Frame conflates (1) and (2).  
 
Frame's conflation of the two senses occurs in the paragraph immediately following the one I quoted above:
 
We can reach this transcendental conclusion by many kinds of specific arguments, including many of the traditional ones. The traditional cosmological argument, for example, argues that God must exist as the First Cause of all the causes in the world. That conclusion is biblical and true, and if it can be drawn from true premises and valid logic, it may contribute to the goal of a transcendental conclusion. Certainly if God is the author of all meaning, he is the author of causality. And if God is the author of causality, the cause of all causes, he is the cause of all meaning. Therefore, the causal argument yields a transcendental conclusion. (pp. 220-221)
 
This is by no means obvious. What the causal argument purports to yield is a transcendent conclusion. If successful, what it proves is the existence of a transcendent metaphysical entity, a concrete entity, that exists whether or not finite cognizers exist. The truth of (1), however, does not require that the ultimate transcendental presupposition be concrete. For on the broadly 'platonic' approach, the transcendental conditions are of an abstract or ideal nature.   (And if the early Heidegger is right, the truth of (1) does not require that the ultimate transcendental presupposition exist whether or not finite cognizers exist. But we leave Heidegger aside for now.)
 
By 'concrete,' I mean causally active or passive or both. Thus Socrates is concrete because he both acts and he can be acted upon. Leaving aside the question whether God can be acted upon, the biblical God surely acts by causing creatures to exist. So God too counts as a concrete entity by the definition. And this despite his being outside both space and time. What makes God concrete is his capacity for the exercise of causal power. Whatever is neither casually active nor causally passive is abstract.  Abstract entities lack the capacity for the exercise of causal power.
 
Now the biblical God is obviously no abstract object. He is after all causa prima, the first or primary cause. So if the causal argument manages to establish his existence, what it manages to establish is the existence of a metaphysical concretum. Could this transcendent concretum be identical to the transcendental presupposition mentioned in (1) above?  Frame and Co. will presumably say, Why not? 
 
Here is an important difference. The transcendental presupposition of truth (and whatever else truth can be shown to presuppose such as truth-bearers, meaning, etc.) is objectively certain.  The presupposition of truth is rationally undeniable such that to deny the existence of truth is rationally unacceptable.  But that is not the case with respect to the causal argument and the rest of the standard theistic arguments including the quinque viae of Aquinas. These arguments are  reasonably rejected and have been rejected by distinguished Christian theologians. Therefore, Frame is not justified in his conflation of (1) and (2). Equivalently, he is not justified in thinking that the standard theistic arguments constitute specifically transcendental arguments for the existence of God.
 
There is a lot more to be said, but this entry is already too long. To sum up the argument in the preceding paragraph:  (a) The transcendental argument to truth is conclusive; it is rationally compelling; (b) none of the standard theistic arguments are conclusive, which implies none of them are rationally compelling; therefore, (c) pace Frame & Co. one cannot enlist the causal argument or any of the standard arguments to do the transcendental job; therefore, Frame's presuppositionalism, at least, does not prove the existence of God.

Debate, Disagreement, and the Limits of Rational Discourse

I wrote a few months back,

. . . the wisest policy is not to debate leftists. Generally speaking and admitting exceptions, leftists need to be defeated, not debated. Debate is worthwhile only with open-minded truth seekers. Truth, however, is not a leftist value. At the apex of the leftist's value hierarchy stands POWER. That is not to say that a leftist will never speak the truth; he will sometimes, but only if it serves his agenda. 

Tony Flood replied that the above quotation reminded him "of [Eric] Voegelin's stance on this very issue, about which I blogged a few years ago."  In that post Tony reproduces the first paragraph of Voegelin's Debate and Existence as follows. [note to AGF: your hyperlink is busted: 404 error]  Tony breaks Voegelin's one paragraph into four.

 

Continue reading “Debate, Disagreement, and the Limits of Rational Discourse”

Retorsion Revisited: How Far Does it Reach and What Does it Prove?

Retorsion (retortion) is the philosophical procedure whereby one attempts to establish a thesis by uncovering a performative inconsistency in anyone who denies it. It is as old as Aristotle and has been put to use by philosophers as diverse as Transcendental Thomists and Ayn Rand and her followers. Retorsion is something like an ad hominem tu quoque except that the homo in question is everyman, indeed every rational being. Proofs by retorsion have the following form:

Proposition p is such that anyone who denies it falls into performative inconsistency; ergo, p is true.

Suppose a person asserts that there are no assertions.  That person falls into performative inconsistency:  the propositional content of the speech act is 'inconsistent' with the performance.  *There are no assertions* is the propositional content, or content, for short.  The speech act of asserting is in this case the performance.  The inconsistency is not strictly logical, which is why I employed scare quotes.  Strictly logical inconsistency/consistency obtains between propositions, and a performance such as asserting is not a proposition.  Performances belong to the category of events, not that of propositions. And yet it is clear that there is some sort of analog of inconsistency here, some sort or analog of 'contradiction.'  The content asserted is falsified by the act of asserting it.  The performance 'contradicts' the content.

 

Continue reading “Retorsion Revisited: How Far Does it Reach and What Does it Prove?”

Genuine Inquiry and Two Forms of Pseudo-Inquiry: Sham Reasoning and Fake Reasoning

Steven Nemes sent me to his Substack site where he has an article entitled Theology and Philosophy in Roman Catholicism. His way of thinking reminds me of my younger self. What follows is a revised re-posting of an article of mine from September 2014 which explores similar themes. At the end of the re-posting I offer some comments on Nemes' article.

…………………….

In Philosophers Who Compartmentalize and Those Who Don't,  I drew a distinction between

1. Philosophical inquiry pursued in order to support (defend and rationally justify) an antecedently held thesis or worldview whose source is extra-philosophical

and

2. Philosophical inquiry pursued in order to support (by generating) a thesis or worldview that is not antecedently held but arrived at by philosophical inquiry.  

But we need to nuance this a bit inasmuch as (1) conflates the distinction between

1a. Philosophical inquiry pursued in order to support (defend and rationally justify) an antecedently held thesis or worldview whose source is extra-philosophical, a thesis or worldview that will continue to be maintained whether or not the defensive and justificatory operations are successful

and

1b. Philosophical inquiry pursued in order to support (defend and rationally justify) an antecedently held thesis or worldview whose source is extra-philosophical, a thesis or worldview that will continue to be maintained only if the defensive and justificatory operations are successful.

Alvin Plantinga may serve as a contemporary example of (1a). I think it is fair  to say that his commitment to his  Dutch Reformed Christian worldview is such that  he would continue to adhere to it whether or not his technical philosophical work is judged successful in defending and rationally justifying it.  For a classical example of (1a), we may turn to Thomas Aquinas.  His commitment to the doctrine of the Incarnation does not depend on the success of his attempt at showing the doctrine to be rationally acceptable. (Don't confuse rational acceptability with rational provability.  The Incarnation cannot of course be rationally demonstrated. At best it can be shown to be rationally acceptable.)  Had his amanuensis Reginald convinced him that his defensive strategy in terms of reduplicatives was a non-starter, Thomas would not have suspended his acceptance of the doctrine in question; he would have looked for a  defense immune to objections.

There are of course atheists and materialists who also exemplify (1a).  Suppose a typical materialist about the mind proffers a theory that attempts to account for qualia and intentionality in purely naturalistic terms, and I succeed in showing him that his theory is untenable. Will he then reject his materialism about the mind or suspend judgment with respect to it?  Of course not.  He will 'go back to the drawing board' and try to develop a naturalistic theory immune to my objections. 

The same thing goes on in the sciences.  There are climate scientists who are ideologically committed to the thesis that anthropogenic global warming is taking place to such a degree that it poses an imminent threat to life on Earth.  They then look for evidence to buttress this conviction. If they find it, well and good; if they don't, they keep looking or adjust their thesis by shifting from the species to the genus, from global warming to climate change.  Clearly, the ideological commitment drives the well-funded research, and raises doubts about whether the science itself is more ideology than science.

According to Susan Haack, following C. S. Peirce, the four examples above (which are mine, not hers) are examples of pseudo-inquiry:

The distinguishing feature of genuine inquiry is that what the inquirer wants is to find the truth of some question. [. . .] The distinguishing feature of pseudo-inquiry is that what the 'inquirer' wants is not to discover the truth of some question but to make a case for some proposition determined in advance. (Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate, University of Chicago Press, 1998, p. 8)

Haack SusanHaack, again following Peirce, distinguishes within pseudo-inquiry sham inquiry and sham reasoning from fake inquiry and fake reasoning.  You engage in sham reasoning when you make  "a case for the truth of some proposition your commitment to which is already evidence- and argument-proof."  (8) Characteristic of the sham 'inquirer' is a "prior and unbudgeable commitment to the proposition for which he tries to make a case." (9)

There are also those who are indifferent to the truth-value of the thesis they urge, but argue for it anyway to make a name for themselves and advance their careers.  Their reasoning is not sham but fake.  The sham reasoner is committed to the truth of the thesis he urges; the fake reasoner isn't: he is a bullshitter in Harry Frankfurt's sense.  I will not be concerned with fake inquiry in this post.

The question I need to decide is, first of all,  whether every case of (1a) is sham inquiry.  And the answer to that is No.  That consciousness exists, for example, is something I know to be true, and indeed from an extra-philosophical source, namely, introspection or inner sense.  Those who claim that consciousness is an illusion are frightfully mistaken.  I would be within my epistemic rights in simply dismissing their absurd claim as a bit of sophistry.   But suppose I give an argument why consciousness cannot be an illusion.  Such an argument would not count as sham reasoning despite my mind's being made up before I start my arguing, despite my "prior and unbudgeable commitment to the proposition" for which I argue.

Nothing is more evident that that consciousness, in my own case at least, exists.  Consider a somewhat different case, that of other minds, other consciousnesses.  Other minds are not given to me in the way my own mind is given to me.  Yet when I converse with a fellow human being, and succeed in communicating with him more or less satisfactorily, I am unshakably convinced that I am in the presence of an other mind: I KNOW that my interlocutor is an other mind.  And in the case of my cats, despite the fact that our communication does not rise to a very high level, I am unbudgingly convinced that they too  are subjects of consciousness, other minds. As a philosopher I want to know how it is that I have knowledge of other minds; I seek a justification of my belief in them.  Whether I come up with a decent justification or not, I hold fast to my belief.  I want to know how knowledge of other minds is possible, but I would never take my inability to demonstrate possibility as entailing that the knowledge in question is not actual.  The reasoning I engage in is genuine, not sham, despite the fact that there is no way I am going to abandon my conviction.

Suppose an eliminative materialist claims that there are no beliefs or desires.  I might simply dismiss his foolish assertion or I might argue against it.  If I do the latter, my reasoning is surely not sham despite my prior and unbudgeable commitment to my thesis.

Suppose David Lewis comes along and asserts that unrealized possibilities are physical objects.  I know that that is false.  Suppose a student doesn't see right off the bat that the claim is false and demands an argument.  I supply one.  Is my reasoning sham because there is no chance that I will change my view?  I don't think so.

Suppose someone denies the law of non-contradiction . . . .

There is no need to multiply examples: not every case of (1a) is sham inquiry.  Those who claim that consciousness is an illusion or that there are no beliefs and desires can, and perhaps ought to be, simply dismissed as sophists or bullshitters.  "Never argue with a sophist!" is a good maxim.  But deniers of God, the soul, the divinity of Christ, and the like cannot be simply dismissed as sophists or bullshitters.

So now we come to the hard cases, the interesting cases.

Consider the unshakable belief held by some that there is what William James calls an "unseen order." (Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 53)  Some of those who have this belief claim to have glimpsed the unseen order via mystical experience.  They claim that it lies beyond the senses, outer and inner, and that is also lies beyond what discursive reason can grasp.  And yet they reason about it, not to prove its existence, but to show how it, though supra-rational, is yet rationally acceptable.  Is their reasoning sham because they will hold to their conviction whether or not they succeed in showing that the conviction is rationally acceptable? 

I don't think so.  Seeing is believing, and mystical experience is a kind of seeing. Why trust abstract reasoning over direct experience? If you found a way out of Plato's Cave, then you know there is a way out, and all the abstract reasoning of all the benighted troglodytes counts for nothing at all in the teeth of that experience of liberation.  But rather than pursue a discussion of mystical experience, let's think about (propositional) revelation.

Consider Aquinas again.  There are things he thinks he can rationally demonstrate such as the existence of God.  The existence of God is a philosophically demonstrable preamble of faith, but not an article of faith. And there are things such as the Incarnation he thinks cannot be rationally demonstrated, but can be known to be true on the basis of revelation as mediated by the church's teaching authority. But while not provable (rationally demonstrable), the Incarnation is rationally acceptable.  Or so Thomas argues.  Is either sort of reasoning sham given that Aquinas would not abandon belief in God or in the Incarnation even if his reasoning in either case was shown to be faulty?  Bertrand Russell would say yes:

There is little of the true philosophic spirit in Aquinas. He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead. He is not engaged in an inquiry, the result of which it is impossible to know in advance. Before he begins to philosophize, he already knows the truth; it is declared in the catholic faith. If he can find apparently rational arguments for some parts of the faith, so much the better; if he cannot, he need only fall back on revelation. The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy, but special pleading.  (Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy, Simon and Schuster, p. 463)

It is easy to see that Haack is a sort of philosophical granddaughter of Russell at least on this point.

In correspondence Dennis Monokroussos points out that "Anthony Kenny had a nice quip in reply to the Russell quotation. On page 2 of his edited work, Aquinas: A Collection of Critical Essays (London, 1969) (cited in Brian Davies, The Thought of Thomas Aquinas (Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 19), he says that the remark “comes oddly from a philosopher who took three hundred and sixty dense pages to offer a proof that 1 + 1 = 2.”

Exactly right.  This is yet another proof that not every instance of (1a) above is an instance of sham reasoning or sham inquiry. 

It is certainly false to say that, in general, it is unphilosophical or special pleading or an abuse of reason to seek arguments for a proposition antecedently accepted, a proposition the continuing acceptance of which does not depend on whether or not good arguments for it can be produced.  But if we are to be charitable to Lord Russell we should read his assertion as restricted to propositions, theological and otherwise, that are manifestly controversial.  So restricted, Russell's asseveration cannot be easily refuted by counterexample, which is not to say that it is obviously true.

Thus I cannot simply cite the Incarnation doctrine and announce that we know this from revelation and are justified in accepting it whether or not we are able to show that it is rationally acceptable.  For if it really is logically impossible then it cannot be true.  If you say that it is actually true, hence possibly true whether or not we can explain how it is possible for it to be true, then you beg the question by assuming that it is actually true despite the opponent's arguments that it is logically contradictory.

It looks to be a stand-off.

One can imagine a Thomist giving the following speech. 

My reasoning in defense of the Incarnation and other such doctrines as the Trinity is not sham despite the fact that I am irrevocably committed to these doctrines.  It is a question of faith seeking understanding.  I am trying to understand what I accept as true, analogously as Russell tried to understand in terms of logic and set theory what he accepted as true in mathematics.   I am not trying to decide whether what I accept is true since I know it it to be true via an extra-philosophical source of knowledge.  I am trying to understand how it could be true.  I am trying to integrate faith with reason in a manner analogous to the way Russell sought to integrate arithmetic and logic.  One can reason to find out new truths, but one can also reason, and reason legitimately, to penetrate intellectually truths one already possesses, truths the ongoing acceptance of which does not depend on one's penetrating them intellectually.

What then does the Russell-Haack objection  amount to?  It appears to amount to a rejection of certain extra-philosophical sources of knowledge/truth such as mystical experience, authority, and revelation.  I have shown that Russell and his epigones cannot reject every extra-philosophical source of knowledge, else they would have to reject inner and outer sense.  Can they prove that there cannot be any such thing as divine revelation?  And if they cannot prove that, then their rejection of the possibility is arbitrary.  If they say that any putative divine revelation has to validate itself by our lights, in our terms, to our logic, then that is just to reject divine revelation.

It looks to be a stand-off, then.  Russell and his epigones are within their  rights to remain within the sphere of immanence and not admit as true or real anything that cannot be certified or validated within that sphere by the satisfaction of the criteria human reason imposes.  And their opponents are free to make the opposite decision: to open themselves to a source of insight ab extra.

………………….

Nemes mentions a "fundamental asymmetry." "Theology takes itself for granted and makes use of philosophy only to the extent that it is useful for furthering theology’s own purposes. Theology is never really critiqued or corrected by philosophy per se." That's right: philosophia ancilla theologiae. But secular ideologies do the same thing.  Metaphysical naturalism and its epistemology, scientism, do not allow themselves to be "critiqued or corrected by philosophy per se." Philosophia ancilla scientiae.

Where is the asymmetry? The situation is symmetrical: both magisteria put philosophy to work to shore up their respective worldviews.  Atheists and mortalists, as a group, never admit defeat.  Corner a naturalist and he'll go eliminativist or mysterian on you.  Show Dennett that consciousness has no naturalist explanation, and he'll just deny its existence and pronounce it an illusion.  We don't explain illusions; we explain them away. Drive McGinn to the wall and he will tell you that it's a mystery.  How is that different from the orthodox Chalcedonian incarnationalist's claim that Christ is fully human and fully divine, one suppositum supporting two natures? Each side is committed to its 'truths' come hell or high water.

The Infirmity of Reason versus the Certitude of Faith

Bayle PierreReason is infirm in that it cannot establish anything definitively as regards the ultimate questions that most concern us. It cannot even prove that doubting is the way to truth, "that it is certain that we ought to be in doubt." (Pyrrho entry, Bayle's Dictionary, tr. Popkin, p. 205) But, pace Pierre Bayle, the merely subjective certitude of faith is no solution either! Recoiling from the labyrinth into which unaided human reason loses itself, Bayle writes:

Cigarettes, Rationality, and Hitchens

Substack latest:

Hitchens shirtless smokingLet's talk about cigarettes. Suppose you smoke one pack per day. Is that irrational? I hope all will agree that no one who is concerned to be optimally healthy as long as possible should smoke 20 cigarettes a day, let alone 80 like Rod Serling who died at age 50 on the operating table. But long-term health is only one value among many. Would the creator of the celebrated Twilight Zone series (1959-1964) have been as productive without the weed? Maybe not.

 

The No True Scotsman or No True Muslim Fallacy

Substack latest.

In logic a fallacy is not a false belief but a pattern of reasoning that is both typical and in some way specious. Specious reasoning, by the very etymology of the term, appears correct but is not. Thus a logical fallacy is not just any old mistake in reasoning, but a typical or recurrent mistake that has some tendency to seduce or mislead our thinking. A taxonomy of fallacies is useful insofar as it helps prevent one from seducing oneself or being seduced by others.

By the way, the study of logic won't get you very far, but it is fun and of some use, especially at a time when shockingly mendacious and dimwitted people have taken over the government of the greatest nation on Earth.  Examples are legion from the top down. You know their names.

Doubting the Teachings of One’s Religion

I argued earlier that besides its salutary role in philosophy, doubt also has a salutary role to play in religion. But I left something out, and Vito Caiati caught it:

I have been thinking about your recent post “A Comparison of the Roles of Doubt in Philosophy and Religion” and would like to pose a question to you: While it is certainly true that the religionist “doubts the teachings of other religions,” does he not do the same with some or many of the teachings of his own religion?  In raising this question, I have in mind the intellectual believer, imbued with an inherent religious sensibility and inclination, desirous of affirming the foundational propositions of his faith, including those that appear illogical or contradictory, but who, however much he wills it, is often suffused with doubt about their veracity. I would go so far as to argue, speaking as a Christian and Roman Catholic, that certain dogmas and doctrines by their very nature engender such doubts. None of this necessarily entails the abandonment of belief, but it renders the faith of the religionist more tenuous and unstable than many would like to admit. His struggle to uphold one or more members of a set of beliefs is, at least for those not gifted with special grace, a characteristic property of his faith.  At best, he should acknowledge the tension and understand that he will repeatedly transverse an arc between belief and doubt and that the warm convictions of one moment will often dissipate in the cold misgivings of another. The gap between what is affirmed and what is consistently believed is for the religionist of this type never entirely closed.

That is a very fine statement and I cannot disagree with it. Religious believers who are both sincere and intellectually sophisticated will in the main, and as a matter of fact, question the truth of their beliefs and the efficacy of their practices.  Dr. Caiati doesn't quite say it, but he does suggest that this is as it ought to be. Whether or not he would commit himself to the further step from the factual to the normative, I will commit myself to it: one ought to, at least sometimes, question truth and efficacy of beliefs and practices.  It has always seemed to me that a living faith, as opposed to a convenience and a soporific, must maintain itself in the teeth of doubt. A vital faith, a living faith is animated in part by doubt and a spirit of inquiry.  He who finds first had to seek; but here below the finding is never secure and final and so must be renewed by further seeking.  

Vito speaks of certain doctrines and dogmas that by their very nature engender doubts. Some of these are harder to believe than others. The hardest to believe are those that demand or seem to demand the  "crucifixion of the intellect."  Trinity and Incarnation are the two main main examples. One cannot be a Christian and deny them* (in the way one could be a Christian and deny Transubstantiation). It is, however, difficult to make logical sense of them (in the way that it is not difficult to make logical sense of the Resurrection.)  See my Trinity and Incarnation category for details, and this relatively short and precise entry in particular: The Logic of the Trinity Revisited.

Religious faith here below must remain "tenuous and unstable" to the intellectually awake. The tenets we hold to must remain tentative and thus "tenuous."  Doxastic 'grip,' like physical grip is subject to the world's loosening. No one's grip is absolutely secure.  There is no helping that unless you want to sink into the somnambulance of the worldling who has the world and its pleasures and "fire insurance" to boot.

Religious faith is a faith seeking understanding. It is not a blind faith without understanding, but neither is it a faith that goes beyond a clear understanding, superadding intellectual assent to a clearly conceived proposition.   Perhaps the Pauline image is apt: religious faith is a seeing through a glass darkly.  The glass of the discursive intellect is a distorting lens through which the Incarnation must appear logically impossible even though in truth it is actual.  

Let me put the question to myself directly: Do you or do you not accept Jesus Christ as the way, the truth, and the life, as your only hope for salvation? My acceptance takes the form, not of an acceptance of a ready-made proposition or set of propositions, but the acceptance of a task to be pursued in all seriousness, the task of investigating the matter in all its ramifications via reasoning, prayer, meditation, examination of conscience, study of all relevant literary sources, including scripture, commentaries thereon, the works of the great and not-so-great philosophers of all times and places,  with no slighting of Athens, or Jerusalem, or Benares, or Alexandria, and seeking out the few living who may have been vouchsafed a higher degree of insight than that which I find in myself.

_________________

*I spew from my mouth those miserable 'liberals' who would remake Christianity in their own stunted image. They are free to reject the doctrine, and I defend their right to do so; but they ought not be allowed to change it to suit themselves.  Christianity is what it is; its definatory tenets are essential to it and cannot be jettisoned without jettisoning the whole thing.

Addendum (6 February 2022):

Malcolm Pollack comments on the above  here.  In an e-mail he writes,

I hope you are well. I set off in 2022 imagining I was going to write a lot more (I'd been tapering off lately), but things are now so completely insane that I hardly know what to say. How does one analyze, or comment productively on, what goes on in a madhouse? Why even bother? And why continue to elaborate the various and infinitely detailed breakdowns and malfunctions of a system that's going over a cliff? I can hardly bring myself, any longer, to raise a pen.

There is indeed something absurd about continuing to add to the analytical literature on our social and political collapse. For example, what is the point of this excellent article by Anthony Esolen? It will not be read by those who need its instruction, and even if they did read it, it would do them no good. You cannot appeal to the reason of those bereft of reason, or to the consciences of those who either lack a conscience or whose conscience was never properly formed. 

So why do I continue to think about and write about these things? The short answer is that I have a theoretical bent. I enjoy figuring things out.  "All men by nature desire to know." (Aristotle). This is so even if few live up to their (normative) nature. The bios theoretikos and all that. Intellectual types derive intense pleasure from reading, study, thinking, and all cognate activities.

Even if the subject-matter is disgusting as is that of the medical and social pathologists, the pleasure of understanding is a delight.  The feculent can be fascinating.

Theory has its escapist joys. But in the end we would prefer to act upon the world and its recalcitrant denizens and bring about improvement. But even if we know what needs to be done to bring about, not mere change, but improvement, the tasks are formidable and perhaps insurmountable especially since we who oppose the current madness are divided among ourselves, which is the topic of this article which explains the Boomer versus 'Based' generation gap on the Right. Excerpt:

Do you hate America and want it to fail? 

A lot of younger right-wingers would say yes . . . in a certain sense, they do. And they have reasons for saying that. What young man with any sense wants to die for the Joe Biden regime in the Ukraine? Who wants to pay taxes so Kamala Harris can shower money on illegal immigrants and left-wing shock troops?

That’s a hard message to hear for anyone who lived through the 1960s and the Cold War. For a long time, to be on the Right—to defend liberty and morality and decency—meant to be a patriot and to love America. And it still does. But the enemies of freedom and decency who hate America are no longer godless communists abroad, they are the godless leftists at home who are currently in power.

If America means transgender rights and suffocating biomedical security measures, then those who love freedom will come to hate America—or, to be more specific, the current regime that has taken control of what used to be America.

Young people on the Right don’t hate liberty and morality and decency; they despise woke ideology. The older idea of “America” that the Boomers love is gone, as far as the younger generation is concerned. Most Boomers will never share this antipathy, but they must learn to distinguish between America the nation and America the state. The American state—as the COVID lockdowns, Russiagate hoax, and the political prosecution of the January 6 protestors show—is at war with the American people. (Many older conservatives recognized this distinction and gave Rush Limbaugh a pass when he famously remarked on air that he hoped Barack Obama would fail.)

A Comparison of the Roles of Doubt in Philosophy and in Religion

This Sunday morning I preach on James 1:5-8. Of all the epistles, this, the most philosophical, is my favorite. There we read that he who is wanting in wisdom should ask it of God. But one must ask in faith without doubt or hesitation. "For he who hesitates/doubts is like a wave of the sea, driven and carried about by the wind."  While I do not deny that doubt  can close us off from the help we need, I wonder whether doubt has a positive role to play in religion.

Doubt is the engine of inquiry, as I have said many times, but I think it also plays a salutary role in religion.  

The religious doubt the world and its values. What I mean by 'world' here is the fifth entry in my catalog of the twelve senses of 'world':

5) In the Christian-existential (existenziell) sense, 'world' refers to a certain attitude or mentality. My reader well describes it as follows:

But there is another sense of the term 'world' — Christians  talk of dying to the world and being in the world but not of it. This world they  speak  of could not be reduced to the world of black holes  and dark matter, of collapsing stars and expanding nebulae. This is the social and moral world that they want to die to. It is the world of spiritual distraction and moral fog, the world of status-seeking and reputation.

To which wonderful formulation I add that worldlings or the worldly live for the here and now alone with its fleeting pleasures and precarious perquisites. They worship idolatrously at the shrine of the Mighty Tetrad: money, power, sex, and recognition. They are blind to the Unseen Order and speak of it only to deny it.  They are the Cave dwellers of Plato who take shadow for substance, and the dimly descried for the optimally illuminated. They do not seek, nor do they find. They are not questers. They live as if they will live forever in a world they regard as the ne plus ultra of reality, repeating the same paltry pleasures and believing them to be the summum bonum.

Crucial to being religious is doubting the ultimacy and value of the world in this acceptation of the term.  The religious person is skeptical of secular teachings, secular 'authorities,' and secular suggestions. He is keenly aware of the infernal and ovine suggestibility of  humanity. That's my first point.

Second, the religious man doubts his own goodness and his ability to improve himself. He cultivates a deep skepticism about his own probity and moral worth, not out of a perverse need for self-denigration, but out of honest insight into self.  He follows the Socratic injunction to know oneself and he is not afraid to take a hard and unsparing look into his own (foul) heart, (disordered) soul, and (dark) mind.  He does not avert his eyes from the dreck and dross he inevitably discovers but catalogs it  clinically and objectively as best he can. Reason is weak, but not so weak that it cannot come to know and bemoan its own weakness and its susceptibility to subornation by the lusts of the flesh.

And of course the religious  train their moral skepticism upon their dear fellow mortals as well.  

Fourth, the religionist doubts the philosophers. Well aware that philosophy is magnificent in aspiration, one of the finest flowers in man's quest for the Absolute, the savvy religionist knows that it is miserable in execution. The philosophers contradict one another on all points, always have, and presumably always will.  Their guidance must not be ignored, but cannot be blindly trusted.

Fifth, he doubts the teachings of other religions and the probity of their teachers.

Sixth, he doubts the probity of the teachers of his own religion.  Surely this  is an obvious point, even if it does not extend to the founder of the religion. Doubt here can lead to denial and denunciation, and rightly so.  (Does not Bergoglio the Benighted deserve denunciation?)

Finally, a point about reason in relation to doubt. There is is no critical  reasoning without doubt which is not only the engine of inquiry but also the blade of critique which severs the true from the false, the meaningful from the meaningless, the justified from the unjustified, the plausible from the implausible, the probable from the improbable.  Critical reasoning and thus doubt have a legitimate role to play not only in theology  but also in scriptural exegesis.

Philosophy and religion are opposed  and in fruitful tension as are reason and faith, but each is involved with the other and needs the other for correction and balance, as Athens needs Jerusalem, and Jerusalem Athens.

Omnia Sana Sanis

"All is reasonable to the reasonable." Herein lies a reason to limit one's reasonableness.

For it is not reasonable to be reasonable in all things or in relation to all persons. We live among enemies. The enemy needs sometimes to experience the hard fist of unreason, the brute rejection, the blind refusal, the lethal blow. Or at least he must be made to fear this response, and you must be capable of making it.  The good are not the weak, but those capable of  violence while remaining the masters of its exercise.

Otherwise, are you fit for this world? On the other hand, it might be better not to be fit for this world. What sort of world is it in which the good must be brutal to preserve the reign of the Good?