Rationality is the most ingenious invention ever devised by the human mind for extracting order out of chaos. As raw experience, the physical world is chaos soup. We are bombarded by billons of perceptual bits every minute—the retina at the back of your eye alone receives trillions of photons a minute. Chaos is totally disorderly and disorganized. It makes no sense; therefore, the world makes no sense unless something steps in to organize things so that everyday life doesn’t feel like a storm-tossed ship.

Reason did the trick. You can gaze out your window and see trees, sky, buildings, and other people, giving each a name. You can hone your reason, go to graduate school, and become an expert in botany so that you know everything about trees or architecture so that you can build a house or skyscraper. The modern world has been engineered by the rational mind. So what could go wrong?