Whom does the modern man worship? Among the most obvious idols of sex, money, power, and self, there is a more subtle ‘god’ emerging today: science.

Science as the sole authority on knowledge claims, science as the ultimate pursuit, science as holding the key to improving (and extending) our lives, science as the standard of evidence, science as provider of enlightenment, science as a great rolling ball gathering momentum and autonomy whose progress must. not. be. stopped.

I almost feel as thought I should capitalise ‘Science’, since it is so personified. I must be careful in what I say, in case I hurt its feelings. I must also be careful not to give any impression that I am ‘against Science’ for today, any criticism is met with cries of ‘infidel’. And Heaven help any field of study or organisation if it even seems to impede the all-important progress of Science!

But is science all this? Sure, no-one will deny its usefulness – both in the search of knowledge and in the quest for technological advances. I personally love science, studying it both at school and uni, reading New Scientist magazines and podcasting science podcasts.
Still, is not science merely a tool to be used by us? Can’t we step back and evaluate it as we would any other field?

This week I read That Hideous Strength, by C. S. Lewis. Though written 60 years ago, this ’semi-sci-fi’ book was almost prophetic in its portrayal of our attitude to science today. It follows the premises of scientific naturalism through to their logical conclusions, and then shows the terrible and inhuman consequences of blind adherence to ‘the advance of science’. In short, it makes eugenics look tame. As a culture, it seems to me that we are on this trajectory and owe ourselves a re-evaluation of the realm of science.

The real impetus behind this post, however, was listening to an interview with secular philosopher of science Professor Stephen Gaukroger, author of The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210-1685, on the ABC Radio National Podcast The Philosopher’s Zone. At one point in the podcast, The Emergence of Science, Gaukroger was particularly keen to clear up some misconceptions of science:

the modern view, the people who think science tells you everything, are almost always people who’ve never done any science. Because I think you can really only seriously propose that if you have a completely theoretical understanding of science. I think anyone who’s had any connection with practical science realises that science is not this kind of inverted pyramid with your basic principles at the bottom and everything following on from there, it’s much more messy than that. You know, the idea that you can explain the simplest microscopic physical object in terms of the behaviour of atoms, is just not something that’s on the cards in serious science, it’s a much, much messier, more complex business, and many scientists and these days, many philosophers of science, are moving much more towards non-reductionist views, that there are many different kinds of activity in science, and the best one can do maybe, is to bridge them, but you certainly can’t reduce them…. it’s a really good antidote to the idea that there is this single thing, science, and it tells you about everything.

I will probably post further on this topic in future, but I will finish this one with something that may come as a surprise to my atheist reader/s:

Interviewer: “Well that’s one message we can take away. Another message that perhaps Richard Dawkins can take away from your book is that the rise of science is not about science dissociating itself from religion.”

Gaukroger: Certainly. I think quite the contrary. I think a lot of the motivation for developments in science in the 17th century, particularly the late 17th century, are driven by developments in natural theology, that’s to say particularly in England for example, and this is a view to which Newton was very sympathetic, the idea is that you have these two sources of knowledge, still unreconciled from the beginning of the 13th century, namely religion and science, and the thing to do is to triangulate them so that you can sort out the wheat from the chaff, and the idea is that there is just a single truth: both these discourses aim at truth, so let’s triangulate them, get them fixed on the same thing so that we can work out what’s true and what’s false in each of them, and in the process, build up something that’s much stronger than either of them taken individually.

Listen, or read a transcript of the interview, here. 

I just read a fascinating post by Michelle.  I was struck by this incredible statement: “Grendel doesn’t believe in God, but he agrees with what God teaches.”

Really interesting. Have a read.

Vice-Presidential candidate Al Gore was debating Vice-President Dan Quail. They were arguing on the abortion issue. Dan Quail, a very committed man, very devoutly committed to the preservation of the unborn and risked his entire political career on that…

At a moment, Gore really pinned him with his back to the wall… And Gore was very sharp, he was brilliant. They teach you in debate ‘if you can’t give your own answers, learn to question the opposition.’ And Gore looked at him, eyeball to eyeball, and says “Sir, Dan, would you repeat after me that ‘a woman has the right to her own body’. Would you repeat that after me, Dan? That ‘a woman has the right to determine the destiny of her own body’.” Three times he slammed him with that comment, “Repeat after me, Dan”.

And of course poor Mr Quail could not really come back at that kind of an approach. He came up with a very meaningful answer but did not satisfy the taunt, he said “Well, every time you abort a baby you stop a beating heart”.

What I think would have been an ideal response would have been something like this, I think. Because Senator Gore had already said he was personally against it but politically he felt it was the right of the person to make the decision. So the response should have gone something like this, I believe: “Senator Gore, would you first repeat after me that ‘the life within that mother’s womb is a human life.’ Would you repeat that after me? Because if the answer to that is yes, what are you doing obliterating life? If the answer to that is no, why are you personally against it? If the answer to that is ‘I don’t know’, how many more decisions are you going to make on an agnostic platform?”

– Ravi Zacharias, from his message Cultural Relativism & the Emasculation of Truth

 

And that accusation* is often used as a kind of fog spread over the debate to conceal the injustice of the basic pro-abortion principle, namely, that the right of a woman not to be pregnant is greater than the right of an unborn child not to be killed. — John Piper

Piper really has, in this sentence, distilled the entire debate into one question: Is the right of a woman not to be pregnant greater than the right of an unborn child not to be killed.

Is it?
Deeper still: where do we ‘get’ our rights? (If we actually have rights, why? If not, why do we suppose we have them?) Love to hear your thoughts. Atheists, in particular. Leave a comment.

*The accusation is that Christians don’t do enough to support mothers in crisis or unwanted children after birth – an accusation Piper argues is not just fog, but also incorrect.

Colourless green idea sleeping furiously.
What does that mean?

This morning’s post Suicide: Why Not?, sparked jpj to observe that even those who say they don’t believe in meaning search for it – for example, in song lyrics.

It reminded me of something I heard on the All In The Mind podcast this week:

I think the big phenomenon that really fascinated [Gertrude Stein] about the brain was language, and she conducted language experiments in [William] James’s lab. I first started thinking about Gertrude Stein when I learned about Chomsky. And of course Chomsky demonstrated the deep structure of language with one of his famous examples about a colourless green idea sleeping furiously. For him this demonstrated how you could construct sentences which were nonsensical, which referred to nothing in the real world — and yet they were still grammatical. And Gertrude Stein actually came to a similar epiphany after some of her experiments in James’s lab where she tried to ‘write without thinking’, as she put it. And yet what struck her about those experiments was even when she came up with the strangest sentences, they meant nothing, they were still grammatical; she was still writing in the conventional structure of language. And that really got her thinking about what held our language together, why it was so hard to write about nothing, to write a completely meaningless sentence. And so these are the questions which I think really informed so much of her prose, which is famous for its difficulty….
I think Gertrude Stein in her work was in a sense raging against this innate structure. She was constantly trying to write a sentence with no meaning at all, to be completely linguistically abstract. And yet I think she was always frustrated by no matter how meaningless her sentences were the mind naturally imposed meaning on them, that we naturally parse sentences into sentence, object, verb, et cetera. And so they weren’t meaningless, and so we did make sense of them somehow. And so at the end of her career she eventually gives up and talks about how she now realises that it’s impossible to write a meaningless sentence because the mind naturally imposes meaning onto the sentence.

How amazing is that! Why are we so hard-wired to look for meaning? Share your thoughts.

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” — Albert Camus

I’m going to be deliberately provocative: Why shouldn’t we commit suicide? Why ought you, or I, keep on living?

I’d love to hear your thoughts from within your wordview (especially atheistic wordviews). Leave a comment. I might post the most interesting/appealing in a future blog post.

A University of North Carolina professor has angered some of his students after saying he thinks fetuses with Down syndrome should be aborted. (read the article, ht CraigS)

Well they might be angry! I would have been!

I wouldn’t be surprised if the professor has never gotten to know any person with Down Syndrome. Had he, his attitude might be different. Mine certainly changed, when I met Peter.

I spent 3 months living with a family in the US. My ‘older brother’, the 21 year-old brother of my host exchange student, had Down Syndrome. And, without any reservation, this single man brought me as much joy as any other person I met in my stay. His life was fulfilled, he brought joy to his family, friends, and colleagues at work.

He called me his brother, we played playstation together, we kicked around a footy in the back-yard, we  went out for lunch together, we watched the football together. In everything he did he was enthusiastic, full of energy, and playful. He was happy, and everyone who met him was all the more happier for it.

Sure, his family probably struggled at times to deal with him, especially when he was younger. Yet despite that, Peter was an immesurable blessing to all, especially his family. I, and they, would fiercely disagree with anyone who claims that anyone’s life – his or ours – would be improved by an abortion. What a horrendous thought! Was it not to his ‘disability’ (if it may even be considered one) that he owed his best characteristics? To be sure, I have never met as genuine, loving, and lovable person as my older brother Peter.

(NB, in the article linked to above, it was noted that Professor Harris said he wouldn’t follow his own moral position.)

I’m in a bad mood. Hairdressors do that to me. But at least I learned from the experience:

1. Never get your hair cut if you’re even remotely happy with its present state. The thought “I might get a trim to make it look a little more stylish” is cosmetically one of the most dangerous thoughts one can have. This is for 3 reasons:
a) to hairdressors, there is no such thing as a trim – it’s all or nothing, baby.
b) it’s a matter of percentages. Only a fraction of new haircutees are happy with their cuts. A still smaller fraction are actually improvements on the previous cut – and in almost all of these cases, it was because the previous cut was so horrendous. The simple maths of it is that while-ever you are happy with your current cut, the chances of an improvement are approximately zero. (This is why, even to this day, evolutionary theorists struggle to explain the existance of hairdressing behaviour.)
c) apparently, there is no communication between the worlds of ‘female hairdressors’ and ‘men’s fashion’

2. In the vocabulary of hairdressors, the phrases ‘a bit shorter’, ‘not too short’, ‘medium’, ‘just a bit off’, and ‘keep it long’ all mean the same thing: ‘ridiculously short’.

3. Don’t book a haircut after a trip to the dentist. Incredibly, the awkward conversations in the mirror are not improved by having half your face paralysed and sounding like you’ve just suffered a stroke.

4. Despite having completed tertiary studies in the hair-care area, practicing for 9 hours a day, and seeing hundreds of different heads a month; hair-dressors are unable to ’style’ hair on their own and need strict, precise, and detailed descriptions of exactly the style you want – which is ok, because you have spent the last month researching what style suits your hair type, length, colour, and head shape… right? Once again, the thought “She’s a professional… she’ll know what to do” has shocking consequences. Avoid making this mistake at all costs.

5) A bad haircut isn’t the end of the world. No, really, it isn’t. Except for these guys.

It’s a scary world. Good luck.

(Photo, thankfully, is not of me.)

Great questions to ask your friends if you love them.

Demetri Martin Stand Up; Montreal 2006

We live in a beautiful Country
We come from a beautiful land
My friends who lived here before me
Your ways I must understand

Cause I’ve been ignorant to your customs
And I’ve read misleading thoughts of white man
Please find forgiveness in your spirit
Your ways I must understand

“These times are ready for change”,
This faint whisper touches my ear
The seed has surely been planted
Are we so proud we cannot say we’re sorry?

Can you hear the whisper stirring up the soul?
Flames from a fire that refuse to give in
Start to scorch your conscience…
Burning off exterior, exposing what’s within.

Living, breathing country
Beautiful and sacred land
Happy, smiling faces…
Keep helping me to understand

“These times are ready for change”,
This faint whisper touches my ear
The seed has surely been planted
Are we so proud we cannot say we’re sorry?

FIRE, FLOOD AND FREEDOM
Water, blood and the flow of life
Pulling down all our pretence
Forcing us to realise…

“These times are ready for change”,
This faint whisper touches my ear
The seed has surely been planted
Are we so proud we cannot say we’re sorry?

(Lyrics to Fire Flood Freedom by Mike McCarthy)

No, not any more. We’re sorry.

How rare it is that our politicians do a truly Good Thing! This was one.

Had a great surf this morning! Went down early with dad, waves were sweet (forming barrels!), sun was out, water glassy, fish jumping, birds swimming. So good.