jeeprs wrote:But in any case, what most people mean by an 'appeal to reason' is actually an appeal to 'what is tangible'. In other words, when they appeal to reason, what they are really appealing to ultimately is sense-perception.
This is a conflation of reason and empiricism - An 'empiricist' uses data from the senses to understand reality, only using reason to make sense of that data. The empiricist justification of the materialist philosophy followed by many scientists (and all 'scientism-ists') consists of the circular argument:
"I can prove truths, using the Scientific Method, from sense objects alone; therefore only objects sensed while applying the scientific method can be true".
This is (of course) profoundly irrational in the fullest negative connotation of the word (anti-rational would be a better term), and clearly comparable to the almost-parallel Christian argument:
"I can gain a clear impression of reality, using the Bible, from reading alone; therefore only reading the Bible can provide a clear impression of reality".
{I've arranged both 'arguments' symmetrically from the word 'therefore'; the only difference is that the scientific method proves its limited truths, whereas the Bible proves nothing at all.}
So, "rationalists" don't always look so rational under scrutiny - Many of them would feel kinda
if advances in detection equipment proved that ghosts were simply inhabitants of parallel dimensions/universes 'wormholing' into ours {Precisely why that won't happen
}.