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About the author:
Descended from old English money, Vidicon was raised by spiny echidnas in the mountainous rainforests of the North American Southeast. Lured back to society by time-traveling gray/reptiloid alien hybrids posing as renegade Jesuits, he has managed to maintain his outsider's perspective and an appetite for crunchy insects. Today, Vidicon is a world-class synchronicity surfer and an unlicensed quantum mechanic. He has a fourth-degree black belt in weird.
About his bi-weekly column:
Tales from the Third Lobe are the unfocused meanderings of the World's Smartest Moron. Topics range widely over the sciences, religion, philosophy, technology, modern culture, mysticism, Vidicon's personal history and viewpoints, and whatever pissed him off in the media last week.
View all articles by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. "Vidicon" Xalieri, 2HC Columnist...
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Worshipers of the Goddess Reason
I was reading Jorge Luis Borges's Fictions just the other day when I stumbled across the phrase, "he was a worshiper of the goddess Reason." I didn't realize for a moment that it was an insult.
Borges frequently writes a version of himself into his stories. Sometimes he appears to be the genuine article and sometimes he's obviously a caricature. But in any guise, he's a poet and very aware of the subtle shadings words can have. (His original language is Spanish—he was one of Argentina's national treasures for most of his adult life—so you have to trust his translators to convey his subtleties.)
It's not rational to worship Reason. People who do it aren't rational. And they aren't even trying.
My first roommate in college was a Physics major. I've always had an interest in physics and the harder sciences, so we would talk, often including a number of our mutual friends in the discussions. We would talk about the findings of the last century, concentrating on the more recent discoveries and their implications, and he would expound on the facts as if they were, indeed, facts.
Some of us had no end of pleasure in challenging his assertions. He would tell us what he had been told. We'd ask about his sources, and what experiments they had performed, or who had performed the experiments upon which his sources' conclusions were based, and so on, especially for the harder-to-believe stuff.
In the end we compared him to an acolyte of a priesthood, delivering to us what his priests and bishops and cardinals had given to him to believe. Becasue when we asked him to say whether he believed these things were actually true, he'd say yes. And that there was experimental evidence. And the experiments were performed by honest-to-God scientists with credentials from various universities and whose findings had been subjected to review by other honest-to-God scientists with credentials from those same universities....
Half in jest we'd point out that the religious authorities who hand their followers truths to believe only respect the opinions of others in their own priesthood. He would counter with the proposition that the hierarchies of authorities in the field of science are based on merit, to which we countered that the judgement of merit also came from their peers.
We would go around on this for hours sometimes, until he begged us to stop picking on him.
The problem wasn't fact or accuracy, or trustworthiness of sources, or any of that stuff. The problem was faith. He believed that the universe existed and behaved according to the principles that had been dictated to him. He had faith in a structure that has no use for faith, and, in fact, discourages it.
Faith is what you use when you need something to believe. People who need to think the universe is understood, or at least understandable, have faith in science. People who need to believe that anything can be understood have faith in reason. Pure and simple, faith is for people who need to believe in something.
Reason—conclusions you get to by use of logic—has no need for faith. Reason is a process. You can put your trust in the conclusions reason gives you, but you know that those conclusions could fail you if the data they are based on is tainted. You can trust in reason to give you useful conclusions as long as you do your math right. But trust isn't faith. Trust is something you have to do in order to put your feet on the floor and put your weight on your feet. Betrayal of trust removes that trust. Betrayal of faith destroys everything you know to be true.
Reason, as a process, doesn't need faith or worship or preaching. If you are perfectly reasonable then you'd be willing to abandon reason if reason dictates you should do so. Being a devotee of Reason means that you value Reason more highly than reason itself could possibly demand. Reason, like God, is something we reasonable people merely keep around until something better comes along.
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Vidicon sees your syllogism and raises you a modus tollens. |
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