Aristotle’s Dream

Before I begin discussing science in general, I believe it is necessary to explore where rationality (and, by extension irrationality) come from, better to shed light on why people hold rational or irrational opinions, and why, perhaps, they refuse to give them up, even under enormous pressure. This will also serve as a good place to describe some basic terms that will be in use in this blog. Interestingly, rationality and irrationality actually share a common heritage.

Rationality can simply be viewed as an attempt to make sense of the world, to order it and seek explanations for it. In that sense, even seemingly irrational beliefs (the sun-centered universe, creationism etc) have their roots in rationality itself. Our earliest thinking ancestors were the first to attempt to construct models of the world, gained, in a surprisingly scientific (here used in the sense of “observe, postulate, theorize”) manner.

The sun rose each morning, and early man observed the movements of animals and insects that responded to that sunrise, and postulated that these same creatures were, in some way, responsible for the sunrise. For example, the Egyptian belief that the sun was a huge dung ball rolled around the sky by a vast dung beetle is a simple extrapolation that the sun is round, like a dung ball, and dung beetles roll them around.

Early man was well versed in cause-and-effect; his very survival depended on it. A rock hit’s a man on the head, he dies. If you don’t kill an animal, you starve. A dropped stick will fall. Thus, it was utterly reasonable to assume that their observations of cause and effect pertained universally. All effects have causes, and thus all observed phenomena have causes.

Fascinatingly, the same assumption still holds true in modern science; as below, so above. In other words, an observed phenomenon on Earth can provide an explanation for an observation elsewhere (and vice versa). By that token, paleontologists assume that the fossil bones that they dig up functioned in the same manner as modern bones (the belief by some ancient people that these fossil bones must have belonged to fabulous beasts with stone skeletons notwithstanding!) An astronomer watches clouds on Jupiter in the hope that it will tell them something new about cloud formation that pertains here on Earth. A supercollider is used to produce exotic particles in the hopes that it will shed light on the conditions in the early Universe.

So rationality can simply be defined as a consistent viewpoint that establishes basic principles from observation, then extrapolates a world-view from those observations using logic. Thus the “irrational” beliefs of our ancestors were actually obtained rationally; i.e. they observed and used logic to extrapolate that observation into a world-view.

A belief only becomes irrational when new or improved observation disproves that view; for example direct observation of the sun reveals it to not be a burning dung ball, but rather a huge ball of gas, and there are no dung beetles in sight. Few, if any people today believe this myth, but the irrational beliefs that do exist appear, on the face of it, every bit as absurd as this one.

Science is an attempt to replace irrational beliefs about the world with rational, provable ones. Of course, along the way, various previously held rational beliefs will become irrational. For example, the theory of the Ether, a mysterious substance that allows the propagation of light through the universe, that pervades everything, and provides the substrate upon which the material universe exists has been supplanted by the theory of space-time. Again, few, if any, continue to hold that the ether exists, but for centuries it was a scientific “fact”.

Today, science is more careful about what it labels “fact”; many of the “facts” of previous generations are now labeled “theory”, or “hypothesis”, rather than “fact”, and this illustrates another bulwark that science has erected against irrationality. Nowadays, scientific fact is largely considered to be what was previously labeled “observation”; for example it is a “fact” that bodies attract each other. This is the “fact” of gravity. What causes this attraction is now considered “theory”.

Irrational thought does not distinguish between fact and theory; it is, perhaps, one of the clearest markers of irrationality that we can use. When irrational thinkers say “Oh, it’s just a theory”, they illustrate the point perfectly. In order to insulate itself from irrationality, science has, in modern times, created a hierarchy of levels of certainty.

Science always starts with observation. This gives rise to facts: Stars emit light and heat; bodies in motion tend to remain in motion unless acted on by another body or force; like poles repel, unlike poles attract, and so forth. A fact is not a statement about why something happens, just a simple observation.

Beyond facts come laws. A law is simply an expression of an observation that had been repeated and confirmed. F=ma is a Law (Force is equal to Mass x Acceleration). E=mc² is a Law, and so on. A law is simply a description of an observation, and nothing more.

Finally comes theory. In general usage, theory means a working idea based on observation, that may or may not be correct. Irrational thought looks down on the theory as “an unproven assumption”, because this is the way it is generally used. In police work, for example, a detective may have a theory about what happened at a crime scene, informed by their observations of the scene and a general knowledge about crime. The theory, in this case, may or may not go on to be proven true.

Science has a subtly different view of “theory”. A theory starts by looking at a phenomenon and attempts to explain it using existing knowledge, much like a detective’s theory about a crime. However, at this point, it is called an hypothesis; it is only a sketch of an idea, perhaps using various laws and existing theories for support, but by no means a fully-fledged scientific theory.

A theory emerges from an hypothesis when the nuts-and-bolts definition of what is happening regarding said phenomenon is constructed. For example, Einsteinian gravitation says that bodies attract because they warp space-time and turn Euclidean straight-line geometry into non-Euclidean curved-line geometry, thus making it appear that a body is following a curved trajectory, when, as far as it is concerned, it is still following a straight one. The theoretical underpinnings of this hypothesis are mathematical and esoteric in nature, but are an essential point in the construction of a working theory. If all that Einstein had said was “bodies curve space”, the physics community would have greeted it with “Oh… very nice. Er.. Well done,” and gone about their business. It was only the deep insight into mathematics and physics that the actual theory itself provided that caused physicists to take notice.

Irrational thought has no place for theory in the scientific sense; for irrationality, “theory” means “guess”, and observation is certainty. This is one of the best markers of irrationality; the adherence to outmoded beliefs or ideas even though they have been supplanted by newer ones. Most irrationlists will use the constant improvement of science against it, gleefully pointing out that science is not self-consistent, and thus cannot be trusted. Many refer to it as something that must be taken “on faith”, which is certainly true of many lay-people, since deep understanding of many of the concepts in modern science is only possible after years of study.

If this is the case, then it can easily be seen that many people adhere to “rational thought” in an irrational way! If this is the case, then how can science possibly lay claim to some status that elevates it above so-called irrationality?

The only way science can do this is by its very nature; the last 100 years or so have seen a revolution not just in science in general but in the way science approaches problems. Gone is the old certainty that led many in the past to claim that all that was knowable would soon be known, gone the idea that a theory was a fact. Now science carefully checks itself and repeats even the most fundamental assumption. Satellites constantly perform gravity experiments, seeking to falsify Newtonian Laws, just in case. Science happily, even gleefully, accepts the possibility that massive changes could overturn almost every fundamental assumption about the nature of the Universe. Thousands of times a day, scientists seek to prove theories, and even observations to be faulty, the better to understand the Universe itself.

It is this endeavor that sets modern rationality apart from irrationality. The ultimate description of irrational thought is “thought that is insulated against change, regardless of evidence”. Whether it is a rigid adherence to Biblical creation, a dogged determination to cling to the idea that the Earth is at the center of the Solar System, or the idea that cold fusion occurs in a test tube, the hallmark of irrationality is that it does not change.

So what of the attempt (in this blog and elsewhere) to overcome irrationality? Debates online do not do the trick, that much is certain. The same canards, irrelevance and trickery repeats over and over again, and the same misplaced assertions on the part of those leaping to the defense of science pop up repeatedly. It is my view that the only way to overcome irrationality is not to change the minds of those who are irrational, but to attempt to describe as much as possible, in layman’s terms, what the conclusions of science are, and how it came up with those conclusions.

Anyway, that’s the groundwork and the philosophy of this blog. I welcome all comments and debate, the better to do the job ahead. If I make an error, I will correct it. I will enter debates about the facts presented herein, in the hope that someone might learn from them.

Above all, I urge you all to recognize that everyone has irrational thought within them, a set of assumptions about the world that form the basis of our experience here. Even scientists are not immune to that bias (myself included!) so I urge you to recognize it, accept it, and join the search for a rational universe. Even if it is out of our reach, I believe it is the journey, not the destination, that makes it so exciting.