Seriously, what’s the point of learning about an observer-free, external-to-the-mind, reality? I get it, the scientific method demands that we avoid letting our biases taint our investigation, but shouldn’t the outcome of that investigation consider what it means for us? In other words, the aim of rational enquiry should be to make humanity better: More fulfilled, healthier, happier, and to increase the human conception of reality; not some abstract thought experiment on what the universe would be like without us in it. That being said, maybe even reason isn’t a complete way of understanding the world.

Here’s a really good podcast that does an excellent job of describing the shortcomings of rational thought, but I’ll summarise and restate here. In essence, reason isn’t very good at describing what it is to be human in this universe. For example, what would happen if I were to use only the natural sciences to write a book on parenting. I could use a statistical analysis of the most safe crib placement, the optimal amount of time to spend with my child, and maybe a logical decision tree to describe the best course of action for every childhood contingency. But that book would absolutely suck. Parenting takes love, intuition, empathy, and discipline, amongst other things that can’t be described by reason, rational thought or science.

What’s more, the danger of rational thought is that we’ve deluded ourselves to think that this is the only way of understanding the world. Before The Enlightenment, Biblical interpretation gave us the certainty we’d figured it all out and were doing the right thing (you know, burning heretics and witches etc.) We’ve just replaced that flawed and incomplete world view with a new one, which albeit better at discovering new things, is still an incomplete system. Here’s a quote from the podcast that sums up the shortcomings of the Enlightenment thinkers and our current reverence of reason:

What these thinkers DID, Nietzsche says, is throw out the religious certainty that caused them so many problems in the past and just changed the criteria for what makes something certain. RATIONALITY is now our path to certainty. They replaced one dogma with another dogma.

And what are the consequences of this dogma of reason? Well, much the same as our mistaken Phrenologist ancestors, we dismiss, disregard or explain away anything that doesn’t align with this zeitgeist; with society’s reverence for rational explanation. Think for example, what would happen if someone came back from the dead having experienced something profound, or tens of thousands of people saw the sun dance across the sky, or hundreds of thousands of people saw an apparition of the Virgin Mary in Cairo. We’d look for a scientific explanation and if there wasn’t one, we’d dismiss it as a lie, or a hallucination, or a hoax.

So if we abandoned religious certainty, for good reason, and replaced it with rational certainty, which is also flawed, what the heck are you advocating? Religious uncertainty!? Hmmm. Maybe there’s a name for that…