Can Rationality and Emotion Co-exist?

In this week's Speaking of Faith radio show on NPR, Krista Tippett
interviews George Ellis, a South African cosmologist. This is a short
excerpt of the interview that I thought you might like to see. You can
read much more here. Science and Hope


"Much our of life can be thought of as a struggle between emotion and rationality — the calm analyst deciding on a logical basis what we should do, versus the emotional hot-head who
rushes into action and just does things. A common view is that
evidence-based science represents that calm rationality which
exemplifies us how we ought to behave, and we should try to avoid
basing our lives on faith and hope rather than rationality and reason.
However this is also a bad misunderstanding. In facing our individual
and communal lives, we always need faith and hope as well as
rationality, and indeed the real issue is how we can best balance them
against each other. Take the case of my own country: there were very
many times in the past when it was rational to give up all hope for the
future — to assume that the nation would decay into a racial holocaust
that never happened. It did not occur because of the transformative
actions of those marvellous leaders Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela,
confounding the calculus of rationality. This is a really important
practical issue that I have only recently begun to consider. It is in a
sense the theme of the book The Far-Future Universe that I edited.

However as well as being a highly practical issue, this also relates to the
issue of reductionism and the way the mind functions. The reading and
writing I have been doing on that topic have led to a very interesting
appreciation: the fact that the rational mind is in a profound
developmental sense based in the emotional mind. This is true both
functionally and in evolutionary terms. So one of my latest projects is
looking at this fascinating theme, and even writing about it in
association with JudithToronchuk of Trinity Western University. So I am
now happy that though I am a cosmologist by trade, I have just had a
paper on this theme accepted for publication by the journal
Consciousness and Evolution. This paper shows that the tension between
emotion and reason has a deep grounding in the neurological mechanisms
underlying brain function."