I've noticed that many people don't mind adopting a self-contradicting axiom or two as their main life-guiding assumptions. A few examples spring easily to mind: "There are no absolutes" (which, itself, claims to be an absolute), "it's wrong to judge" (which, itself, makes a judgment on others), "you shouldn't push your beliefs on others" (the person saying this is, in fact, trying to coerce another into behaving in line with their beliefs), etc.

The underlying problem with such an approach is this: If you believe reason works, then you have to believe it works all the time. A proof isn't right when 19 out of 20 of its points are correct, and an argument isn't true when it's right on 2 out of 3 counts. That one missing point or count makes it wrong, or a lie, and may make a HUGE difference in end results. (Even more so when we're talking about life-guiding assumptions!)

The basic assumption of logic is that you can't have some "atomic" (by which I mean sufficiently simple and clear) proposition be both true and false at the same time. (In fancy logic-lingo, this is called "The Law of the Excluded Middle", among other names.) When a person who believes in logic reaches such a contradiction, the "logical" response is to realize there's something wrong with your initial assumptions. This is called "proof by negation" -- you start with a set of initial statements, reason to a contradiction, and thus realize there's an error lurking among your starting points. If you believe logic works, then "there are no absolutes" becomes self-disproving, and thus can and should be tossed out immediately.

On the other hand, if you don't really believe in logic (and are thus "irrational"), then you should just stop arguing with anyone, including yourself. Since you don't believe logic means anything, why bother to offer it? You can just reject any conclusion if it doesn't suit you. Or believe any set of beliefs, no matter how contradictory. Such people are lost, with no signposts or markers to guide them, other than raw authority.

You're not going to find God, disprove God, or discover whatever is or isn't true about the universe if you can't (or aren't willing to) use reason in even the simplest ways possible.

Unproven Assumptions

Incidentally, I can't actually prove logic works! It's one of those unproven assumptions we all start from. Though most people seem unaware of it, we all wander through life with a large number of unproven -- and often unprovable -- assumptions. The wise person, I would argue, is open to noticing and thinking about these assumptions; the beginning of wisdom is to admit we don't know everything, including what we "know."

I call these foundational beliefs "religious" assumptions. We all have them, including atheists. (Often, it seem, they have even more of them than I do.) And since that's so, I have to clarify an important misconception about logic:

Logic doesn't give you the truth. It just helps you make sure your beliefs match up and are "logically consistent." If you were sign up for a class in logic (or "formal reasoning"), the first thing you would learn was that all logical arguments begin with statements of unproven assumptions. Logic can tell you whether those assumptions are consistent, but it can't tell if they're actually "true" in the grander scheme of things.

For example, I could say "dogs eat only vegetables", and then assert "things which eat only vegetables are vegetarians" and then arrive at "dogs are vegetarians". My argument is perfectly "sound" and logical -- but there was nothing about logic which told me that dogs ate meat. You have to go out to the real world and watch a dog -- and that, of course, bring in a whole set of assumptions -- that we can trust what we see, what the word "meat" means, etc.

That sounds obvious when I say "dogs eat meat" but there are many seemingly-true statements (like "logic works", or "it's better to believe true things") for which it's hard to find similarly "hard" evidence. We'd like to believe it, and such statements sometimes or always seem to work, but, at the end of the day, we have to admit we're just making assumptions.

There's an optimistic belief out there that we can just start with things we can observe, and reason towards all truth. There was also a brilliant mathematician named Godel (with two dots over the "o") who proved this idea was completely wrong. To the contrary, Godel conclusively showed, there will always be things which are actually true for which we can offer no proof, and always be things which are actually false, but which we can't disprove.

So "reason" and "logic" are helpful, but not nearly as much as some think.

"Reason"-Believers

I mentioned above that "Reason" is not a laundry list of things you have to believe. For example, I often hear things like "Reason tells us that religion is a danger to science", or something along those lines. Or "Reason is the opposite of faith." Well, no. Such people are telegraphing to you that they, frankly, have no idea of what reason is.

As I said above, all statements of logic contain internally unproven assumptions. One person's belief in God can be quite reasonable, depending on what arguments they choose -- another's "skepticism" can be quite irrational. Or vise-versa. What makes a belief or argument "reasonable" (though not true) is how consistent your reasoning is. We don't live in a world where you can just say you believe X, Y, and Z and suddenly be declared "reasonable" or "rational." You have to actually be reasonable and rational, which is a far harder task.

Instead, what such people are usually saying -- and this is important to note -- is that they believe in the human ability to do reason or the ability of human thought to save us all, or, more narrowly, in their own wonderfulness as "reasoning" people -- at least two of which I don't believe in much at all! Worse, in my experience, the most irrational among us are frequently those who proclaim most passionately that they believe in "Reason". (This may sound surprising, but it isn't for reasons I'll explain in a moment.)

Consider the French Revolution: The people who spoke and wrote endlessly about "Reason" were frequently the same people chopping off the heads of nuns and everyone else who disagreed with them. The same thing was later true regarding Communist regimes around the world: the "Reason-believers" around the world have frequently been the supporters of dictators and championed the revolutions which took so many lives. Such people proclaimed an "Age of Reason" and inaugurated it with the blood of dissenters.

Why should this be so?

When you say you believe in "Reason" as a laundry list of sureties, it means you're not familiar with actual reason, with all her limits and frailties. The person who insists that "reason disproves religion" frequently means that he or she doesn't want to have a reasonable argument about the matter, with all the risks that entails. They're taking a short cut which allows their unproven beliefs (which we all carry, mind you) to be rubber-stamped as "true" and get that warm fuzzy feeling of surety.

This is a serious problem. When you change your definition of "Reason" to mean belief in whatever dogmas the "Reasonable" people around you saying, you have no mental slot into which to plug the actual definition (and practice) of reason. This is a classic way of controlling thought: redefine a word out of existence, so people no longer have a way of referring to the original concept or even thinking of it.

By analogy, today "tolerance" increasingly means keeping you from saying things I or someone else might disagree with -- which is the opposite of the historical definition of tolerance. As people adopt this new definition, actual tolerance goes out the window. You're already being "tolerant" by censoring words which trouble you, so there's no ability left to appeal to "tolerance" in it's original definition. The word has been taken over.

So in a similar way, when "reason" means, say, "Don't believe in God or the supernatural", then people can do all sorts of irrational things, as long as they don't involve believing in God or the supernatural. Their mental checklist changes from "does this even make sense and match my alleged values?" to merely "am I opposing religion?" That second criteria is a lot simpler.

So there's your irony: the "Reason"-believers seek a simple, sure, and rather blind kind of faith. Which is why so many of them register, to outsiders, as a sort of "fundamentalist". They're made of the same stuff, and motivated in the same way, as those you envision as religious fundamentalists.

Humans do NOT have a great ability to reason. We do very little of it, in my experience, and usually most of that is motivated towards justifying ourselves. A principal barrier to caution and skepticism towards our own thoughts is to keep telling ourselves how GREAT we have been at being reasonable. We haven't been, reason is not of much interest to most people, and people like Sam Harris -- who manifest both intolerance and an constant talk of "Reason" -- strike me as classic demonstration of our weakness in this area.

The Utility of Reason

I suppose at this point, it's beginning to sound like reason isn't useful at all, or like we'll never know absolute truth, or that such things are impossible or not worth pursuing.

Nonsense.

First, we can prove all kinds of things with the normal, everyday assumptions most people make. If I use reason to notice that "there are no absolutes" is false, then I've also just proven the opposite: There are some absolutes. Again, as long as you accept reason, anyway.

And, yes, we'll never be able to prove reason itself, but I would make several points in its defense:

(1) Logic seems to work in the cases we can observe and test, so it would seem sensible to apply it to the cases we can't, also. (I can't prove that rule works either, but most of our lives are based on this kind of "inductive" inference (the sun rose again every morning so far!), so we might as well go with one more unless someone can suggest a reason not to.)

(2) Most of us seem to believe in reason anyway.

Even those who show they don't believe in reason, one minute, by offering some self-negating life-guiding principle will, in the next, turn around and try to convince you (say) of the evils of Republicans or religious people (etc) with every "logical" argument they can muster. It's too bad they don't value such arguments (at the core -- they are probably not aware of their own irrationality), but they're certainly expecting others to buy in.

Again, if you really didn't believe reason worked, you would just stop reasoning or arguing, except for the amusement of it. Since nobody actually does this or lives this way, we should just admit that, yes, like it or not, we DO tend to believe in reason, and we might as well try to be more consistent about applying it to our lives and thoughts.

(3) Logic can help YOU.

This is a big reason for learning more about reasoning and logic. You could take classes on "formal reasoning", as I've done, but luckily, we all have a built-in ability to do logic. What's probably more important and helpful is to familiarize yourself with popular logical fallacies. (There are actually an unending list of fallacies, but some show up more than others.)

A "fallacy" is simply an argument that sounds good, but doesn't always work. (Indeed, a fallacy's ability to seem right, and sometimes give right answers is part of it's dangerous allure.) For example, a popular fallacy involves "ad hominem" attacks -- Bob has bad motives or has been paid off, therefore, what Bob is saying is false. Of course, sometimes people who have bad motives DO say what is false. A used-car salesman might lie about the car, for example. But just because someone might have a bad motive (or so you imagine) doesn't prove their statement false. You have to look at the evidence.

"Bill claims that 1+1=2. But he is a Republican, so his claim is false."

You may laugh, but many people don't go much further in their political thoughts.

Here's a nice list of fallacies, offered by a site whose main purpose is to oppose Holocaust denial. That juxaposition makes a subtle point: that such people found that an inability to reason is frequently a big part of how their opponents get stuck in a certain mindset. I've seen this: some people believe in some obviously-wrong thing, but they have a clever-sounding set of (circular) defenses against it. Sadly, they're being irrational. But for them, it's more important to feel good or right than to actually be good or right.

And that last point brings us to another limit of reason: it's only as good as our conscience. When we're trying to convince ourselves of something, in order to justify ourselves, we can swallow all sorts of fallacies we'd normally reject. So what's more important here than raw mental power is, I guess I'd call it, the decision to try to be good and honest, even at the expense of being impressed with ourselves. Instead, follow the truth wherever it takes you, regardless of the unpleasant feelings that can cause.

(4) Logic can persuade.

It's true that all arguments rest on unproven assumptions. And you can't always change a person's life assumptions. But if they share yours (or even if they don't) you can often employ logic to show inconsistencies in their beliefs.

For example, if someone says to me: "The Iraq war was wrong because it didn't have UN approval", they are saying (obviously) that wars are only moral if the UN approves. But is this true? You can find out by asking them, for example, if they approved of Clinton's war in Kosovo. If they did, they're not being consistent. If they didn't, perhaps they are. It doesn't prove their belief is right or wrong, but most people don't really believe the UN is the ultimate moral authority -- they would certainly object to some decisions the UN could possibly make, which means they actually believe in a higher moral power. In such cases, all you have to do is notice the underlying assumption, and ask a few simple questions in order to expose it as false, at least in their own eyes.

Of course, the easiest way to win an argument is to be correct: then you're going downstream, not upstream. And the easiest way to be correct is to first adopt true (or "truer") positions, which means sometimes ditching ones which don't seem to add up. See benefit #3 above.

(5) Logic helps society.

Expanding a bit on point #3, totalitarians hate sound logic, and love relativism.

In an earlier post, I argued that we all have a built-in "homing mechanism" which can help guide us, if we wish to follow it, towards the ultimate truth of life. As I perceive it, this mechanism includes our conscience, our ability to perceive the world around us, and our ability to reason.

Conversely, if you want to control someone, you need to attack these three facilities. A demagogue doesn't want you to reason independently: he wants to accept whatever argument he gives you. If he's clever, he wants people in a state where they reject reason itself, which will leave them to be controlled by whatever argument sounds or feels good -- which you can usually arrange by giving them enough propaganda, or encouraging them to follow the crowd. (Shaming has always been a huge aspect of leftist revolutions.)

So belief in some objective things -- including objective, non-changing morals and logic -- is a hedge against dictators big and small. And by being willing to put logic and morality first, and being willing to question your own goodness and rightness, you can find our if you're part of the control structure, or part of those working to make the world better.

Long-Term Prognosis

Again, the primary barrier against truth isn't illogic, so much as the underlying desire to feel one is right, which makes the illogic so attractive. It isn't so much that people want to do evil or believe lies, but more that they simply have some other goal in mind, some feeling they're enjoying having, or something they fear, and goodness (truth) seems to be standing in their way.

I don't believe that truth or goodness always wins out in the short run, and certainly not in a person's lifetime. But if you don't accept my broader beliefs about the universe, at least consider this one: That it's better, in the end, to know the truth -- especially about yourself -- than to feel good. Honesty comes first, before everything else, and without honesty, you can't even have a meaningful conversation, much less discover higher truths.

Best to you!