Religion and Rationality: A Semeiotic Approach

The article argues that, contrary to New Atheism’s claim, religion does not eo ipso violate standards of rationality, provided that rationality is understood in a nonpositivist way. To illustrate, the first section analyzes examples of religious argument across world religions (Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, Islam), while the second section introduces basic key features of a minimum concept of rationality (personrelatedness, structure-relatedness, communicability, generality, differentiatedness) implied by the previous examples. The third section offers a semiotic frame theory broad enough to allow for different types of rationality and to this end uses Charles Peirce’s analytical system of ten semiotic trichotomies, which presupposes that all living processes, especially human ones (including feeling and acting), can be analyzed along the line of “sign,” “object,” and “interpretant.” The fourth, fifth, and sixth sections argue that rationality is primarily ascribable to so-called normal interpretants, i.e., terms, judgments, and arguments, although rationality will take a different shape in each case. The last section draws six brief conclusions concerning the relationship between religion and rationality.