Stop Trying To Be So Rational!
“荣耀归主 ❤️”
[Glory to the Lord ❤️]
phoenixji
The Invisible Everywhere: Believing Is Seeing presents the modern scientific evidence that shattered my lifelong atheism and opened my eyes to the existence of God.
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Falling In Love
When I fell in love with science in the second grade, I was really falling in love with two things: the scientific method and logic.
I’ll save my love affair with the scientific method for another letter. Today, I’d like to talk to you about my equally passionate love affair with logic.
My fascination with logic quickly led me to Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher who, more than 2,300 years ago, became the first person to systematically write down the rules of logical reasoning. His writings were later collected into a work known as the Organon ("Tool"), which for nearly two thousand years has served as the bible of logical thought in the Western world.
Growing up, I amused myself by working through countless books of logical puzzles. Here’s a classic one written by the legendary Princeton-trained logician Raymond Smullyan.
A typical puzzle went like this …
Three boxes are labeled: APPLES, ORANGES, and APPLES & ORANGES.
All three labels are wrong. You may reach into one box, without looking, and pull out one fruit. Which box should you choose, and how can you correctly label all three boxes?
I’ll give you the solution at the end of this letter.
I challenged my dad with logical puzzles I myself created. I used logic to win arguments with my friends in and out of class. Basically, I drove everyone around me crazy with my infatuation with logic!
Falling Out of Love
My years-long love affair took its first big hit, however, when I learned that Aristotelian logic is just one of many ways of reasoning logically. Without getting too deep into the weeds, I learned that Aristotle’s logic is what’s called a bivalent system of logical reasoning, because it allows for only two possibilities: true and false.
I learned that other logics existed that recognized three, four, five— an infinite number of degrees of truthfulness. Collectively, they’re known (naturally enough) as Non-Aristotelian logics. In particular, the ones that allow for infinite shades of truthfulness are called Fuzzy Logics.
The next blow came when I learned that among all these logics, Aristotle’s is now considered by most mathematicians to be relatively primitive. Modern mathematics (and by association modern philosophy) relies heavily on sophisticated, high-level, non-Aristotelian reasoning.
The next blow came when I learned that modern physics, too, now leans heavily on non-Aristotelian logic to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe beyond and within us. This is especially true in the translogical, looking-glass discipline of quantum physics, where nothing can be everything; solid can be ghostly; and past, present, and future can all be the very same thing.
The next blow came when I learned that not just in the academic world, but in the