I have to side with
Hookbill here in one sense: the irrationality. There are two completely different things - for myself, I like even SF (lot of it), and I think I have even read more of that than of fantasy. I even enjoy the sort of "mixed genres" - provided it is good! - but I would never, NEVER let anything like that be dragged into Middle-Earth as I know it.
I have had an era, sometime, let's say, few years after I read LotR for the first time, when I wanted to explain some things in LotR scientifically. For example, I wondered if the Trolls cannot be an Si-based lifeform, or something like that. Why not. But that is far beyond me nowadays. LotR is purely fantastic world for me, and Trolls are Trolls.
The advantage of the fantasy worlds is that you don't actually need any explanations at all. The things just work, and that is the interesting thing about them, the mystery, sort of. Maybe it works only for certain kind of people. Some people wish to know what really is the thing they hold in their hand, what atoms is it made of. However, is it really necessary? I remember when I was small, I did NOT want to know what's beyond the forest which marked the horizon across the field from my family's summer cottage. Nowadays I know that there was a downhill slope beyond it, and a village. A village I knew even back then, but I just did not realise it was so close to our cottage! But back then, I did not want to know, and I did not care to know - there was Withered Heath beyond it, obviously, where the great dragons dwelled.
Nogrod is right about the way the mythology works, and how it "develops" - but still, one wants to have also in the kind of
primal mythology, no scientific explanations of why a dragon can breathe the flames. And one wants dragons and not Xzers from planet of Kwoon.
And as for the Star Wars, it was not that bad with the midichlorians, it was an interesting idea by itself - but it indeed killed one possibility of understanding the Force. From the original movies (4, 5, 6) one had a completely different view of Force. It still could have been midichlorians, if one imagined it work that way, but with showing the midichlorians, nobody could anymore understand the Force "just" as a "force".
EDIT: x-ed with
Skip.
All right, I think what you said brings me actually better to clearing up what I have in mind. It's not that understanding what the sunset is would not have its own interest, but
at the same point one has to know that the irrationality (like especially us from the Greek-European culture forget too often) is not necessarily anything "bad" or "ignorant". It's based on feelings, which do not have anything to do with rationality.
Most of all however, one has to know that the science by itself does not cancel the beauty of the sunset, you are still being capable of accepting it in the way "as it is". Of course, it's just about that in this case, one of the people watching the sunset does not disturb the other one with scientific bragging when the other is not interested and wants just to watch the sunset, and vice versa
