Invoking The Voyagers Against Id Options

[ljk4-1]

Cornell President Rawlings Condemns Intelligent Design

Drawing from sources ranging from Cornell's founders to Voyager
space missions, Interim President Hunter R. Rawlings III condemned
the push to teach intelligent design in public schools Friday. The
attack came during the president's State of...

http://www.cornellsun.com/vnews/display.v/...4/435c7762cf891


"The desire to understand the world and the desire to reform it are the two great engines of progress." - Bertrand Russell

[mike]

If it weren't for all these 'evil wretches' you wouldn't know what to do with yourself.

[ljk4-1]

Vatican cardinal said Thursday the faithful should listen to what secular modern science has to offer, warning that religion risks turning into "fundamentalism" if it ignores scientific reason.

http://blog.sciam.com/index.php?title=the_...1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

Vatican cardinal said Thursday the faithful should listen to what secular modern science has to offer, warning that religion risks turning into "fundamentalism" if it ignores scientific reason.

http://blog.sciam.com/index.php?title=the_...1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

Good.


To be noted that the Catholic Church are not the only religious persons in the world, there are other religions, and buddhist masters went to this point for tens of years now.

The problem of the relation science-religion is complex, but I think we can have some grasp on it with some simple examples. Since about the Merovingian epoch (where the stake made Catholicism the "norm" in Europe) nearby everybody is persuaded that the world was created in seven days, 6000 years ago. Science disproved this point of view, with the geological times, primitive nebula, big bang, etc. Did religion lost any value from this? Alas many persons began to think that, if religion was false in geology, it was also false in ethics, metaphysics etc. From where the rise of libertine ideas (with their Sade extreme) which led to our modern notion of "freedom" in many minds (at the extreme associated with anti-ethics). And person who still grasp to ideas of the creation in six days are really cut from something, if not fundamentalist. From here the move of the Vatican, good move but four centuries late.

But would not be science doing the same kind of mistake today? Science claims not to study the spiritual-ethics domain, but it however made quite a bunch of implicit or explicit statements in these domains, as what, for instance, there is no survival after death, or that our only purpose is to perpetuate our genes whatever injustices and lack of happiness, or that we can do things such as uterus lending, chemical war, etc. Some scientists even denegate the existence of consciousness itself, just considering bodies and behaviours.

With my opinion, scientists should be more modest, and publish their results in physics and biology without telling us what to do with, as if they were our ethics masters or gurus. We cannot prove the value of any ethics idea with physics, we prove it in society. And if there are things such as a survival after death, it obviously cannot be demonstrated with the tools of physics, but it may have some other testable effect of our lifes, at a more philosophical level.

Science risks turning into "fundamentalism" if it ignores consciousness.