What makes people irrational thinkers?

[polymath257]

The simplest possible answer is "that which makes us alive." 

Like in "that which makes blood red"?
Kindly demonstrate that there is a "that", before we go to the demonstration that this "that" could be, or in fact is, a soul.

I am always bothered when something is defined as 'that which does something'. The definition itself assumes that there is a single thing that 'does something' and that it is uniform across all examples. That is almost always false.

For example, what is it that makes me alive? Well, life *is* a complex collection of chemical reactions which, in my case, is driven by the difference in chemical potential of molecular oxygen and sugars and the end products of carbon dioxide and water. The specifics are quite complex, but that is the ultimate basis for keeping the collection of chemical reactions going.

In the case of sulfur archaebacteria, however, oxygen is poisonous and the relevant chemical potential is based on sulfur, not oxygen.

For plants, the relevant aspect is the energy from light captured to drive chemical reactions.

There isn't a single 'that' which keeps all living things alive. And it is a HUGE mistake to assume that there is.

In a similar way, the concept of God as a 'source of being' is, I think clearly, incoherent. Among other things, it assumes that there is such a source, and that it is the same under all cases of 'being'. It also assumes that 'being' requires a 'source' (does the source not exist?).

Of course, the ASSUMPTIONS continue in claiming that 'source' is conscious. Which, frankly, is preposterous. Consciousness is, itself, a complex collection of interactions between different parts to process information. How that can be connected to a 'source for being' is never dealt with. In fact, the question seems never to be acknowledged at all.

But it goes further. Not only is this 'source of being' supposed to be conscious, but it is *also* supposed to be the 'source of consciousness'. And, again, that has all of the problems of the original 'source of being'  concept.

I've stared reading the book 'The Experience of God' and have found another thing that seems quite common among theists. It wants to identify matter as 'inert'. And that is *far* from being the case. In fact, the most interesting aspects of physical things is precisely that they *interact*. And, at the most fundamental level, they are *defined* by how they interact: electrons interact via the E&M force with photons with a characteristic coupling; quarks interact via the strong force with gluons and via the E&M force photons, etc.

Physical things have properties and those properties say how they interact with other physical things that also have properties. They are far from being inert.

Another thing the book seems to be trying to do is place metaphysics above science in terms of its reliability. There I have to laugh. the fact that metaphysics is filled with biases and preconceived notions and cannot test itself except through simple logical coherence is the reason why it is ultimately unable to answer any questions and is thereby unreliable. the reason the scientific method works is because it demands that ALL hypotheses be testable and rejects those that cannot from consideration as ultimately meaningless.

That there is no way to test metaphysical ideas is why they cannot be trusted. Logical coherency is a very poor substitute for actual knowledge. And it is far from clear that metaphysics even manages that level of coherence.