Abbr. Enth.Irrational Truths?
A quote was given to me by someone who I’ve had a few Creation/Evolution debates with over the last year. The quote is from Donald Miller’s book Blue Like Jazz.
“I had no explanation [for my friend Laura’s questions about my faith in God.]My belief in Jesus did not seem rational or scientific, and yet there was nothing I could do to separate myself from this belief. I think Laura was looking for something rational, because she believed that all things that were true were rational.
But that isn’t the case. Love, for example, is a true emotion, but it is not rational. What I mean is, people actually feel it…but it cannot be proven scientifically. Neither can beauty. Light cannot be proven scientifically, and yet we all believe in light and by light we see all things. There are plenty of things that are true that don’t make any sense. I think one of Laura’s problems was she wanted God to make sense. He doesn’t. He will make no more sense to me than I will make sense to an ant.”
While I can see the argument that was being presented here, Miller apparently failed to do his research for this book. Saying that love is not rational is one thing, but saying it can’t be proven scientifically is an entirely different thing. Here is a good article explaining all of the chemical reactions that take place in our bodies when we’re feeling love. And love IS rational, it just doesn’t always seem that way all the time. Since love stems from various chemical reactions in our bodies which all fit within the bounds of reason, then their product must be rational too. I don’t know if Miller was buying into the idea that making love explainable takes something away from it or if he was just hoping his readers would.
Miller’s next example of something that’s not rational is beauty. I can see his line of thought, but I think he stopped a bit too early. What he’s missing is that beauty isn’t even uniform. What was considered beautiful 100 years ago isn’t today, and what is considered beautiful to you may not be to me. When I drive through a city I can’t help but gawk at the beauty and symmetry of the engineering marvels all around me, but to my parents it’s nothing but chaos. In the same respect my parents can watch wild deer and look at flowers all day, while I quickly grow bored after the first couple. It’s not that beauty is irrational, it’s that it’s ambiguous. There is no one standard of beauty that we all follow. If Miller is saying that God is open to interpretation and can be perceived differently by different people, just as beauty can (which I don’t think he is) then I may be able to jump on board with that.
Miller’s last example is light, which is quit confusing to me. Saying “light cannot be proven scientifically” is not a clear enough statement for me to understand exactly what he means. Physics knows a lot about light, from how it moves, to how it is perceived, to how it is created. There are very few aspects of light that are not well understood in physics right now, at least compared to any other particle or wave. We have formulas to describe light, and we’ve mapped out the reactions that take place in the retina and the brain to create our perceptions of light.We even know the constant speed of light, which plays into some of the fundamental laws of the universe. That we can see is enough evidence to prove the existence of light, and the only reason everyone believes in light is because we all see it. To compare this to a being which supposedly exists even though we don’t see or otherwise observe it is a faulty comparison.It’s hard for me to think that Miller would write something like this down that was so wrong, but I can’t think of any other way he could have meant it.
The claim that “there are plenty of things that are true that don’t make any sense” is not justified by his examples. In fact I can not find any good examples of things that are irrational truths. There are things that scientists are still working out the answers to, and by no means do I think that we have the answers to everything, but don’t confuse unexplained with unexplainable.
July 25th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
God has always been a scapegoat for the unexplainable. No matter what culture or race, anything that wasn’t understood was caused by some mighty form that nobody had ever seen. As time goes on and we understand more and more about the world around us, there are fewer unexplainable things.
I don’t really believe that one should have to subscribe to the fact that there is some all-mighty judge in the clouds to be religious.
July 25th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
I’m going to assume that when he referred to love as irrational, he didn’t mean the chemical reactions that create lust. I think he might have meant to everything surrounding the actions, like how people do a ton of irrational things in the name of love. I dunno, just a thought.
July 25th, 2008 at 2:36 pm
I’m going to assume he was talking more about what love makes us do, rather than how love functions biologically. For example - I understand that all these chemicals are going off in my brain, but why the fuck am I sitting here listening to my girlfriend’s cokehead sister talk about cars while she’s over there emailing her professor back and forth while he keep insisting that she fuck him?
Love.
And stupidity.
Anyway, who the fuck listens to Denis Miller any more?
July 25th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
I’m not entirely sure that I buy into the idea that love and lust are two different things. I think that lust is part of love. The article I linked about the science of love goes through the chemical reactions of the three stages of love (lust, attraction, and attachment), and shows that it’s not just sexual desire that creates these reactions.
Even the “irrational” things that we do for love are more rational than we give them credit for. It all boils down to the instinctual desire to spread our genes, and the desire for attachment. We know we’re going to get a tongue lashing if we don’t listen to our girlfriend’s sister’s stories about hobos and horny professors, so we take one for the team in hopes that our sacrifice will be noticed and appreciated. Freud was right.
That’s my take on it anyway.
July 25th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
Also, this was Donald Miller, not Dennis Miller.
July 25th, 2008 at 6:56 pm
I think it’s pretty safe to assume that the chemical processes never crossed Mr. Miller’s mind when he wrote that. Let’s take lust and even romance out the equation to avoid confusion with the simple drive to reproduce. “Love” is an emotion that holds someone else’s well-being as more important than one’s own. It is selfless which is contradictory to our instictual habits of self-preservation. Don’t most bodily functions work towards our own personal furtherance? If you have some sort of scientific explanation as to why us humans experience this sensation of “love” where we are willing to sacrifice our own health, comfort, lives, etc. for the sake of another, I’m curious to hear it.
If you restrict love to sexual relationships than yes, you’ll be able to say that Freud was right and it’s all about getting laid… (for that matter you’ve got to avoid using your mom as an example too… fucking Freud) But the fact is, love can be felt in non-sexual ways…
But yeah, I think you punched a propper hole in the light and beauty examples.
July 25th, 2008 at 7:14 pm
Good points Will, let’s see if I can address them:
Kinda… Natural Selection works towards the survival of the species. Sometimes this is shown through changes that benefit the individual, but other times it doesn’t. For example, if a specific type of bug tastes terrible to birds then it is a survival trait for the species, but for the first one that got eaten which resulted in the bird realizing he didn’t fancy that particular bug, it didn’t help him out squat because he’s still dead. If we apply the same idea to love it’s not hard to come up with scenarios where it’s better for the species as a whole if individuals are self-sacrificing and protective of each other. As for the specific genes and/or hormones that cause this feeling, I haven’t a clue, I’m just hypothesizing.
I never meant to imply otherwise, and I may have overlooked this topic entirely at first because the statement “Love [...] is not rational” is what I was looking at. I still think that even the “selfless” things we do in the name of love are completely rational, so his point is wrong.
If we really want to get into the alleged “selflessness” of love then I’d have to do a little more research into Freud’s claims beyond what I recall from my Psych 401 class. As I understood it Freud would have claimed that even putting our partner’s needs above our own is just a way of trying to get noticed and rewarded, and that all things have an an inner selfish motivation even if they appear selfless. Again, I’m no Freud expert, so if I’ve missed his point here let me know.
July 25th, 2008 at 8:10 pm
Damnit, I was under the wrong psuedonym earlier. Ah well, my point stands.
I bolded what I think is dangerous territory. “I think this so he’s wrong” is exactly the sorts of stuff you’ve built this site to argue against, isn’t it? That sort of argument is borderline fallacious, when you get down to it.
Feel free to disagree with him, of course; philosophy would be nothing without debate. But I just wanted to point out that you’re beginning to enter into the realm of “he’s wrong because I say so” with that bit.
Also, let’s not forget, Freud pointed out that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. He acknowledged he may very well be wrong, so even looking into his research further wouldn’t get us closer to a resolution of all this.
July 25th, 2008 at 8:37 pm
Hahah Donald Miller, I was reading all that in my head like Dennis Miller. Well fuck me, son. Now it’s less amusing and I don’t care any more because he wasn’t on TV.
July 25th, 2008 at 8:38 pm
Tristan: Good response.. though I don’t know that I would agree that our basic instincts inherently have a sacrificial quality to them in regards to the advancement of our species. I would say that the advancement of our species is a byproduct of genetic inequalities. I think instinct and self-preservation is an end for each individual to survive and to reproduce… You know more about the subject than I do but I feel that to say that instinct has the goal of bettering the entire species would lend itself moreso to arguments (though not the usual ones) for predestination and even some sort of intelligent design..
Tom: A cigar is never just a cigar, period.
July 25th, 2008 at 9:13 pm
@Tom - That wasn’t me being dumb, just me sucking at the wording. I should have read over that before I posted it, it should have read
but that sounded redundant to me. I was intending it to be read with the “I still think…” being applied to the statements before and after the comma, but I can see in re-reading it that that didn’t happen. I’m sure there’s a better way to word it, but my point wasn’t “he’s wrong because I say so” but more that “I see love as being rational, therefor I don’t see love as being irrational, therefor I don’t agree with him”.
@Will - I’m having a bit of a hard time coming up with a better example than the bug one, but if you’re getting predestination/intelligent design from that then it’s obviously not working for you. What are your reasons for saying
I completely agree that
but I don’t see how that explains your former sentence. Is your emphasis on the self-preservation bit? I’m having a hard time explaining myself better because I’m not entirely sure where we differ here…
July 26th, 2008 at 3:26 pm
Haha yeah, I’m struggling here. Even as I type this stuff out contradictions pop into my head. But yes, my emphasis is on the “self”.
My only question is… why do we humans experience feelings that cause us to overcome the drives of self-preservation when there is no descernable reward? I guess that maybe such occurences could be the effects of culture but that seems an oversimplification. I just find it hard to believe that all individuals have the goal of promoting their species even at the expense of themselves. I feel that out of “selfishness” within a species and the emergence of dominant individuals, comes the advancement of that species. Examples for this would be competition for feeding/mating rights and even the existence of war. In my mind, sacrificial love remains an emotion that is contradictory to our instictual natures.
And yes I’m aware that I have completely strayed from the whole “rationality” topic. I personally don’t think that anything is irrational… things can be complicated and some things certainly have yet to be completly understood and explained. I’m not really arguing either way (though I do think Miller’s arguments are weak) I’m just pointing out things I that don’t understand.
July 27th, 2008 at 1:58 am
Ah, ok. I thought you were saying Miller was right, and while I’m fine with people thinking that, I was having a hard time fitting that with what you were saying before. I think I can tackle this a bit easier now.
I guess in present day it isn’t really about the species, but more a specific group within the species. This may be going against what I had said before, but let me try to explain how I was thinking. I was picturing early man having to defend his people against animals, etc. He would know that he could get injured or killed, but in the process he would be helping to save his people. Since humans aren’t capable of outrunning most things big enough to prey on us, we would need this aggressive attitude to survive. Also, if it was just one clan of early humans that developed this, they would have a distinct survival advantage over the other clans.
Fast forward to present day, we’re not a species that needs to be protected from wild animals. In our case now it comes out more in the form of things like love and patriotism. People are willing to go to war in order to preserve not the individual, but their way of life and their families, and people are also willing to put others’ needs before their own.
Am I making any more sense? I think the more I try to explain things the more I fumble words.
October 9th, 2008 at 10:52 pm
[...] I wanted to talk about about the idea and concept of a soul. In my experience the idea that we have a soul is something that is almost universally agreed on by theists and non-theists alike. Perhaps people just find it more comforting to believe that they are more than merely the sum of their cells. I don’t buy it. I’m not one to change my world-view based on what’s comfortable, but it’s almost X to suggest that there is no such thing as a soul; similar to suggesting that love may be merely a perception of the chemical and hormonal reactions that go on in our brains. [...]