| richardhutnik said: Rationalism and the scientific method work... when you have the right conditions for them to do so. When they do, as in the case of innovation and the arts, or understanding human behavior, they are limited. Also, in the scientific method, the origin of a hypothesis is not rational at all. It will usually come as a flash of insight. There is a degree of irrational in the scientific method. A place that practical testing of how things work is economics, and you see that there is irrationality in how economies work. Here is a show Nova ran on this: |
Everything works only in the conditions in which it can. That's a truism.
The point being that science is a bottom-up work in progress by its nature. And the degree in which it provides explanations and predictions increases in all fields, all the time. It's obviosuly limited as all human constructions, but what I asked you to point me to is some field where it can't work, no matter how much we try.
That's not to say that rationality is always the most important faculty of the individual. When I'm hungry, I need food, not the biological explanation of why I'm feeling that sensation. When I enjoy a painting, my sensation is valuable to me, indipendently from the exact description of my brain activity we might one day be able to give.
Still, science works as the best tool to know the biology of my methabolism or my brain, and I would never try to promote my hunger or my enjoyment of a given painting to a tool to estabilish objective facts about reality.
Faith in a creator god is just that: it's an assumption of a very complex idea, that only seems simple because our brains are wired to look for human/intentional explanations in our environment. It may be comforting and pleasant to the individual, but it's not a useful idea to understand the world at a basic level.
On the other hand we've been proving day in day out for thousands of years that everything as far as we can see and test works along mathematical models. And that strict and economic rationality has been the best way to develop such models of the world behaviour.
I'll never question the value faith or art or wit can have in subjective lives. I'll always question when they are used as the wrong tool for the job.
