What would Wanda say?

... A Fish Sorely Misused. (Hat tip, Dave Lull, who suggest that the issue "isn't science vs faith, but faith of 'rationalist' scientists compared with faith of religious scientists," in connection with he sends along the following passage from Brand Blanshard's "The Philosophic Enterprise.")

Now a rationalist is a person who assumes that behind every is there is a must, that if snow is white or fire burns or John has a cold, the question “Why?” has an answer, and that this answer would disclose a necessity. You may protest: “Can you prove this? Do you really think that because we are seeking necessity, it must be there to be found, that things must be intelligible because it would be so satisfactory to us if they were? The answer, of course, is “No.” The philosopher who takes something to be true because he wants it to be true betrays his calling. But unless the philosopher could assume that there was some answer to his questions, he would have no motive for pressing them. For the critical rationalist the intelligibility of things is neither a necessary conclusion nor an arbitrary assumption, but a postulate, that is, a proposition which for practical purposes he must assume and which experience progressively confirms, but which is incapable of present proof.

Thus the rationalist is, if you will, a man of faith. His faith is that there is to be found in the universe the kind of intelligibility that would satisfy his intellect, that there is a coincidence between reality and his intellectual ideal, that at every point there is an answer to his question “Why?” This faith is the mainspring of his endeavor. He is ready to discard it if he has to, but not until he has to; and he will regard an ap-parent defeat as only a temporary setback if he can. After all, if there is no answer, why seek it? One may say indeed with George Saintsbury that “the end of all things is bafflement, but it is good not to be baffled too soon.” But if we expect nature at any moment to set a roadblock to our reason, we shall almost surely be baffled too soon.

Nige might enjoy reading Edward Feser's The Last Superstition, from which the following is taken: "Though he would scarcely have thought it possible, Chesterton would find that New Secularist Man circa 2008 is an even more absurd creature than the incarnation with which he had to deal: A copy of Skeptic magazine ostentatiously tucked under his arm, the Darwin fish on the bumper of his car proudly signals his group identification with other members of the herd of 'independent thinkers.' He 'knows' that there is no God, and he isn't sure whether even the thoughts he thinks he's having are real or not. But he is pretty sure that his 'selfish genes' and/or his 'memes' in some way manipulate his every action ..."