Auguste Rodin's The Thinker

Rationalism is an approach to life based on reason and evidence.

Rationalism encourages ethical and philosophical ideas that can be tested by experience and rejects authority that cannot be proved by experience.

Because rationalism encourages people to think for themselves, rationalists have many different and diverse ideas and continue in a tradition from the nineteenth century known as freethought.

However, most rationalists would agree that:

Almost all rationalists are atheists or agnostics. There has been a long link between rationalism and scientific method.

There is also a long tradition of philosophers who have approached philosophical and ethical questions from a rationalist perspective.

Bertrand Russell's "The Faith of a Rationalist" is an example of a rationalist approach to religious belief.

As well as approaching life through reason, rationalists enjoy those things in life where emotion and imagination are to the fore.

There has been a long tradition of artists and writers who have been associated with rationalism and its sister movement, humanism, or have pre-empted rationalist ideas in their writings. George Eliot, E.M. Forster and Emile Zola are all examples of such writers.

Rationalism encourages people to think for themselves, to look at the evidence before them and to come to their own conclusions. For this reason, the logo of the Rationalist Press Association is based on Rodin's "The Thinker".

Read more:

BBC - Religions - Atheism: Rationalism