The science of man?

Whenever we say that people are irrational, we usually mean it as a kind of criticism, as if to say, “If only they could be more easily reduced to a formula, well then they’d be more human.” But what if the irrationality of people (and of course particular persons) isn’t a disorder but rather a key element of their basic nature?

Why does the man raised well do some horrible thing? Why does the person in desperate straits behave nobly? Why is my wife unhappy although I did what she requested? Isn’t the sum total of every person’s experience with others and himself the overwhelming certainty that people are just impossible to explain and predict? And what if this isn’t because of a deficiency in our knowledge, but of a virtue in their essence?

Science, you see, wants us to believe (or at least assume) that people’s choices are nothing more than the complex result of a formula derived from their genes, chemistry, and environment. But what if (contrary to the assumption) we truly can’t be reduced to a theory like any other merely natural phenomenon, regardless of how much data we acquire? Could this perhaps explain why “social science” does so poorly what “natural science” does so well? What if people are truly irrational, which is of course just an unkind way of calling them miraculous?

If so, then what can science really tell us about people? Very little, it turns out. According to science, you see, miracles don’t exist.

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