The mental faculty of reason is not capable of explaining, but also not of producing, the basic beliefs of a system. These basic beliefs, i.e. system-wide premises are the output of other, unknown mental faculties. This is true for all systems, not just religious ones. — alcontali

Isn't this just another way of saying the Quran is miraculous - the faculty of reason being incapable of producing the Quran?

So, doesn't that prove my point that some form of miracle is necessary if to be a prophet? This is a digression from the OP's issue as to why people should trust preachers. I personally don't accept miracles as evidence for the simple reason that advanced knowledge masquerades as miracles.

Isn't this just another way of saying the Quran is miraculous - the faculty of reason being incapable of producing the Quran? — TheMadFool

The terms "miracle" and "miraculous" are loaded with all kinds of connotations that sometimes sound questionable. I prefer the phrase: "the output of other, unknown mental faculties".

Look, it is not possible to come up with the 9 unexplained, speculative beliefs of number theory, just like that, just "by reasoning". You will simply never get there by reason alone. Same for the 14 speculative beliefs that construct the system of propositional logic, or of the 10 arbitrary beliefs at the basis of set theory. I do not know what their true origin is, and nobody else does either. Otherwise they would not be axioms.

In other words, all our mathematical beliefs go back to seemingly arbitrary, speculative, basic beliefs. Why would anybody right in his mind believe that our religious systems would be any different? On what grounds?

We simply do not have any knowledge at all that is not of seemingly arbitrary, speculative nature. Our own heads are replete with mental faculties that we do not understand and that we cannot reasonably explain.

So, doesn't that prove my point that some form of miracle is necessary if to be a prophet? — TheMadFool

Depending on how you define the term "miracle", yes. The prophet of Islam is widely believed to have listened into a stream of transcendental messages of which the origin was not of this world. People generally do not know how to do that because otherwise, they would be doing that all the time ...

I personally don't accept miracles as evidence for the simple reason that advanced knowledge masquerades as miracles. — TheMadFool

Evidence is the argument/proof element in the three-tuple (premises, conclusion, argument). It is even tautological that you cannot swap these elements around. You have to find a way to discover premises. You also have to find a way to discover a conclusion, and most of all, you need to find a way to connect them. None of these activities are rational processes. The main characteristic of the greatest mathematicians and the greatest scientists was not rationality, because the process of knowledge discovery is not rational at all.

Furthermore, as I already argued, swapping around premises and argument in the three-tuple (premises, conclusion, argument) does indeed not make sense. However, it is you, yourself who are trying to do that. You want to solve the problem of (underlying premises, existing premises, unknown). As I argued previously, your request is itself not rational at all; and it is even trivial to rationally argue that.

panpsychism (hi bert1) — jorndoe

Big shout from the rock massif

:lol:

Evidently, any such deity either has no messages of utmost importance for all mankind, or is not real.

(Which, by the way, also is justified by how these faiths spread, and their places and times of emergence.)

Would parsimony be of any use here?