> "being rational wasn't invented until the 1930s Rationality -- which is to say reason and logic, was already formalized over 2000 years ago, by Aristotle and

> "being rational wasn't invented until the 1930s Rationality -- which is to say reason and logic, was already formalized over 2000 years ago, by Aristotle and other greek philosophers. It wasn't reason that the ancients lacked, but empiricism as embodied in the scientific method -- although even that was used to some degree by people such as Galen and Aristotle. Reason alone can take you down deep rabbit holes, because it's heavily dependent on what you take as postulates, and without empirical measurements, it's difficult to figure out where to start the chain of reasoning from. It took a long time to standardize measurements and record keeping to the point where people could do accurate experiments that could prove theories that people had developed through reason. For example -- the ancient greeks had already developed the idea of atoms! [0] But they had no chance of proving that atoms existed, so it was one theory among many. What ended up becoming the general accepted theory of matter was hylomorphism [1]. They lacked physical and intellectual tools that they would have needed to be able to distinguish the two theories through experiment, similar to the status of string theory today. Some religious ideas that seem absurd today -- for example the catholic belief that bread is literally transformed into the body of christ -- were justified by the belief in hylomorphism. In the case of transubstantiation, the church claimed that while the accidental properties of the bread, the form of the bread were unchanged, the underlying substance of the bread was completely different -- in the same way that for example a petrified tree was transubstianted from wood to stone, while many of the accidental properties and the form where unchanged. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomism [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hylomorphism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hylomorphism