You are correct that, by definition, one cannot deduce one's way to true faith. Personal faith, however, entials much more than simply believing in something that can't be logically deduced. The sum total of a person's faith is the result of that individual's personal quest for knowledge and understanding regarding himself, the world around him, and the meaning of the human experience in general.cpebbles wrote:In short, I think by definition logic cannot lead to faith, and belief in the supernatural defies deductive reasoning. If the religious have arrived at their beliefs rationally, why is it they are still using the same few obvious logical fallacies to promote them?
You are making the assumption that knowledge and understanding can only be obtained through rational/logical (and thus unbiased/impartial) observations and deductions. That is, what is known and understood by one individual should be knowable and understandable to everyone because it is objectively quantifiable or deducible. While this is a fine governing tenet for the body of knowledge rooted in math and the hard sciences, the underlying processes involved also render it completely useless regarding other important facets of the human experience.
For example, the abstract concept of beauty is one that is known to be universal to the human experience. Hard science has measured brain activity and other physiological responses to understand the physiological mechanism involved in the perception of beauty. However, this adds nothing to our collective knowledge and understanding of what we as humans (both as individuals and as a collective) find to be beautiful. The medium of art, however, has been exploring and adding to our knowledge/understanding of this aspect of human experience on both a personal and collective level for ages. While the experience of beauty is universal, the abstract nature of the subject inevitably dictates that what is known and understood to be beautiful by one person is NOT knowable and understandable to all others. Does the fact that I don't find something beautiful mean that I should automatically discount the fact that someone else claims to find it so? Does the fact that the concept of beauty is a subjective one make it any less of a universal experience? Any less important a subject for exploration and understanding? Any less a concept that significantly impacts our lives?
The fact that some knowledge and understanding regarding life and the human experience is subjective instead of objective does not make it any less important to the collective human experience or any less valid on a personal level. It simply means that we must accept that the knowledge and understanding of others in those particular areas might run counter to our own knowledge and understanding.
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In response to your question above, the answer is relatively simple...when they think, people are logical creatures. Unfortunately not everything that we come to know and understand is the result of thinking (or only of thinking). You don't sit down and think about who to love, or what you find beautiful...you may put a little (or even a great deal) of thought into it over time depending on your individual personality, but there will always be a significant experiential component as well. When you later think about what you've come to know through experience, however, the mind naturally attempts to justify/explain that experiential knowledge with logic...it's what it does. And when you try to explain what you know through experience to others, those are the straws that your thinking mind grasps at in its attempts to explain the knowable but ultimately unexplainable.
Sometimes the logic created in hindsight is extremely good, and sometimes it's extrememly bad...but ultimately it's all a rationalization since that component of the underlying knowledge wasn't a product of rational thought at all. If an experience that led to knowledge defies all logical explanation, then that's when terms like "miracle" and "fate" start getting bounced around.
Let me stress again, though, that it is a mistake to dismiss any body of knowledge simply because it has an experiential (and thus subjective) component. It's direct relevance to you as an individual might shrink in proportion with the size of the experiential component involved, but it's relevance to the original individual in question and to the human race as a collective does not.
