Rationalism and Nihilism

Over the course of several years, I somehow grew into the idea that rationality is sort of the holy grail when it comes to truth-seeking: it is rigorous and procedural, it takes care to minimize the effect of human emotion, and it is open-minded and self-correcting.  Given all these strengths, it seemed a perfect tool.  I learned to apply it in all particulars of my life, from work and school to relationships and religion.

I was shocked, disappointed, and annoyed when I discovered that religion and rationality don't get along.  There is place for reason in religious circles, but when it comes to belief in deity... there is simply no rational way to arrive at that kind of belief.  There is no evidence.  And the experience that usually leads people toward God is subjective and logically unsound.

There was a sort of crisis of belief, when I contemplated what it might mean to turn my back on the religion in which I was raised.  I didn't feel like I could honestly remain an active church member when everyone around me was saying stuff that I didn't believe in.  It was all so irrational, yet everyone was OK with it.  I sort of hovered in this half-interested state, where I went through the motions to keep the peace and avoid confrontation.

Later, while contemplating the exact nature of rationality, I realized that it, too, has limitations: pursuing rationalism alone leads to an unsatisfactory nihilistic view of the world, where nothing matters because there is no rational basis for establishing a standard to measure good and evil, right and wrong, and better and worse.  Reason alone cannot provide an objective method for determining value, establishing morals, and giving meaning to life.

Nihilism is the end result of my previous posts about assumptions - we make assumptions in order to form our own world-views, but there is nothing to recommend one set of assumptions over another.  As someone pointed out to me, even the idea that we can know anything at all is itself an assumption.  The idea that life has meaning is an assumption.  Unfortunately, these basic assumptions about knowledge and meaning aren't strictly rational.  They are motivated by the human desire to know things and to feel like the human experience somehow matters.  But for all we know, the universe doesn't give a rat's about us, and when we are gone, we are gone.

The implication?  If we want any real meaning in life, if we want to feel like we know anything at all, then we have to be irrational.  Somewhere along the line of reason, we have to take an irrational leap and build our world-views on it.  The only alternative is nihilism.

This realization is at once disconcerting and liberating for me.  It is disconcerting because it puts us poor humans in a position that basically forces either irrationality or despair.  On the other hand, it is liberating because it recognizes that the human experience is subjective to the core - it recognizes that what really matters is what matters to me, to us, not what matters to the universe.  Since the human experience is subjective anyway, we have license to build a world-view that appeals most to our biological brains.  That world-view could either include or exclude God, and the rational universe wouldn't care.  Only people care.