Beyond Reason: Thoughts on The Rational and The Illusion of Life

Recently I’ve had the thought that rationality or even science is not “objective” but is its own worldview. It may have more “plausibility,” but nevertheless it is still a point of view or a way to see the world. That worldview implicitly states that the natural world is understandable through repeated testing of hypotheses and experimentation aka the scientific method. This worldview has lots of merits obviously. Think of the COVID-19 vaccine for example, which is a modern miracle. Somehow in less than a year, a vaccine was produced to help stop a deadly disease, all of this courtesy of the scientific method.

But rationality and the scientific method have their drawbacks, especially with the individual human being. On a rational level, we can learn all about anatomy and how everything in the human body works together. And we can maybe learn something “objective’ about how humans function psychologically in the tradition of B.F. Skinner, using the scientific method to view rationally how humans behave. (Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Slow” comes from this tradition. It is a wonderful book if you want to tackle it.)

But in the world of spirituality, this line of inquiry misses the forest for the trees as they say. No amount of rationality or scientific study can explore the subjectivity of being a human…