4 What is Rational Belief?

Rational thought processes, decision-making, and behaviors govern how living creatures interact with their environments and with each other. Extended and formalized, it constitutes a large part of the foundations of science.

4.1 Basic Rationality

Belief based on logic combined with empirical, concrete evidence is not at all like a faith whose first principles are inscrutable deities, personal revelations, mystical, myth-filled text, cultural traditions, strong personal emotions, or priestly admonitions. The objects of rational belief – the real world entities to which those beliefs refer - do not reveal themselves only to the privileged few. They are not matters of taste, opinion, tradition, and custom. The truth of these beliefs is easily demonstrated and reproducible by anyone who cares to test them. If specialized education is required to comprehend some of the more arcane topics, anyone with the aptitude, intelligence, resources, and interest can obtain the training and experience that knowledge, firsthand.

The use of the term, rationality, here should not be confused with the Rational Philosophy of Descartes and Leibnitz, where all knowledge could be reasoned out through purely logical means independent of experience. Another sense of rationality, the one used here, is: reasonable, sensible, sane, in accord both with logic and experience.

Even primitive creatures, which have no consciousness or what we would call thought, behave rationally. They do what they do for their survival and self-interest. Evolution enforces rationality – those who work against the reality of their environments, historically, were eliminated from the gene pool. Humans, who developed the capacity to intellectualize this process call it rationality. Somehow in our pre-history, we alone also evolved the ability to be irrational.

In everyday life, in our jobs, and in our relationships we have expectations about how events and outcomes evolve, about how certain things cause other things to occur. We see these expectations borne out again and again. Based on our experience, we form models of how the world works and come to have trust in our models. In science and technology we build theories that explain how things behave now and will behave in the future, and we rely on these theories as a basis for further work. We can conduct those complex enterprises without have to return to the basics and prove them each time again from scratch. They have been proved and, barring the introduction of evidence that contradicts their predictions, they don’t need to be revisited. We combine fundamental, proven beliefs with new phenomena and experiments to build more comprehensive and complex models, which in turn become the fundamentals of other, even higher level hierarchies of explanations. We believe these things because we trust the evidence of our senses and our experience. As Phil Plait wrote, “Trust is when you accept what well-sourced evidence tells you. Faith is believing in something despite evidence to the contrary.”

Again, Richard Dawkins from “Is Science Religion” - “There is a very, very important difference between feeling strongly, even passionately, about something because we have thought about and examined the evidence for it on the one hand, and feeling strongly about something because it has been internally revealed to us, or internally revealed to somebody else in history and subsequently hallowed by tradition. There's all the difference in the world between a belief that one is prepared to defend by quoting evidence and logic and a belief that is supported by nothing more than tradition, authority, or revelation.”

The fundamental difference between the two kinds of faith we are discussing (and it’s this difference that gives rationality its power) is that rational faith (or belief) has the capacity to change itself when new evidence challenges old assumptions. Whereas non-rational approaches see patterns where none exist and assign causality to unrelated phenomena, rational approaches can test those patterns and investigate the proposed causality, rejecting what fails to meet its standard.

4.2 Rationality in Science

In section 3, we discussed faith and differentiated it from rational, evidence-based belief. Here we look more closely at rational belief and at its use in science. As Dr. Barnhardt said in the original version of the movie, The Day the Earth Stood Still, “it isn’t faith that makes good science Mr. Klaatu, it’s curiosity”. I would add a few other attributes to curiosity, but fully agree with the exclusion of faith from the recipe.

Methodological naturalism and scientific naturalism are terms that refer to the view that explanations of observed effects are meaningful when they invoke only natural causes. They are formalizations and extensions of the everyday rational/empirical process we use to live our lives. Methodological naturalism takes the position that the scientific method (hypothesize, experiment, measure, analyze, interpret) is the only effective way to investigate reality. Science doesn’t (typically) study the supernatural realm, does not invoke it to explain events, and finds no need to hypothesize its existence or effects. As Steven Novella wrote:

Science is dependent upon methodological naturalism, and this is not an arbitrary choice, as some may claim. The methods of science simply do not work without this underlying philosophical basis. This is because nonmaterial causes cannot be falsified; therefore, they fail to meet a necessary criterion for science. The reason they can’t be falsified is that they are not constrained in any way. There are no limits to what they can potentially do because they are not, by definition, following the laws of nature—of material cause and effect. Furthermore, constraint is necessary for falsifiability.

For example, how are the characteristics of ghosts constrained? How could we falsify the hypothesis that ghosts are responsible for any particular observed phenomenon? If they are outside of what we understand as the law of nature, then they could theoretically do anything. If they could do anything—if they’re unconstrained— then they are untestable by the methods of science. In other words, is there any observation or experiment that is not potentially compatible with the hypothesis that ghosts exist? If the answer is no, then ghosts are simply an unscientific notion.

This methodology doesn’t take a hard stand on defining the “true” nature of the universe from a metaphysical point of view. Perfectly good science can be done by "bracketing", i.e. deferring, that question indefinitely. The act of "doing science" doesn’t require that one have a particular philosophical opinion – only that a particular approach to the conduct of science be taken. Rather than trying to uncover the "truth", it discovers how things work and the processes that govern the phenomena being studied. Nevertheless, the discoveries of science map closely to our experience of the universe. They are consistent with that universe, consistent among themselves, and are very useful, if not necessarily and absolutely “true” (whatever “true” means in this context).

As with methodological naturalism, the scientific method also extends the everyday common sense we use to make it through life. The simple techniques we use to gain knowledge about the world as we move through it are extended and rigorously applied in science. For example, if you hear a knocking sound on your door, you hypothesize that someone is at the door. You perform an experiment by going to the door and opening it. By looking outside, you gather evidence. You evaluate the evidence (compare what you see to your hypothesis), and interpret the results (e.g., your friend is visiting you). There is no faith involved - this is the way we humans interact with and learn from the environment. Anyone can duplicate this discovery process – there is no privileged class that alone can experience it. As Albert Einstein said, “The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking”. Just as apt, a quote from T.H. Huxley (Darwin’s bulldog) - “Science is simply common sense at its best--that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.”

Even among philosophers of science, there is no common agreement on the definition of science. Most of them can recognize the difference between science and non-science, but differ on the exact nature of science. No single unified account of the difference between science and non-science has been widely accepted by philosophers, and some regard the problem as unsolvable or uninteresting, although Karl Popper had a technique for making this distinction, called the “criterion of demarcation”, discussed later in this paper. The fact that good science still occurs without agreement about this issue highlights the fact that it is not strictly a philosophical or metaphysical enterprise, but also a practical one, straddling the chasm between the physical world and theoretical constructs. There is more or less unanimous agreement among its practitioners as to how it should be conducted (encompassed in the term, methodological naturalism). But for those who do care to debate what lies beneath science, there are conventionalists, who believe humans devised “laws of nature” and organize their experience of the world according to these laws. The inductionists (Bacon, Russell) gather information from the physical world and use induction to create theories that explain the phenomena that are observed (this is probably what most people would intuitively agree with). The deductivists take the opposite view – that there is no valid inductive logic, since general statements can never be completely proved from specific cases. On the other hand, a general statement can be disproved by even one contrary particular instance. Therefore, a scientific theory can never be proved but it can be disproved. The role of an experiment is, then, to subject a scientific theory to a critical test. Thus, all theories are tentative.

While on the topic of belief systems surrounding science, but not intrinsic to it, there are philosophical naturalists, similar to philosophical materialists, who insist that the world is entirely natural (in the sense of being devoid of the supernatural). This is a belief that many choose, but is entirely a personal choice. Certainly science has, as yet, not required supernatural entities to explain the many processes and phenomena it has helped illuminate. Philosophical naturalism is not required for science to work. It stands in opposition to deistic or theistic beliefs. However, it cannot be emphasized too strongly – despite the similarity of the terms, philosophical naturalism has nothing at all to do with methodological naturalism, which defines the practice of science.

Science develops theories through inductive logic (from the specific to the general) and then tests theories by generating predictions through deductive logic (making specific predictions from a general theory) and empirically verifying those predictions. Science explores the natural world and makes predictions about the future, and creates theories explaining discoveries that reveal the past. Unlike practically every other endeavor, especially faith-based enterprises, it constantly attempts to falsify itself in order to grow and strengthen – the “no pain/no gain” approach. Religions, New Age spiritualism, Mysticism, never attempt to refute their fundamental tenets or falsify their basic dogma – those who do are deemed heretics. For example, Christians accept on faith that various assertions about God – he created the earth, he visited various saints and prophets, sent his son, and then took his son back. None of that is tested, nor it is testable – we cannot question the mind of God. Although it is perfectly good theology, it is not science.

James Frazer, author of The Golden Bough sums it up well: “but while science has this much in common with magic - that both rest on a faith in order as the underlying principle of all things, readers of this work will hardly need to be reminded that the order presupposed by magic differs widely from that which forms the basis of science. The difference flows naturally from the different modes in which the two orders have been reached. For whereas the order on which magic reckons is merely an extension, by false analogy, of the order in which ideas present themselves to our minds, the order laid down by science is derived from patient and exact observation of the phenomena themselves. The abundance, the solidity, and the splendor of the results already achieved by science are well fitted to inspire us with a cheerful confidence in the soundness of its method.”