Natural Order and Science

[Neo-Scholastic]

Chad, an honest question –

Your preface is not necessary. I consider all your questions genuine. You’ve consistently demonstrated your sincerity.

...while I acknowledge that the efficacy of reason is not obviously a given and more like a working assumption which appears to yield consistent results, I still wonder, is there a coherent notion of the alternative? Could reality be unintelligible or might such a sentence be meaningless.

This is an idea I’ve been toying with lately. There seem to be two notions at play: 1) the efficacy of reason and 2) the intelligibility of reality. The first has to do with the capacity of the knowing subject. The second concerns the nature of external reality.

Just because human reason works doesn’t mean the object of inquiry (reality) is actually intelligible. Perhaps it is absurd. Perhaps it is just so. Either way, it is as it is for no reason at all. Alternatively, even if reality were intelligible that doesn’t mean the mental toolkit (reason) is valid. Reasoning could be a linguistic trick or compelling illusion. Self-evident truths only appear so to a brain functions evolved for see patterns even where none exist.

Now, I personally do not believe either of these. I believe that human reason reflects a reality that is as it is for discernable (but not necessarily obvious) reasons.