Rational…until Chazal – on the book “A Candle in the Midnight Hour”

Rabbi Michi, have a good week,
I wrote the following post on Saturday as a critique of the value of the virtues in Rabbi Aviner’s book:

1) Rabbi Aviner wrote a book on the subject of superstition and pseudo-science in light of Torah and science (I must admit that this is a good book in general…).
2) Throughout the book, the rabbi debunks many myths about alternative medicine, UFOs, false diets, unprofessional research, superstitions, coffee reading, astrology, numerology, etc.
3) He rejects any method, method, or theory that does not meet scientific criteria, and cites scientific articles to support this and thoroughly reasons the rejection. He despises people who believe in things that have no experimental proof or rational basis.
4) Ostensibly this is called following the truth to the end. Intellectual integrity from a religious person, a rabbi, an educator… until you get to the virtues written in the Gemara, and then something very interesting happens: the rabbi has to deal with virtues that have no known internal logic, that seem primitive and even harmful… and most importantly… that they don’t work at all. See link to page on the subject from the book .
5) Ostensibly according to the line he presented throughout the book, that everything should be scientifically tested in an empirical and rational manner, he should have written that these virtues are “vanity”, as he wrote about someone who opens an umbrella in the house, or who knocks on a tree, about someone who uses homeopathy, about someone who is afraid of a black cat, but what can be done when these virtues were mentioned in the Talmud, which is sacred by the Jews? And what’s more, some of the virtues were mentioned by the sages of Israel?
6) The rabbi used Rashba, one of the great early rabbis of Sephardim, and two important later rabbis to counter by using the following argument:
There are forces in nature, like the attraction of metal to a magnet, that at the time were not known how they worked—> But if we don’t understand how something works, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t work —> Therefore, the virtues should not be rejected.
7) The first part of this argument is true, just because we do not understand the mechanism of some force, it does not mean that the force does not exist. But the inference to virtues is clearly incorrect, because virtues do not work, or at least do not work most of the time, while the laws of nature work almost all the time (!), and therefore this inference is fundamentally flawed and even a child of Bar Mitzvah age can overcome the aforementioned logical fallacy.
8) In the end, the rabbi received the virtues, only because he believed in the Sages. He abandoned rationality in favor of total faith in the “words of our sages.”
9) I completely reject such an approach. A rational religious statement would claim that the Talmud contains a variety of statements on various subjects. On subjects related to halakhic law according to tradition (not according to interpretation), the rational religious believer can accept [if he believes that historically, the Talmud represents an authentic halakhic tradition], but on subjects of beliefs far removed from the Torah (couples, demons, etc.), on subjects of science and medicine, on subjects of strange powers of their kind, one certainly should not accept the statements without in-depth examination – and it does not matter who said the statements: Tanna or Amora.

What do you think about these things? Isn’t the Rashba’s argument very weak?
Best regards,