| Reason is not a God, nor even an absolute of any kind. It is merely a process that allows errors to be continuously corrected for. Scientific process is a form of reason as is mathematics, and engineering.
The first step is a guess, just like any other process. It does not really matter what the guess is as long as it is well documented. Next you observe the results and make a second guess, preferrably only changing a single element. You observe the different result and try to use what you observe for future guesses.
#1 You throw a ball into the air by dropping a known weight on the other side of a lever. You then measure the distance it travels, and drop a different size weight. From this you can figure out the relationship between movement and mass.
#2 You observe that laws are being ignored, so decide that more police to enforce the law, or reducing the number of laws to where the police can enforce them are the only reasonable solutions.
#3 You observe that man has killed each other since the beginning of time, so you try to figure out what measures reduce this other than trying to remove anything that can kill.
#4 You observe that man cannot exist without government, so you accept government but work to see how little of we can get rid of.
I define any other method as irrationality, because the actual results hinge more on opinion than any trackable evidence.
Examples:
#1 Deciding that abortion should be illegal because 'God' says so. We have no evidence to observe that anything actually happened much less what it was, so this is irrational.
#2 You pass laws and observe that 10% of these laws are broken on a regular basis, so you decide that you need more laws.
#3 You observe that men have killed each other as long as written history has existed, so you conclude that banning guns will stop the killing.
#4 Man cannot exist without government, so you invent a form of government where the government vanishes after it is established and expect it to work. |