16 - Modern knowledge and the post-Christian consensus II

Summary

Many who started as rationalists but were disillusioned by the discovery that a too comprehensive rationalism defeats itself have indeed practically capitulated to irrationalism. … But … there are other tenable attitudes, notably that of critical rationalism, which recognizes that the fundamental rationalist attitude is based upon an irrational decision, or upon faith in reason. Accordingly, the choice is entirely open. We are free to choose … a critical form of rationalism, one which frankly admits its limitations, and its basis in an irrational decision, and in so far, a certain priority of irrationalism.

(K. R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, 1945, vol. II, p. 218)

The motions of electrons and atoms do not resemble those of the parts of a locomotive so much as those of the dancers in a cotillion. And if the ‘true essence of substances’ is for ever unknowable, it does not matter whether the cotillion is danced at a ball in real life, or on a cinematograph screen, or in a story of Boccaccio. If … this is so, then the universe can be best pictured … as consisting of … the thought of what, for want of a wider word, we must describe as a mathematical thinker.

(James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe, 1930, p. 136).

Any … religion of the future must have as its basis the consciousness of sanctity in existence … It must admit that this … high sense of sacredness and transcendent value may be vouchsafed in many ways and in many objects. […]