I believe the scientific community is defined by complete commitment to the rational. Sure, there are people who claim to be scientists, but the scientific method is an exercise in pure rationality.
You would do best to rephrase that statement in far less concrete terms, because scientists (more specifically -- "scientists" trying to answer "why" and "how" our existence came about) are hardly playing in the arena of complete and total rationality.
As I linked before, scientists far smarter than myself have noted that the rational scientific method used in empirical observation oversteps its
rational boundaries when it attempts to answer existential questions -- those are the only real questions that are even disputed between religion and science. No intelligent religious person questions the complete rationality of empirical observation and the scientific method behind that, so the only domain were talking about here is that which is under dispute.
In this domain of dispute between religion and science, where it's pretty evident both world-views are in fact NOT completely rational (i.e. conjecturing about the unobservable and unmeasurable), it would only be fair to say that neither the scientist or religious believer has a completely rational answer that explains their own existence. This is a distinct difference from how the scientist and religious believer are subjectively viewed as concretely rational vs. irrational, when it is crystal clear that is not the true big picture of the differing world-views.
Nevertheless, the major problem here is that these questions of existence are answered in the name of Science. The common person understands science to be the authority on all things rational, because they've seen it in practical use on all things empirical. The only problem is that most fail to realize that the scientific method only has true rational authority in the domain of the empirical. Can't you see the inherent problem here? Science has no more authority in answering existential questions than any other world-view, because all of science's rational authority comes from the empirical, where things can be measured, observed, modified, etc.
In the realm of unmeasurable and unobservable, I agree that the empirical method is impotent, and science can only conject, in a manner similar to religion.
You would do best to rephrase that statement in far less concrete terms, because scientists (more specifically -- "scientists" trying to answer "why" and "how" our existence came about) are hardly playing in the arena of complete and total rationality.
As I linked before, scientists far smarter than myself have noted that the rational scientific method used in empirical observation oversteps its rational boundaries when it attempts to answer existential questions -- those are the only real questions that are even disputed between religion and science. No intelligent religious person questions the complete rationality of empirical observation and the scientific method behind that, so the only domain were talking about here is that which is under dispute.
In this domain of dispute between religion and science, where it's pretty evident both world-views are in fact NOT completely rational (i.e. conjecturing about the unobservable and unmeasurable), it would only be fair to say that neither the scientist or religious believer has a completely rational answer that explains their own existence. This is a distinct difference from how the scientist and religious believer are subjectively viewed as concretely rational vs. irrational, when it is crystal clear that is not the true big picture of the differing world-views.
Nevertheless, the major problem here is that these questions of existence are answered in the name of Science. The common person understands science to be the authority on all things rational, because they've seen it in practical use on all things empirical. The only problem is that most fail to realize that the scientific method only has true rational authority in the domain of the empirical. Can't you see the inherent problem here? Science has no more authority in answering existential questions than any other world-view, because all of science's rational authority comes from the empirical, where things can be measured, observed, modified, etc.