Hell

[Matthew]

I'm talking about a baseless belief. A belief that isn't supported by rational argument.

I believe that a basic belief in God is rational because it is justified externally by God's revelation rather than internally by the reasons one has for holding it. So basic belief in God is not unsupported - it is supported by God and not by arguments.

How is belief in God a basic belief?

It is a belief that is arrived at immediately by God's revelation rather than by argument.

Irrelevant. If you can't do it you can't do it. Because you can't support it doesn't mean you should pretend that you can have a rational belief without support.

Your comments below suggest that you actually agree with me that you can have knowledge independent of arguments. Like me, you are an epistemological particularist (as opposed to a methodist) - you think that it is possible to know something without knowing how you know it. Having such knowledge requires that you do not have an argument that supports it (otherwise you do know how you know it: by the argument). You say that there are some things that we just know by awareness. Yet somehow you also hold that we must be skeptical about any answer to the question of how we know something (even though you give awareness as a way in which you know things!) So these things considered, I am finding it difficult to see how your epistemology is consistent.

Most likely I am understanding you incorrectly, so I offer the following examples for some clarifying should you wish to: suppose I say that I know that God exists because I am aware that He exists; or perhaps that I know that other minds exist because I am aware that they exist. Are these, by your definition, examples of my having knowledge?

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My response is that any question of "Why do I know that X is true?" ultimately leads to the case that I can't know because any response I give either commits the Begging the Question Fallacy or the Circular Reasoning Fallacy.

An example: I don't know why I don't believe in God, because if I say I don't believe because I'm unconvinced or I am unaware of any evidence that is ultimately just a paraphrasing of saying "I don't believe because I don't believe" so it commits the Begging the Question Fallacy.

I define knowledge to be identical to the true awareness of something. Hence why when people say "I'm aware of that" they mean "I know that".

So, following from that definition of knowledge I consider it possible to know that something is true because it's possible to be aware of something. However, I am completely skeptical to knowing why anything is true, because we ultimately don't know why we are aware of anything, if we ask "Why?" enough times we ultimately don't know the answer.

Knowing that something is true is very different to knowing why something is true. I am not always skeptical about the former but I am always skeptical about the latter.

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I'm trying to understand why you feel that God is a necessary being and the creator?

That is just part of what I mean by the word 'God'. Necessary existence and creatorship are part of the "definition" of 'God'.

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I don't think either morality or rationality has a universal standard that we can compare it to.

So when you say that belief in God is not rational, do you mean your own personal subjective standard of rationality? If so, why should it make any difference to me whether you think that my beliefs are rational? In other words, why have we had a conversation about rationality?

The point is that the basic belief of 'there is a God' is not necessary.

Not necessary for what?

Well theoretically you could go out and interview a huge sample, and test how people use logic and reasoning to come to conclusions. Logic could also be used to make consistent predictions about things.

The first would only give you data on what people think about the laws of logic, not the laws of logic themselves. For the second, could you give an example of a prediction you could make from the laws of logic? [EDIT: Please don't feel obliged* to answer this question given the comment below.]

I don't think I can go into any more detail about the laws of logic, though, I'll have to leave that up to those who are well-versed in philosophy.

I appreciate that the metaphysics of logic is not an easy topic - I am certainly no expert myself. Let's stick to morality and rationality, as those are examples with which we are more familiar.

*Yes, that was meant to be ironic.