Is religion irrational?

A person on the internet said that religion is irrational. This was my response:

When I say irrational, I usually have something very specific in mind. An irrational person is a person who openly embraces contradictions. By "openly," I meaning knowingly and willingly. Since none of us are infallible, it must be the case that all of us make mistakes in thinking sometimes. We draw the wrong conclusions about things which results in us holding false beliefs. But the mere holding of a false belief or making a mistake in thinking is not sufficient to say that somebody is irrational. If it were, then all of us would be irrational since none of us are infallible.

There are irrational people, though, and there are irrational worldviews. People who deny the law of excluded middle, for example, are irrational.

There's another class of people who are unreasonable. These are people who stubbornly refuse to follow an argument where it leads. They stick their head in the sand, so to speak. But that's being unreasonable, not irrational.

I get the impression you're using "irrational" in a much more loose way than I am, but I can't tell exactly what you mean by it. Maybe you mean "unreasonable." Or maybe you mean "silly" or "absurd."

But let me point out a few things we disagree about and try to change your view.

First, you appear to define a miracle as a violation of the laws of nature. That's why you find it irrational to believe in miracles. I think there are two mistakes in this argument (besides a misuse of the word, "irrational"). First, I don't think that's what a miracle is. A miracle is an event in the natural world whose cause is not natural. Let me unpack this a little.

According to Newton's law of gravity, there's a force of attraction between any two masses that's directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. So if there were a basketball ten feet in the air, there would be a force of attraction between the earth and the basket ball. In other words, the basketball would be pulled toward the earth.

Now, if something were holding it up, like the hand of a basketball player, you wouldn't think that Newton's law had been violated just because the basketball player was preventing the basketball from being pulled to the earth.

Well, a miracle is an effect in the natural world whose cause is not part of the natural world. So instead of a physical basketball player holding the basketball, you might have a God or an angel exerting causal influence on the basketball, preventing it from falling to the earth. Newton's law would not be violated in this case because there is still a force of attraction between the basketball and the earth. It's just that in this case, there's a supernatural being exerting a force in the opposite direction so that the basketball is suspended in the air.

And that's how it is with all miracles. Once a supernatural being initiates a causal chain within the natural world, the natural world accommodates that action according to the laws of nature. The laws of nature are never violated.

Now, if you didn't believe there was a supernatural realm, or that a supernatural being could have causal influence in the world, then it would stand to reason that miracles couldn't happen. So it would be understandable for you to think belief in miracles was unreasonable. But if you use naturalism as a premise in your argument against miracles in order to show that religion is irrational, then you're begging the question against religions. All three Abrahamic religions think there are supernatural beings who can have causal influence in the world. To just assume that these beings don't exist or can't have causal influence in the world in order to "prove" that miracles don't happen in order to prove that Abrahamic religions are irrational, is to beg the question against Abrahamic religions.

One does not have to be religious in order to believe or be justified in believing that there is something beyond the natural realm that has causal influence over the natural realm. Thomas Nagel is famous for being an atheist who thinks naturalism is false. He even has a book out about it. It's called Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. Thomas Nagel isn't being irrational. He has good arguments for his view. Alvin Plantinga and C.S. Lewis are both Christians who have made similar arguments against naturalism/materialism.

Now, let me say something about "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." This claim is much too ambiguous to be useful. Whether a claim is extraordinary or not depends on what you already believe. The claim that water can become a solid would be an extraordinary claim to somebody who had never seen or heard of ice, for example, but it's not extraordinary to you because ice coheres with what you have already experienced. For somebody who already believes in God, the claim that a miracle happened would be less extraordinary than it would be for somebody who does not believe in God. There is no such thing as an "extraordinary claim" that's extraordinary independently of some background information.

And what does "extraordinary evidence" even mean? Is video evidence extraordinary? For example, suppose I told you that I saw a deer on my way to work today, and to prove it, I showed you a vide o. There's nothing extraordinary about seeing a deer in my part of the world, and I doubt you'd think a cell phone video was all that extraordinary either. But suppose, instead of seeing a deer, I told you that I ran into Kate Beckinsale, and she was so happy to see me that she kissed me. Now, you don't know who I am, so imagine it's a friend of yours. You'd probably think his claim was more extraordinary than merely claiming to have seen a deer. But suppose he showed you a video on his cell phone. Notice that this evidence is exactly the same evidence as the evidence for the deer. If it's not extraordinary in the case of the deer, then it's not extraordinary in the case of Kate Beckinsale, either. So what exactly does "extraordinary evidence" even mean?

A better maxim is that any claim you make requires adequate evidence. You may require more evidence of your friend kissing Kate Beckinsale than you would for your friend to have seen a deer, but that's because the incident with Kate Beckinsale seems, prima facie, less likely given your background information. So whatever evidence is adequate in each case would be different. Your friend's word, alone, would probably be sufficient evidence that he saw a deer, but you might not take his word for having kissed Kate Beckinsale.

In the same way, I can grant that a miracle claim would require more evidence than a mundane claim, such as seeing a deer. But it wouldn't require extraordinary evidence. It would only require adequate evidence. The amount and kind of evidence would depend on how prima facie unlikely you thought the miracle was, and that would depend on your background beliefs.

I have a lot more to say, but this has gotten too long already, so I'll stop here.