Religion, rationality and David Hume

robhu recently set the atheist hit squad on a luckless university chaplain who had the gall to criticise the Great Dawkins. Yellow, the chaplain, argues that the current atheist backlash is President Bush's fault, but that Bush's sort of religion is unrepresentative of Christianity as a whole.

robhu's argument that religion is irrational has provoked a series of interesting posts from Yellow. The first one starts off talking about Sam Harris before the topic begins to turn to rationality.

The second gets into some philosophy, with Yellow pointing out that Hume's arguments on causality and induction lead to the conclusion that science itself is not strictly rational. To my shame, I wasn't that familiar with Hume before this, mainly being aware of his stuff on miracles (and that he could out-consume Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, of course), so it's been interesting to do some reading up on the web pages of various philosophy departments (Stanford's is particularly good). I've left a comment on Yellow's blog, remarking that there's something slightly odd about invoking the arch-empiricist Hume in an attempt to argue for Christianity. ETA: added link to my comment.

Finally, there's a third post on cosmological arguments for the existence of God. The absence of physical content in these arguments gets on my goat, so I responded there, too.