| richardhutnik said: To some degree, all aspects of life that people trust in requires faith. Even a belief in rationality is an act of faith. There is some weird things in reality that defy rational thought. If you want to talk about purely rational, then I can bring in Popper and say that you can't even prove anything at all, including causality. This means you merely disprove things. But then, you only disprove for a certain set of conditions and not univerally for all conditions in the universe (God would fit this). So, thus, you can't even prove anything at all. All you can do is have reasonable inferences from that which is, and hope it is consistent enough you can trust in it. The reality is we can't prove that the laws of science work everywhere at all times, or the same laws will continue to work. We can't even prove that the universe wasn't created last Thursday, and just set in motion either. But, all this talk doesn't lead to any practical dealing with anything. We go to science, because it works relatively well for the human race as a methodology to get control over the universe and make plans that will come to pass. As far as "rationalism" doing anything, science has found that human beings tend to have emotions in their decision-making and they have difficulty making any decisions unless emotions are involved. There is also the case of people intuitively making decisions, and these decisions can be very good ones. As far as saving money, I am fully aware that myself telling myself that "you need to save money, because it is rational" doesn't cause me to save money. |
You're just playing with words, here, but let's get to the meaning.
I have "faith" in laws of physics not changing suddenly so that the airplane I'm travelling in doesn't plummet from the sky because its wings are suddenly useless. That's a statistical inference: it never happened since humanity kept track and we have no evidence that it ever happened even before that.
Thus, it's "faith" only in the sense i which if I extracted 999 times out of 1000 a black ball out of an opaque urn and only one white ball, I have "faith" that the majority of balls inside the urn are black.
It's an assumption that the world follows some laws that we can rationalize mathematically in some way. It's apprently a big assumption, but it has been tested again and again billion of times every day in all fields of human activity, even before the scientific method as we know it was formally adopted. As such even though blind induction is still a logical no-no, the theory that laws of physics keep working on our human time scales is the best tested theory of all in a Popper-ian sense.
The faith that a god or other mystic force created our world or keeps to meddle with it, on the contrary, has no value as a scientific theory according to Popper exactly because we can't falsify it.
You can say it's faith in both cases, if you want, in the same way that the number of atoms in the universe is the same as the number of living unicorns in Wales this instant. They're both numbers, after all. But leaving aside this superficial abstraction, the underlying concepts are both quantitatively and qualitatively different.
Last but not least rationalism in epistemology has little to do with "behaving rationally" in everyday's life, but has all to do with using rational tools for the exploration of the world's behaviour. Proof be that there are rational, scientific studies on human behaviour according to "gut feelings" , brain areas and inconscious risk assessment, see e.g. Damasio's "Descartes' error". Please point me to a real case where rationalism fails in this sense, since you say that
"There is some weird things in reality that defy rational thought. "
