There are those who, in order to buttress their arguments against the God and religion, love to again and again use the words such as logic and rationality. They talk as if there is a clean and simple dichotomy: Religion is irrational, bound up with stupid, unreasonable superstitions, emotions, and wishful thinking and their ideas are all rational, based on evidence, reason and impartial objectivity. What they fail to understand with their ‘rational’ minds is that all their claims about logic, reason, rationality and science are based on metaphysical assumptions that they BELIEVE to be true and can never prove.
Usually, the claims of these ‘rational’ thinkers are based on the principles that no premise should be accepted without empirical evidence. This is based on assumption that only that which is proven by evidence is truth. But one may ask about what is the evidence that only that which can be proven empirically is true? Is there any empirical way to prove that only things empirically proven are true? Moreover, the existence of evidence via intuition is denied. This deniability is declared true as a rational premise, which premise requires the intuition of its truth; so intuition is denied via the use of intuition, which is a paradoxical process to these ‘rationalists’.
The point is that no field, no matter how much progress it makes, can ever get rid of its metaphysical assumptions and some times even paradoxes upon which it is based. Every field of knowledge begins with certain metaphysical ‘truths’ that are referred to as first principles. These first principles form the foundations upon which all knowledge rests. First principles are BELIEVED as fundamental truths (or supposed truths) from which inferences are made and conclusions are driven. These principles are considered to be self-evident truths and can be thought of as both the underlying and the governing principles of every worldview. Without these assumptions or ‘truths’, nothing would make sense. To put it simply, the words rational, logical, scientific etc only make sense because these first principles are BELIEVED to be true. So, before making claims about irrationality of religion, these ‘rational’ thinkers should better understand what their rationality is and prove the rationality behind their self-proclaimed ‘rational thinking’.
