Rational Thinking versus Belief

"Our world is too complex, potentially too dangerous, for us to base decisions on what we want to believe, rather than what is actually the case. The scientific method is deliberately constructed to oversome the deep-seated human wish to assume that what we want to be true--what we claim to "know"--really is true. In science, emphasis is placed on trying to prove that what you deeply believe to be the case is wrong. Ideas that survive stringent attempts to disprove them are more likely to be correct." - Ian Stewart in The Story of Mathematics:From Babylonian Numbers to Chaos Theory.