The attempt to sneak evolution in through the back door, while insisting on the compatibility of scientific knowledge and arbitrary speculation about supernatural beings, is ultimately counterproductive.

Let's stop making excuses for rationality. Attempting to understand the natural world by reference to a cosmic father who ties up all loose ends is cro-magnon thinking. And as Sam Harris points out, religious moderates who acclimate themselves to the fruits of modernity just provide cover to their more consistent, radical brothers in spirit.

People are blowing up buildings because of this kind of thinking. It needs to be made clear to such people and to their intellectual enablers that the jig is up.

Posted by: Eric | May 5, 2008 1:09 PM

Let's stop making excuses for rationality. Attempting to understand the natural world by reference to a cosmic father who ties up all loose ends is cro-magnon thinking.

rationality is just a process of deductive inference generation from axioms. it only entails contingent upon the axioms. and my understanding of jim's point is that he is suggesting that science is the best way to model the natural world. don't act like all religious people are tarded fundamentalists; it's false and it's stupid.

Posted by: razib | May 5, 2008 2:31 PM

don't act like all religious people are tarded fundamentalists; it's false and it's stupid

I neither acted like it nor said it. Smart people can be egregiously wrong. What's false and stupid is the idea that scientists should be bending over backwards to accomodate stone age cosmology. My point, taken from Sam Harris, is that smart people who have compartmentalized this stone age irrationality into a little box in their minds labeled "What I do on Sundays" make it much easier for the retarded fundamentalists to exist in our society and plan their periodic bombing expeditions.

And no, rationality is not just deductive inference from axioms. Rationality is inference from sensory data, i.e. from evidence, both deductively and inductively. Rationality is not a formal system, it is a basic orientation toward the world granting primacy to what one sees and hears and smells over what other people (like imams and priests) say or what random excretions proceed from one's own subconscious.

Posted by: Eric | May 5, 2008 4:14 PM

It's both, actually: the rationalist view of the results is what informs the rationalist examination of the methods. In short: they work.

If you could show that some other methodology could reliably produce useful models, it would be absorbed and incorporated into science - but you almost certainly can't do that.

The scientific method IS inquiry. It's what people have always used whenever they want a practical answer - it just wasn't formalized until recently.

The real key is wanting the practical answer in the first place, instead of the nonsense humans usually want.

Posted by: Caledonian | May 5, 2008 6:04 PM

That's like asking "why be right, when we can be wrong"? There's no point to being wrong.

Posted by: Caledonian | May 6, 2008 9:20 AM

the deeper question: "Why be rational?"

Because being rational predicts the future better than being non-rational, so rational behaviour will (usually) maximise your future utility. It's quite simple when you think of it.

Incidentally, that's also the answer to Alvin Plantiga's intriguing little sophism (which essentially assumes that a non-rational brain would be just as useful as a rational brain).

That leaves a lot of explaining to do, about why so many folks ARE irrational.

Because man is not a rational animal. Man is an animal that is capable of being rational, sometimes. The reason is easily found: in some specific cases, an irrational behaviour (say, stereotyping) can actually quite useful in terms of self-preservation - and thus be favoured by evolution.

Posted by: toto | May 6, 2008 10:30 AM

Rationality is making a decision while explicitly recognizing the reasons for that decision. A rational decision isn't necessarily correct in an absolute sense, but is correct given the data available to the actor.

Non-rational decisions may or may not be correct; there is no conscious evaluation of the mechanism by which the decision is made.

Irrational decisions are explicitly nonsensical but are made regardless; they may end up working, but the reasons they were made are necessarily wrong.

Rationality is better than non-rationality, but it can't always be managed and sometimes (because of the costs involved) shouldn't be attempted. Irrationality is always wrong, period. Asking why we should prefer rationality to irrationality is ridiculous on its own grounds.

Humans are irrational because we've inherited certain preferences and cognitive shortcuts that produced adaptive behavior in our original environment but that have persisted long after they've become obsolete or even actively harmful.

Posted by: Caledonian | May 6, 2008 11:13 AM

Because he made at least one incisive sociological point and I don't want to pretend I came up with it.

Posted by: Eric | May 6, 2008 3:01 PM