Rationalism
Auguste Rodin's The Thinker ©
Rationalism is an approach to life based on reason and evidence.
Rationalism encourages ethical and philosophical ideas that can be tested by experience and rejects authority that cannot be proved by experience.
Because rationalism encourages people to think for themselves, rationalists have many different and diverse ideas and continue in a tradition from the nineteenth century known as freethought.
However, most rationalists would agree that:
- There is no evidence for any arbitrary supernatural authority e.g. God or Gods.
- The best explanation so far for why the natural world looks the way it does is the theory of evolution first put forward by Charles Darwin.
- All human beings should have fundamental rights. Some rationalists and humanists go further and argue that animals should also have rights as they are living, sensate beings.
- Society is should be an "open society", where each individual is able to live "freely and equally practise their chosen life stance, and in which human potential is realised to the benefit of the individual and the community at large." (Levi Fragell, President of International Humanist and Ethical Union, 2001)
Bertrand Russell, 1907 ©
Rationalism and philosophy
Almost all rationalists are atheists or agnostics. There has been a long link between rationalism and scientific method.
There is also a long tradition of philosophers who have approached philosophical and ethical questions from a rationalist perspective.
Bertrand Russell's "The Faith of a Rationalist" is an example of a rationalist approach to religious belief.
Rationalism, art, and literature
As well as approaching life through reason, rationalists enjoy those things in life where emotion and imagination are to the fore.
There has been a long tradition of artists and writers who have been associated with rationalism and its sister movement, humanism, or have pre-empted rationalist ideas in their writings. George Eliot, E.M. Forster and Emile Zola are all examples of such writers.
The Thinker
Rationalism encourages people to think for themselves, to look at the evidence before them and to come to their own conclusions. For this reason, the logo of the Rationalist Press Association is based on Rodin's "The Thinker".
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