Fred

Hi.
I would say that science is becoming more important in our daily lives. Disinfectants are a great example of what good it has done.
When a discovery is made we don't give thanks to scientists, they are just doing their jobs.
The real problem lies in the fact that the evidence that we gather as a species is at great odds with ancient stories and peoples desire to cling to mythology. The greatest oppossition to scientific work comes from the worlds religions. How often have we seen arguments stating dinosaurs on the ark or some other nonsense ?
Where science and religion differ is in their attitude to progress, science is progressive and seeks to improve itself constantly and religion is regressive. What improvements in religion have we seen other than things such as Inquisitions being stopped ? The Taliban were actually doing that recently.

Dr. Retard

I never suggested Hume and Kant led people to atheism. Maybe Hume did, maybe Kant did (though Kant was pretty pious). What I was saying is that they're still the big dudes in moral philosophy, and their work predates Darwin. So the claim that Darwin ushered in a fundamental change in moral philosophy is plain wrong.

What I do buy, and maybe all you meant, is that Darwin ushered in, or reinforced, a cultural change that influenced the everyday schmuck's perspective on moral philosophy. This cultural change also helped foster atheism in the West, I'd bet. (Though atheism was going strong before that, in spades -- Enlightenment-era France, for example. I'll also say that my personal atheism owes little to evolution, so far as I can tell. If, incredibly, evolution were one day overthrown, I'd be very interested to see what replaced it; but I wouldn't think my atheism in need of any revision).

As far as the existentialist, Continental, post-modernist, whatever troupe goes, maybe they do think that evolution and atheism has some heavy-duty moral implications. I don't know why they would think that, because I almost never understand what exactly they're getting at. I don't deny that evolution, or any other similar scientific discovery, has ethical implications, but nothing fundamental that I can see. Even with very relevant sciences like economics, while I see lots of interesting implications, I can't see anything fundamental or earth-shattering.

Fred

I studied existentialism many years ago and I wouldn't say, from my experience, that they would be greatly influenced. Being concerned about ones position in relation to other objects whether they are being existing as things in itself or for itself does not need to include a relation to any theory.
As far as I remember anyway, it was about 20 years ago I studied.

Salmon of Doubt

luvluv, I agree with you that the average person can be extremely misinformed about science. But I don't like the way you're using this to try and twist it into some sort of "evolution is bad because it makes people lose faith in God and therefore become immoral"

I believe that human beings have no inherant purpose, but I don't believe that the theory of natural selection means I can justify having no morals, or going round killing everyone weaker than me. I think you'll find most people, when they lose belief in God, use the golden rule as a basis for morality, and seek only to be happy, and make other people happy. When I was a Christian I believed murder was wrong, even though God seemed to enjoy it, and I still believe that now. So no, in my case, and the cases of every person I have EVER met, deconversion and lack of belief in God had absolutely no moral consequences.

Koyaanisqatsi

Why? They're not moralists, they're scientists.

If you'll permit me, I think the problem might be (as Philo alluded to), that you're being unduly influenced, IMO, by a residual side effect of theist mentality. I think even you will agree that critical thinking is not exactly encouraged in similar settings as a school room (i.e., church), so for you to hear a scientist talk about evolution in an open forum that is similar to a congregational gathering, for example, you freak out because you've been conditioned to think "voice of authority=voice of truth."

I don't mean this as a slight at all. That has been the traditional role of Church; the Priest or Reverend or Rabbi (or whatever) speaks with the authority of "God;" therefore, naturally, one who is in the congregation would equate a voice of authority as a voice of "truth." Unquestioned, truth, no less; that what he or she preaches is the inerrant word of God.

But science teaches no such thing; in fact, quite the opposite. A secular science class teaches the scientific method of investigation (doubt; falsifiability; applied critical analsyis; etc., etc.), so that when students of science here a theory presented, it is understood what that entails.

So when you say you're concerend about the "laypeople," isn't it possible that you're natually and/or subconsciously thinking of "them" in terms of say your own congregation? Isn't it possible that you're applying this fallacy to the situation and alarmed because, from your theistic mentality, you infer "voice of authority=voice of truth?"

My 2 cents. And, again, no slight, just a possible psychological reason behind something that you perceive as a problem and none of us do (the only common denominator between us being that you're a theist and we're atheist, so perhaps this explains the confusion).

Nobody atheist I have ever met said, "It's true because I was told it was true," yet one can not say the same thing at all about theists. But, that, of course, isn't the fault of or the concern of the scientist; it is a concern and/or fault of the theist mentality. If your churches and synagogues and the like are going to instill in their congregations the notion that "voice of authority=voice of truth" then you can't blame scientists for what may or may not happen when "laypeople" (in other words, theists, largely) hear a scientist speak.

After all, noboby stands up in church and says, "Well, hold on a second, Preacher. How do you know any of this is true? Just because the Bible says it's true? Where's your critical analysis? Where's you disclaimer that says, 'We believe this book is the truth, but we cannot possibly be absolutely sure it is the truth.'"

I tell you what. The minute the churches in this country enforce this kind of clear and honest disclaimer upon the Preists and the Rabbis and the Reverneds is the minute I'll personally spearhead a similar disclaimer for scientists who speak (though I have the advantage, since this is already inherently the case whenever a scientist opens his or her mouth).

Philosoft

And when should they explain these things? At the end of every journal abstract?

"Oh, by the way laypeople, just because this experiment demonstrates conclusively that sand fleas can be trained, using operant conditioning, to rebuild eroded shorelines does not mean a disembodied consciousness isn't responsible for the first living organism."

It appears you're basically pissed at Richard Dawkins. You might also ask the esteemed members of the mass media to add disclaimers, because non-scientists probably get most their science from the news or Discovery.

So, even though science has found exactly zero cases of non-naturalistic phenomena in 700 years, scientists still need to make every effort to remind us that we can still believe in ghosts if we want to? Isn't that the job of religion?
Yeah, you just have to wonder why those darn scientists don't publish a list of possible alternative supernatural explanations at the end of every journal entry.

Clutch

Just wondering what the phrase "as concerns questions about existential reality" contributes to this sentence.

Really, your post could be about 8% its current length, and express the same point with vastly greater clarity.

One point about substance rather than style: You must distinguish between science and media presentations of science. Journalists are overwhelmingly scientifically illiterate, yet it is their half-grasped and oversimplified presentations of a few gee-whiz results that constitutes the lay understanding of science.

Your point may hold, in this modified form: that in general people place too much trust in what they read, including what they read about science. The cumulative effect of this is not, I suggest, a privileging of science though. The very same phenomenon also accounts for why people find themselves constantly reading about miracles, psychic predictions, astrology and crystal therapy.

I agree that when people read or hear about science, they tend to get a presentation calculated to sell papers rather than inform with subtlety; and the first casualty is usually the defeasibility of whatever result or theory or explanation is being reported. But the orientation towards selling papers rather than informing with subtlety is entirely general, has nothing to do with science, and overall -- I submit -- causes more ill-founded scepticism than dogmatic acceptance towards science.

luvluv

Dr. Retard:

Well, unfortunately, in the public mind the only two alternative visions of reality are that of creation by a personal, loving, moral God, or creation by nonrational, nonpurposeful, material processes.

Those are bedrock assumptions. You seem to think that unless an ethical system would send you ought into the streets with murderous intent that there hasn't been a fundamental shift. But, however much some Darwinist scientists fail to see how the implications on "what we must do" follow inexorably from "where we came from", the general public sees it quite clearly.

Morals are a whole new ball game if instead of being the purposeful loved creation of an infinite God who desires that we seek union with Him first and then communion with all humanity we are actually purposeless accidents with no real reason for existing and beholden to none but ourselves.

It is true that given these circumstances your average comfortable middle-class Westernized atheist may not want to murder his neighbors in any large numbers. But there isn't a single reason in the world why there is anything INTRINSICALLY wrong about doing so if he so desires. That is a fundamental shift in reality, even if most people aren't daring enough to take up on it's full implications.

Salmon of Doubt:

It's a darn good thing I didn't say that, then.

I said that, in general, the hubris surrounding naturalism is bad given the authority science has in the public mind. Knowing their influence scientists should be more careful to inform the public about precisely how much they don't know. Moreover, they should be more accepting of outside criticism. Scientists quite often make veiled appeals to heresy whenever one of their doctrines is threatend by unanswerable objections. Whenever anyone writes a book quite rightly questioning holes in Darwinism, science generally puts up a united front that seeks to marginilize such authors as "creationists" and suggest that to reject Darwinism is to accept literal 7 day creationism. Well, it seems to me that in the interests of science, and of good form, a scientist ought simply to admit that yes there are signifigant problems within the theory of evolution and we hope to fill those gaps in our knowledge soon.

They should not, as I have seen done in reviews of Johnson's work as well as that of Behe, seek to intimidate people from even ATTEMPTING to critique Darwinism, even for it's actual failures, on the dubiously self-interested grounds that science cannot consider non-natural explanations and remain science. (While that is true, that does not mean that non-natural explanations aren't occasionally true.)

Frankly, you aren't looking hard enough. Certain things are right if there really are such things as souls and heaven and hell which aren't right absent all of those things. Is it right to try to scare people out of going to hell if hell really exists? That's debatable. But what isn't debatable is that it is absolutely wrong to scare people about going to hell if hell doesn't exist.

Morals and ethics cannot be divorced from what is real. Every statement about the nature of reality has moral implications.

Koy:

Well, whatever theistic mentality I am undergoing is not residual or a side effect. I'll remind you that I am a theist, and will be one forever (literally .

I don't have a problem with a scientist speaking with authority about what he knows to be an actual fact. But when scientists say things like "We scientists have no doubt that a naturalistic explanation of th origin of life will be found", for example, I get upset. It is these kind of totally unsupported statements of blind faith in the philsophy of naturalism that upset me, not emprically verifiable statements of actual fact.

The question in my mind is whether scientists will ever have the moral compunction to act against their own intersts and say "We remain optimistic, but there is no guarantee that we are right. Within the boundaries of science, if intelligence is involved we are simply out of the loop. We'll never be able to establish it, and what we will teaching (incorrectly) will be the least absurd naturalistic explanation, which is what we will have to accept as true. We will have to do so not on the basis of evidence, but because of the limits of the philosophy of science."

This would give the laymen a more adequate picture of what is going on. The majority of people I encounter still very comfortably assume that everything is explained with some primordial soup and a bit of lightning, and from there it's smooth sailing. They have no idea of the difficult of the actual enterprise, and when I try to correct their scientific superstitions (which is what their version of the origin of life amounts to) using some scientific facts, I get laughed out of the room because I am a Christian.

The paradox here is that the Christian, armed with actually scientifically informed facts, is not being refuted in the streets with equally informed atheists, but is being refuted simply on the grounds of the faith the public has in the superior MORAL character of the scientist. They cannot envision that science would mislead them or lie to them, or that they could simply be wrong. On the other hand, they have been conditioned to believe that religion constantly seeks to mislead and lie, and that science has PROVEN that religion is quite often wrong. They are therefore unprepared for a situation in which science is being dogmatic and evasive and operating primarily on faith, and when the Christian is asking for a hearing on the basis of the facts. In the publich mind, this simply cannot be the case, so they close off their minds in advance of the debate and because of the relative PRESTIGE of the opinion of naturalism, feel totally justified in MARGINALIZING the role of intelligence in our universe without even remotely succeeding in REFUTING the notion.

a) I'd like to meet all these ingenious atheists you guys know.

b) I have certainly heard people say that something is true "because science says so" without any knowledge of the evidence which makes science say so, or how much of that evidence is accurate, or whether such evidence even exists. I can't tell you how many times I've heard people say "We know that life can arise without God, on the basis of science." When I tell them, excuse me, we currently know no such thing, I am generally assumed to be "uninformed" or "uneducated" because I am unaware that the primordial soup theory has already been proven to be true by science.

And I would agree with you that theists don't challenge their "superiors" enough. But the general public doesn't question science AT ALL, and it being that scientists are much more trusted generally speaking than are priests, that is a huge problem. We don't solve one infallibilty by creating another.

Thanks for proving my point. You really think WHENEVER a scientists opens his or her mouth they always speak of pure objective truth? No scientists fudges even a little bit, or is more optimistic or dogmatic than they have a right to be, in order to secure needed funding? In order to advance their own careers?

This is what I mean when I say that humankind is in it's infancy stage when it comes to the declarations of scientists. We haven't really grasped yet that they are human beings, capable of all our failings and misgivings. They can be wrong, they can be self-serving, they can be dishonest. And whatever correctives operate between them as individuals does not protect us from their faults AS A CLASS, operating as they do at a removed and esteemed distance from the rest of us. Regardless as to WHICH version of abiogenesis they dispute over, they are united in saying that life MUST have had a natural origin (otherwise, there is no need in financing the search for one) and furthermore they say that NO ONE WHO IS NOT A SCIENTIST HAS A RIGHT TO SUGGEST OTHERWISE. They assert a right over knowledge which they deny to others, and some of these rights that they claim are unavoidably self-serving. Whatever reality may be, a scientist's perfect world is one in which everything has a naturalistic explanation, so that is the world that science projects as "real". This should not surprise anyone. Mathematicians see the world as a series of elegant equations, philsophers have built notions of a perfect society around the notion of a philsopher-king. We'd all like to believe that reality is fundamentally structured in a way that would be most convienient to our proclivities. But do we have a right to actually believe that they are this way? I don't think so, but the endeavor of science cannot get around this assumption, so what happens if this assumption is not true? Science must get increasingly and stubbornly useless or mythological if it actually is the case that intelligence is involved in the creation of such things as life.

a) Who says the consciousness has to be disembodied? If you believe that we humans, one day, might be able to create entirely new systems of storing and transmiting biological information, then why is it not possible that we were not the creation of some other species? This is what I was talking about. Either evolution or seven day creationism by a disembodied ghost named Yahweh. Scientists draw up this distinction in an attempt to intimidate intelligent people away from questioning their naturalistic paradigm.

b) I don't think you need to explain this in every particular instance, just that scientists need to explain to people that naturalistic explanations for certain things may be wrong. They should explain, for example, that the Dawkinsian "blind watchmaker" hypothesis is not necessarily the one that has the best empircal attestation, but the one which proposes the most practical explanation of the diversity of speciation ABSENT THE APPEAL TO INTELLIGENCE. So, it isn't that the "blind watchmaker" hypothesis is so well evidentially supported that it must be true, it is that SINCE WE HAVE TO ASSUME NO INTELLIGENCE IS INVOLVED, something like the blind watchmaker hypothesis must be true. While the fossil record may lend more support for punctuated equilibrium, P.E. had no means of explaining sudden exponential change and subsequent stasis producing speciation from a naturalistic standpoint, and so some form of Dawkinsianism must be true.

Now the majority of your thinking public is unaware of this. They assume that evolution is a theory built upon facts. But in point of fact it is in large part an interpretation of facts based upon theory, it is ocassionaly philosophy OVER (or at the very least BEFORE) evidence.

The point, my dear Philsoft, is that inasmuch as science CANNOT CONSIDER non-naturalistic phenomena, they can never "find" it. They can only find things they cannot explain, and for these things they will place hold-over theories which conform to naturalistic philsophy. They will then declare that these theories are "true" until someone comes up with a better theory to explain the data. And oh by the way, that explanation must be naturalistic in order to be considered.

What does that kind of thinking lead to if it turns out that naturalism is untrue, say, of the origin of life on this planet. Let's not even get into a God, let's say that some ancient alien civilization planted the seeds of life on earth. This is not too far fetched a notion if you consider it to be possible that, in say 20, 000 years, we will be capable of similar feats. If it really is the case that there is a non-naturalistic explanation of the origin of life, does it not follow that a science which is enslaved to fully naturalistic explanations will lead us further and further astray and do so on rather dogmatic philosophical grounds?

Supernatural need not mean the suspension of natural laws. It could just mean the involvement of intelligence. Is it possible that single-celled life forms were implanted here from somewhere else by intelligent creatures? If so, then how do you KNOW that there must be an naturalistic explanation for the origin of life on earth?

"Science cannot explain this, if it is true" does not equate to "this is not true"; and unfortunately this is the assumption of naturalistic science.

Clutch:

I'm searching for my point. It's going to get worse before it gets any better.

And you really believe that your average layperson puts as much stock into these things as he does into the discoveries or proclamations of scientists?

How many informed, intelligent people do you know who are skeptical about science, as opposed to skeptical about miracles, psychic predictions, astrology, and crystal therapy.

There is a disproportionate problem of credulity when it comes to the scientific worldview.

Serious question: pinkie out or pinkie in when drinking from a tea cup?

You elitist, you.

yguy

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "upset", but to react with defensive hostility to such statements is playing into the hands of the propagandists, because it makes it easy to cast the perception shell of bigotry about you, and also hampers your ability to see the logical flaws in their arguments.

If that doesn't apply to you, ma'am, kindly disregard it.

luvluv

Sir.