Rationality

Recently, I watched a movie that played an important part of my youth, the Adventures of the Baron Munchausen, directed by Terry Gilliam (the guy who did the cartoons for Monty Python, if that means anything to you). The movie takes place in “The Age of Reason” where a French town is under siege from the Turkish army. The leader of the city (played by Johnathan Pryce) insists that everything needs to be reasonable and according to logic. This logic compels him to have a soldier (a cameo by Sting) executed for repeatedly going above and beyond the call of duty, killing the enemy and rescuing his fellow soldiers because it would demoralize people who want to lead quiet, ordinary lives by their rocking of the boat.



At one point the Baron Munchausen interrupts a farcical performance, supposedly based on his life, because he says it is making a mockery of him and that he would not have it. The leader of the city says that the Baron has no grasp of reality. The response is “Your ‘reality’ is lies and balderdash and I am grateful to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever” (or words to that effect).



The reason that the Baron is claimed to be irrational and illogical is because he speaks of grand adventures, with magnificently talented servants, one who could run around the world in a matter of minutes, one who could carry all the gold out of the Grand Turk’s treasury, one who had exceptional hearing and powerful lungs who could blow over an entire army with one breath, and one who could hit a bullseye from halfway around the world. He spoke of visiting the king of the moon and of Cyclops in the South seas and of being eaten by giant whales.



The trick, according to the movie, is that these things actually happen. Not only does the Baron go on these adventures once again, but takes a member of the town with him (more accurately, she stows away on his hot air balloon made of women’s knickers).



I think that this entire movie raises the question of what is rational and what is irrational. Out understanding of rationality seems to be very closely related to our understanding of science. Are scientific formulae (such as Einstein’s E=mc2) actually rooted and grounded in how things actually are (that is, are matter and energy actually different expressions of the same thing, where what we call matter is really super-concentrated “knots” of energy), or are they just convenient ways to organize and manipulate our sense data?



If there really is a world outside of the human mind, and if we can actually have any kind of experience of that reality, then rationality cannot be determined before actually experiencing that reality. It is only after the fact, in light of all the possible investigations that we can really decide if someone is behaving rationally or not. To devise an understanding of what is “rational” independently of actual reality and then declaring that anything that does not fit into that understanding is “irrational” is itself irrational. It is behaving out of accordance with what actually is the case, because it automatically rules as impossible anything that violates those presuppositions.



This is where the example from the Adventures of the Baron Munchausen helps us to see this point. According to the movie (which, admittedly, is meant to be fantastic and not claiming that what it portrays is an accurate picture of the real world), the problem with the way that the “enlightened” leaders understood reality is because it did not allow for the fantastic adventures of someone like the Baron. The reason why this turned out to be a problem is because, according to the movie, all those things actually happened. According to the facts as they stood independently of the people, the Baron, and those who agreed with him were the only rational people, the only people who actually had a grasp on how things were in reality. It did not fit the “logic” or “reason” of the city leaders, but that logic and reason were declared to be false by what actually was the case.



My point is that it is not “rational” to behave in accordance with a strictly empiricist or positivist notion of reality where nothing can be considered to be “real” unless it has been directly experienced by the senses. The reason why this is not rational is that, first of all, nobody actually behaves that way in real life. Most of our decisions are made, not because we have either direct experience that proves something or is the result of logical deduction of that sense experience. Most of the time, we do what we do because we feel like it, we want to do it, because it seems right to us. If everything must be based on empirical data or strictly logical deduction in order to be rational, anything that we do on a whim, anything that we cannot give a strict account of using logic (and only logic), is irrational behavior.



The second major reason that strict empiricism or positivism is finally irrational is that our modern sciences (at least the purer sciences like physics and chemistry) do not actually operate using only their direct sense perception. A famous story from the world of science is when Ernst Mach, perhaps the most famous of modern positivists, was having a discussion about the existence or non-existence of atoms with Max Planck. Planck gave many reasons why the atomic theory made sense, and made more sense than competing theories and that, through carefully designed and controlled experiments, the existence of atoms could be more than reasonably asserted, even if not directly perceptible. Mach’s response was, “Show me one.” The argument is, if it is not possible to take a single atom to observe directly with the eyes (or even a microscope) and to touch with the hands, it must not be real.



As it turns out, our understanding of exactly what atoms are and exactly how they function has changed over the years, but nobody seriously questions the atomic theory anymore. Evidence is too completely on its side. However, if rational behavior is determined, not by what really is the case, but by clamping predetermining presuppositions onto reality, atomic theory would be completely irrational and our lives would be radically different today.



As everyone probably already knows, I have religious convictions at stake in this, that I believe that there are indeed things that we cannot touch with our hands or see with our eyes that are nonetheless very real, perhaps even more real than what we can touch or see or taste. However, I think that asking the skeptical questions with the intention that they will tear down any kind of theological understanding of the world will actually also tear down natural science as well. No science that exists after people like David Hume can affirm that we really only know things that we directly experience or what we can logical deduce from that experience without being terribly naïve. In spite of all the critical, post-modern attacks on every field of knowledge, natural science has remained, not because it is stubborn, but because it has a grasp on reality that is so deep and profound that it would be the height of irrationality to deny it because it would mean that their reason would have become unhinged from reality.



If rationality is determined by behaving in accordance with what really is the case, then the one who lives as if there is a God because they believe that this God exists is not intrinsically any less rational than the one who behaves as if there were no God at all because they were convinced that this was the case. The question is whether God actually exists or not. However, to insist that God must be subject to our ordinary means of investigating the universe is to make the same kind of mistake as Ernst Mach did. We cannot tell what color something is with our ear, we cannot tell if something smells good or bad with our eye. We cannot understand the purpose of a machine, simply by analyzing it on a physico-chemical level. We cannot understand God by using tools and methods for investigating very different things. God must be investigated on his own ground, according to his own self-revelation. To say that God must conform to our scientific conventions means that those conventions have priority even over reality itself, which is to lapse once again back to irrationality.