First and foremost among the rationalists was Rene Descartes (1596-1650), who attempted to build a completely new philosophy from scratch —or rather from reason. His mathematical, mechanistic views were modified for people, who presumably had souls in their pineal glands, but this fabrication notwithstanding, Descartes was attacked because his ideas led to atheism. While he was living in Holland, the Prince of Orange saved him from persecution, and when the University of Leyden forbade all mention of him, he was again aided by the Prince, who told the University not to be silly.

Nevertheless, the general message was clear: Reason would do well to compromise and accommodate itself to religion. In fact, Descartes might have changed his famous maxim to Cognito, ergo stupido had he known his atheistic cosmology would be supplanted by Newton's not because that system was superior mathematically or provided a better theoretical framework for factual knowledge but because it required God to set the planets in motion. This was a classic example of how appeal can supersede logic when competing ideas confronted, confirmed or conformed to entrenched beliefs. Generally, a system of thought is accepted not for itself but only to the degree that it supports established, orthodox, popular conclusions.

Although Descartes professed to be a devout Catholic and refused to publish anything that would disturb the Church, his universe was hardly that of the Bible, in which a meddlesome God concocted unpredictablemiracles. It was one of vast numbers of particles whirling around and combining to fool us with false common sense notions about the way they interact. He had a full measure of the rationalists' contempt for facts, eschewed reality and contended that the way to understand nature was not by studying it through experience but by sort of divining its underlying principles through mathematics. A throwback to Pythagoras, he sought the clarity and consistency of a mathematically perfect system.

stupidity.net

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