The Nature of Rationalism Today

Socrates addressed matters of belief, true opinion etc. Knowledge isn't infallible. Wittgenstein wrote a book titled; 'On Certainty'. One might be able to qualify almost any statement epistemologically speaking as conditional except for tautology probably. Some like to morph and equivocate belief with faith and that subjective intentional self-aware opinion with extensional opinions about God; who is transcendent of physics and being.

Someone who hasn't faith brought up a couple of points of interest to me. I'm a Christian however so  I view the points philosophically concerning the nature of rationalism. I want to address a point first about free expression. Censorship of free speech is a result of concentrated power and statism generally. The left and atheists are the worst offenders since communist governments took over. Yet the right in Nazi Germany and Imperialist powers also censor. Even modern corporatism can censor as well as capitalism. If one's product is regarded as a rival opinion influencing consumer selections and a power has the ability to finesse it out of existence it often will. That's human nature; original sin if you like.

Renes Descartes perhaps was the founder of that epistemologically speaking in modern terms, although Plato's allegory of the cave and Bishop Berkeley's Three Dialogues obviously were earlier 'products. Then one gets on to Sartre, existentialism, Heidegger and Husserl in phenomenology and the modern problem of epistemological relativism or what might also be called; realism. Plainly though what most naive people-non-philosophers-mean by rationalism is empiricism and mathematics, astronomy and so forth.

Modern rationalism denies the objective existence of reality and particle physics in a sense seems to confirm that. At the least one can say that the evident universe of the senses is a quantum flip up of particles or force without an ultimate original ground in-itself. If one takes Kurt Godel's incompleteness principles for an illustrative paradigm where a set of all sets including itself cannot exist, the first cause of the Universe cannot be attributed to a force or original particle. The Bible solves that with the word of God spiritually speaking the first things into being.

Atheists have the implicit problem of rationally finding no source in-the-Universe for moral authority. Some people can make one up just as communists and capitalists can invent their own value theories (and there are many more possible some of which haven't yet been invented). Nietzsche's 'Beyond Good and Evil', an inspiration to the Nazis, personifies the existential problem of morality. In his companion book 'Just Spake Zarathustra' a philosopher-hermit lives on a hill overlooking a village where he abuses the villager's traditional morality. He thinks that superman beyond good and evil should run the world. Nietzsche also believed in eternal recurrence of cosmology and the world and though this life recurs infinitely therefore it's best to be a wise-guy and take advantage of all the rubes.