Someone who emphasizes observable facts and excludes metaphysical speculation about origins or ultimate causes

Usage examples of rationalist.

Old Rationalists had enough power to incinerate a magic forest, move rivers, and build horseless wagons and sailless ships.

The Arminian priest turns the rationalist over to the penal fires of eternity, because he is in mental error as to the explanation of the Trinity and the Atonement.

In the days of my youth the Religion of Humanity was a term commonly applied to Comtism, the theory of certain rationalists who worshipped corporate mankind as a Supreme Being.

As a scientist and a rationalist I regard it as a great fortune that the WormCam has proven the greatest debunker yet discovered.

So did the soil, and the trees, and even the grasses that surged along the new-forged lines of balance, seeking the old patterns sundered by the mighty planoforming engines of the Rationalists, engines that had ignored the balance that had been and would be.

Of all the diehard rationalists she had ever encountered-including her father-Mary Jo topped the list.

Eugene, the rationalist, held no belief in legends, but he recognized the symbolic power that lay in the reforging of the ancient crown.

Christian or mystical virtues involves a paradox in its own nature, and that this is not true of any of the typically pagan or rationalist virtues.

The Rationalist minority was gaining support—worrisome for the Draka League and the Archonship.

The result is that from difficulty to difficulty, the plain conjunctive experience has been discredited by both schools, the empiricists leaving things permanently disjoined, and the rationalist remedying the looseness by their Absolutes or Substances, or whatever other fictitious agencies of union may have employed.

She'd always thought Dennis was a stolid sort, a dyed in the wool rationalist.

To the sceptic, their quest may ultimately rest on a delusion, but debunking is hardly likely to be an effective rhetorical device for their rationalist project of getting [people] to recognize what appears to the sceptic as mistaken or magical thinking.

An urbanized peasantry that has crowded into Egyptian cities has withdrawn into religion, unable to fathom the issues of overpopulation and resource scarcity confronted in the 1970s by the Western rationalist John Waterbury.

Despite successive waves of rationalist, Persian, Jewish, Christian and Muslim world views, despite revolutionary social, political and philosophical ferment, the existence, much of the character, and even the name of demons remained unchanged from Hesiod to the Crusades.