This book shows that our Rational Trinity evolved through our precursors to constancy in our species Homo sapiens, and that everything we have done is a consequence of being the group-species we are. Thus, we have an awareness of the unknown and the unknowable which stimulates our imagination to produce beliefs which we validate to knowledge consistent with reality or which otherwise remain beliefs because we cannot yet reality-evaluate them or because they are beyond reality-evaluation in principle. Thus, this book shows that our craftsmanship and self-knowledge have accrued since time immemorial by reality-evaluation of our imaginative beliefs as to the usability of reality and the maintenance of our survival dependent social cohesion, and that this self-knowledge was progressively reflected in the deities of our imaginative belief to the reinforcement of adherence to our behaviour codes in reality. Again, this book shows that the methods of craftsmanship led to the experimentation which defines scientific method which from the seventeenth century onwards enabled beliefs concerning the underlying nature of our reality to be validated to the knowledge which inter alia transformed craftsmanship to technology. However, this book also shows that while differences in belief have been the source of conflict from time immemorial, knowledge has been accepted by religious believers regardless of such differences; that in contrast, secular belief now opposes aspects of our self-knowledge and technology; that scientific knowledge and method are now being corrupted to pseudo-science in support of a secular belief supremacy reminiscent of the religious belief supremacy which destroyed the Roman Empire; and that it is imperative to replace our current belief-based democracy with a knowledge-based alternative before democracy itself is lost to the reality rejection of postmodernist relative belief.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Douglas Cormack
We classify writers as expressing opinions more or less acceptable to ourselves. Yet, even as a schoolboy (1944-57) I noted that all were exposed to the same reality, and I concluded that opinions were mixtures of belief and subjectively selected knowledge; that science was objective, ever-expanding and internally consistent knowledge; that languages were comparatively static; and that everything else was opinion, though in those days teachers were dismissed for expressing political opinions. Thus, while I preferred knowledge to recycled opinions, and while I sought to analyse the latter into their knowledge and belief contents, I had not yet differentiated the one from the other with sufficient clarity for such general use.
Thus, while pursuing knowledge at the University of Glasgow through a 1st class honours B.Sc. in chemistry with subsidiary maths, physics, and microbiology and a Ph.D. in catalytic mechanism, followed by a post-doctoral appointment in oceanography and marine geochemistry in the USA, I continued my quest for knowledge/belief differentiation by comparing the presence of direct observation and experimentation in the physicochemical earth sciences, astronomy, cosmology and cellular biology with their absence in the beliefs of pseudo-science. Meanwhile, I continued to analyse the undifferentiated mixtures of belief and knowledge which constitute history, literature, philosophy, religion and the so-called social-sciences.
Subsequently, I joined the UK Scientific Civil Service to experience belief-based socio-political policy at its interface with chemical engineering, catalysis and computerised process control, mineral processing and metal extraction, and the mechanical handling of viscous fluids, pastes, powders and phase separations; and with air pollution abatement and atmospheric monitoring, marine pollution prevention and response, materials recycling, contaminated land reclamation and waste disposal. On this experience from the levels of senior scientific officer to director/chief executive (Grade 3) including a knowledge-implementation posting to the Department's Marine Division HQ, I converted Warren Spring Laboratory to the DTI's Environmental Laboratory Agency in response to the Department's proposal to close the industrial support side of the Laboratory. Nonetheless, despite my subsequent profit-revealing annual reports having attracted venture capital interest in a management buyout, the Department closed the Agency in an apparently unconscious preference for reality-rejecting belief over knowledge.
Again, having encountered this same preference while acting as a private consultant, I have now written The Rational Trinity: Imagination, Belief and Knowledge to differentiate knowledge from belief, science from pseudo-science and commonsense from nonsense; to exemplify the necessity for such differentiation; and to commend Change from belief- to knowledge-based socio-political policies as incontestably preferable to continual change from one set of arbitrary beliefs to another in a continuing rejection of reality
