Welcome back. And we're actually going to continue with our question from the last time, Greg.

We had a question about tools of reasoning you use to determine true and false, right and wrong, that sort of thing. And I have a question that kind of goes along after that. This one comes from Kagan. Why would any rational thinking person have to use any religious book, including the Bible, unless, of course,

one doesn't really think with reason and doesn't comprehend logic and logical fallacies such as

circular reasoning. Okay. So, do you know what I'm thinking right now?

I actually probably do. Well, I could be thinking of a whole host of different things.

Okay, you don't.

Let's just say you are the most perfect reasoner in the world.

Would you now be able to know what I was thinking?

No.

No.

So knowing what another individual is thinking has nothing to do with your rational capacities.

So much about what we learn from a religious book is meant to explain the nature, the foundational nature of reality,

which isn't always directly accessible to rational thinking, and certainly

when your religion entails a personal God who has thoughts about things like salvation,

for example, those are things you're not going to be able to conclude simply from perfect rational thinking because every

aspect of rational thinking has to start someplace.

It's got, and you made this comment in our last podcast, it's got to start with either

a moral intuition or a fact about the physical world

or a series of facts from which you are going to infer some detail. So let's just say you

are the perfect moral reasoner and there was no, and you are completely isolated from any details of the world or from God's

thinking. You're not going to be able to produce any information about the nature of the world,

or almost any. What you can do is what René Descartes did. Well, I think, therefore I am. Or in my version,

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