Actually, rational thinking doesn’t allow you to walk. Walking requires dozens of decisions each second to maintain balance, and we do not and cannot use our conscious mind to make those decisions. That is why walking takes time to learn. The body needs those decisions to be made, but you cannot ‘think’ fast enough and at the level of muscular control required.
This is true in other areas as well. When you ‘see’ a couch, you don’t see a couch. You see a lot of colors in a pattern. Your mind then compares it to everything else it has seen and determines it is a couch. Before you can look at a room and have any sense, your mind needs to be able to make these comparisons and determine what is what.
That is why humans are so good at target recognition. A child can look at a severely scrambled picture of a tank in the woods and know it is a tank. Computers cannot - not at the level we can. That is why no automatic target recognition system has worked nearly as well as a human.
This is not ‘anti-rational’, for it is something we train for. In WW2, target recognition of planes was taught. With practice, a human could see a specific plane for 1/10 second, and ‘know’ exactly what it was. They were specifically taught not to think. Thinking was too slow and too unreliable. They had to train the subconscious mind to do the rational work of the conscious mind.
That is what I am trying to explain to kosta50. Every day, he makes thousands of ‘rational’ decisions without using logic to do so. If he didn’t, he would be insane.
So why does he insist that only his conscious, rational, logical mind is adequate to ‘know’?
This is also something they teach in self defense and in combat - trust your ‘instincts’. If it feels wrong, it probably IS wrong. Your mind can pick up on details, compare it to your experience, and make rational decisions without logic.
Can it go wrong? Of course. So can the logic of anyone I’ve met. You can make mistakes. But when I was training to go to Afghanistan in 2006/2007, our instructors said that NOT trusting our instincts was a sure way to die.
That is what I’m telling kosta50. Don’t be surprised if we make decisions about following God without having a clearly thought thru, logical, A proves B approach. After all, we do this all the time, every day, and it works well.
In combat, no one waits to move until they can prove something. You take what you’ve got and make the best decision you can, including your ‘instincts’ and ‘feelings’ as inputs. You make a ‘leap of faith’ and go (or stay). We do the same thing driving down the highway. And we do the same thing making decisions about God and faith.
Every day we make ‘leaps of faith’, most of which work. Those that don’t, or are based on inappropriate subconscious patterns, can kill us (read Deep Survival, or study USAF accidents). But we have to make them, so we do.
Faith in God is not anti-rational, but neither is it a conclusion. Obviously we make mistakes, just as we make mistakes when flying. But avoiding a decision until it is provable is a decision in itself.
In any case, let's assume that a leap of faith of some sort is required. On what basis, what criteria do we use to choose where to leap?
In driving, or combat, we don't have full information, but we have clear criteria - what information we're looking for and how it it relates or is judged. We don't leap completely blind in driving or combat.
What is the data we're evaluating that goes into where and if we leap?
I never said everything we do is rational. I said human begavior is learned. That's not the same as rational. But it is only through reason that we may know, because through logic we estbalish relationships of the cause and effect (understanding).