What is the link between rationality, irrationality and faith? A recent email inviting me to a discussion led me to ponder this question and i reproduce my analysis sent to the email chain below:
An irrational thought leads to a rational examination that causes discovery of a new truth. This new truth can lead to further rational advances if the truth is really true; or it can lead to furthering irrational thought, as in the case of a parent tying the tabeez to ward off evil. The first is a result of thorough understanding of the causes and the discovery that adequately explains the phenomenon within the bounds of current knowledge – as all scientific theory does. The second is a result of half-baked ideas that may pass muster with a limited set of data (maybe even one observation) and worse by a superficial analysis of the root cause of a problem but in the end it is not always true and creates half-baked ideas. The extreme examples obviously being the belief in “spiritual methods” to sort your problems, by applying a black mark to ward off the evil eye. I would present that the evil eye concept would have originated when someone somewhere saw that by applying a black mark to a child led to ending a high fever in a child; since the concept of causality was confused in this case it led to the belief that the child had an evil eye that would be alleviated if a black mark is applied. The people who formulate these ideas do not have the tools that can systematically prove or disprove the theory. After all the data set that is being used to analyze this causality is the handful of births in a village somewhere. Not all births lead to disease and not all disease are dangerous. So a superficial analysis of limited data set leads to un-truths and further irrationality. The difference between modernity and rational thought is the persistent effort by humans to understand the phenomenon around them. All branches of science are an attempt in this regard. Modern science, however, places a high emphasis on proving or disproving a theory without regard to any dogma. Dogmatic insistence on a particular line of thought is rewarded only in so far as it leads to provenance. If there is no provenance the scientist is discredited and may lose any serious audience. Darwinism survives in spite of the insistence dogmatic pursuit against it simply because practical evidence proves it right. If tomorrow an alien were to come to earth and prove that it actually designed us then Darwinism would be done with and the Spaghetti Monster theory would win. Quantum mechanics and Relativity are accepted theories even when they are incompatible against each other simply because they are supported by experimental evidence. Quantum mechanics did not displace Classical mechanics simply because Classical mechanics was adequate within its limits. Only when the human insights reached beyond these limits did we need Quantum mechanics and then it was available to us. Now that we have perhaps reached the limits of our understanding, we are constructing new theories that would perhaps explain the relativistic motion of quantum particles ( I don’t know if that is what they do, but you get the point). Eventually we would find our answer and then be faced with a new question. It is as if a higher being is playing a game of problem solving with us. And then there is the question of Faith. To a point made in this chain – an irrational intuition leads us to an eureka moment that devices a new experiment and prove a certain result. All scientific advancement perhaps is a result of this imaginative progress. But then where does this idea germinate, how is our imagination informed of something that didn’t exist? How did Einstein think of a relativistic geometry that went against the prevailing Euclidean idea? This intuition is perhaps more a result of an unexplained process rather than an irrational thought. As I put in my blog once “It is only in imagination that we can try and fail to encapsulate the infinite. Where are we, within our unknown, infinite universe. Where does our infinite universe reside? What is beyond the known? What is known? What are we made of? Atoms? Neutrons and positrons and Quacks? When did we come into existence? In the year xyz of some reference point of the birth of someone? When was that someone born? How much time lapsed after the birth of this, our universe, when this someone was born. What is birth and what lapsed before the universe came into existence. What is existence?…For what answer can there be when every answer begets an infinitude of questions?”All our scientific progress is to answer these infinitude of questions and by definition they cannot be answered. The advancement of science is in essence the proof of a higher existence as well as a disproof of any ultimate being, for by our logic there cannot be one. As the Creation Hymn of the Rig Veda intones: Whence this creation has come into being; whether it was made or not; he in the highest heaven is its surveyor. Surely he knows, or perhaps he knows not. Abrahamic religions believed in an entity that created everything, call the entity Brahma, God or Allah – it still is a human construct. Ultimately it is the matter of your faith. After all we exist and something owes us our existence, something gives us the idea that causes the discovery of relativity, something moves our economies around and creates higher standards of living. Call it the invisible hand, call it God – but you cannot have a rational construct that will explain it completely. The whole tenet of rationality as I understand it will be destroyed in explaining the unexplainable. In the end you reach the limits of rationality and have to end up leaving the rest to faith. Which is why Einstein can be a deeply religious person while also being completely rational: there are phenomenon we can explain in a stream of causality – there is friction and the ball rolls, there is no friction and I slip on the ice; there are phenomenon we cannot explain rationally and accept it as the act of god. At some point we reach a level of understanding that moves one more thing into the realm of rational and one less in the realm of irrational. Some can be mostly rational while others can be mostly irrational: even the village simpleton knows that fire burns, his careful response in the face of fire is a rational response; even though he may blame the evil eye for his misfortune. His jumping into the fire to save his pet animal at the cost of his life however is not a rational response. In the end it is this irrationality that keeps us human and it is in finding beauty at the mysticism of the natural that we can still delight in. Rationality need not be at the cost of irrationality for things that matter. Knowing that my love for such and such a person is because of pheromones does not make me enjoy the feeling less. Knowing that stars are a mass of hydrogen in violent fusion reactions does not make me enjoy the night sky less.
~*~
