The current issue of New Scientist has a 13-page series of items on “Reason” with the title “Seven Reasons Why People Hate Reason” from authors as diverse as the Archbishop of Canterbury, mathematician Roger Penrose and linguist Noam Chomsky. Taken as a whole – indeed even taken individually – the short articles are philosphically incredibly deep and quite difficult. They bear reading and I think probably re-reading. As New Scientist doesn’t make its full material; available online except to subscribers, what follows is a cherry-picked selection of what are (for me) soem of the highlights and insights. I offer them without commentary, and without the attribution to their specific authors, as food for thought.
From the 16th century, reason came to be seen as opposed to tradition and authority. Faced with the expectation of believing something just because a particular sort of person said so, the reasonable person was now the one who asked: “What are the arguments for this?”
This focus on rationality doesn’t speak to how people usually understand their lives and so they reject it for homeopathy, diet pills and […] stories about planes on Mars. People understand the world in stories, not dry rationality.
Do we know for certain that 2 plus 2 equals 4? Of course we don’t. Maybe every time everybody in the whole world has ever done that calculation and reasoned it through, they’ve made a mistake. Maybe it isn’t 4, it’s really 5. There is a very, very small chance that this has happened.
[There are] people saying we shouldn’t turn on the Large Hadron Collider experiment because a small probability exists that it might create black holes that would annihilate Earth. Sensible scientists say that this is ridiculous, there’s no chance. On the other hand, there’s a small chance that accepted theory is wrong, so there is a chance!
The central question here is about trust. What do you put your faith in? The kind of faith that Nehru expresses in science is absolute. It is not at all the qualified, provisional acceptance that might suit actual scientific findings. It claims to answer not just factual questions but every kind of social and moral dilemma. It offers general salvation. This sort of unconditional, general reliance on a single authority is never sensible, whatever god it may invoke. No system provides an infallible oracle; different problems need different ways of thinking.
Reason is “dangerous” because it leads you to question faith, not just faith that the world was created 6000 years ago but faith in the secular religions that lead to state power.
[…] governments and big corporations have hijacked the language and methods of reason and science in their PR and advertising to subvert the ability of people to judge for themselves – an end directly opposed to the Enlightenment values we supposedly hold dear.
[…] the concern that science and reason are increasingly seen as providing not just scientific, technical and military fixes, but answers to everything that matters in the world. This alienates people […] because it leaves no room for morality, art, imperfection and all of the things that make us human. Is it really surprising that so many turn to pseudoscience?
[…] even when we think we are being reasonable, we aren’t. Our decisions are based on gut instinct, then justified post hoc – and they are made better when we don’t consciously think about them. Researchers are also starting to realise that individual judgements they had long categorised as emotional and irrational may actually be beneficial when seen in the context of a group.
Man’s technology has exceeded his grasp. – ‘The World is not Enough’ Zealous Nobel Prize hungry Physicists are racing each other and stopping at nothing to try to find the supposed ‘Higgs Boson'(aka God) Particle, among others, and are risking nothing less than the annihilation of the Earth and all Life in endless experiments hoping to prove a theory when urgent tangible problems face the planet. The European Organization for Nuclear Research(CERN) new Large Hadron Collider(LHC) is the world’s most powerful atom smasher that will soon be firing subatomic particles at each other at nearly the speed of light to create Miniature Big Bangs producing Micro Black Holes, Strangelets and other potentially cataclysmic phenomena.CERN physicist Alvaro De Rújula in the BBC LHC documentary, ‘The Six Billion Dollar Experiment’, incredibly admits quote, “Will we find the Higgs particle at the LHC? That, of course, is the question. And the answer is, science is what we do when we don’t know what we’re doing.” And CERN spokesmodel Brian Cox follows with this stunning quote, “the LHC is certainly, by far, the biggest jump into the unknown.”The CERN-LHC website Mainpage itself states quote: “There are many theories as to what will result from these collisions,…” Again, this is because they truly don’t know what’s going to happen. They are experimenting with forces they don’t understand to obtain results they can’t comprehend. If you think like most people do that ‘They must know what they’re doing’ you could not be more wrong. Some people think the same thing about medical Dr.s but consider this by way of comparison and example from JAMA: “A recent Institute of Medicine report quoted rates estimating that medical errors kill between 44,000 and 98,000 people a year in US hospitals.” The second part of the quote reads “…but what’s for sure is that a brave new world of physics will emerge from the new accelerator,…” A molecularly changed or Black Hole consumed Lifeless World? The end of the quote reads “…as knowledge in particle physics goes on to describe the workings of the Universe.” These experiments to date have so far produced infinitely more questions than answers but there isn’t a particle physicist alive who wouldn’t gladly trade his life to glimpse the “God particle”, and sacrifice the rest of us with him.This quote from National Geographic exactly sums this “science” up: “That’s the essence of experimental particle physics: You smash stuff together and see what other stuff comes out.”Find out more about that “stuff” below;http://www.risk-evaluation-forum.org/anon1.htmhttp://www.lhcdefense.org/http://www.lhcconcerns.comhttp://www.SaneScience.org/http://www.LHCFacts.orgPopular Mechanics – “World’s Biggest Science Project Aims to Unlock ‘God Particle'” – “