Posted by Adam on June 2, 2000, at 12:10:49
In reply to Re: Ahh, science, posted by bob on June 1, 2000, at 22:10:12
> And in saying such, Weinberg shows his own prejudices, perhaps, more than his understanding of the beliefs of others.
> If you can acknowledge the limitations of the mind in grasping creation, then having a spiritual faith that is orthogonal to sensory data is not an unreasonable proposition. That no one has either proven or disproven the existence of a Creator supports the orthogonality of faith to proof.
>
I think Weinberg may have meant many things by "nostalgia". Certainly his own bias toward atheism may color the issue, but I'm guessing what he hoped to convey is the separation of science from faith. One can as easily interpret the discoveries of science as faith-affirming or the contrary. It is nostalgic to think that interpretations one way or the other should be intrisic to the scientific discourse, as they were when science and philosophy were one and the same. Mere reasoning is no longer sufficient to make a scientific claim. You have to have some evidence. It's true: Discussion about "God" is orthogonal (or superfluous, depending on your viewpoint). Since the very nature of our concept of God makes His existance impossible to approach empirically, science is essentially silent on the matter, and scientists, operating as scientists, might do well to be the same. What science is not silent on is the accuracy of folklore. Though science can't disprove God, it has cast much of the traditions of our old philosphies and religions in doubt, as well as revealed intriguing parallels between spiritual thought and the discoveries of science. Whether or not the latter is a result of the limits of perception, or the power of our intuition, I don't know.
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> I can't disagree more. Ask a scientist "What is science?", and you'll probably receive an answer on average somewhere along the lines of "an endeavor to gain further understanding about our world." Ask why we need this understanding, and I'd bet you'd start hearing responses about the need or desire "to predict and/or control natural phenomenon" with a sentiment about improving the human condition.
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> But don't let the objectivity of sensory data fool you -- as soon as it passes into interpretation, it becomes an act with moral dimensions.
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> cheers,
> bobI may not have been clear here. I agree that the motivations for scientific study are not in themselves scientific, and are laden with value judgements, etc. However, the process of discovery can and should be as objective as we can hope to make it, and the information gathered is in itself neither good nor evil. It's just information.
It is a deeply troubling issue, though, that we cannot be certain if an objective reality exists, or that human limitations allow us to perceive it. I think the best one can do is keep striving to be as objective as one can be when interpreting data, and to also invite and embrace the scrutiny of other individuals, not only of our data, but also our interpretations, and perhaps ourselves, to keep us grounded. We have no better means at our disposal. We must acknowledge doubt about the very nature of our perceptions, but we can't be paralyzed by that doubt any more than we should be hubris about our own abilities.
Genetic engineering is a great way to illustrate the complex way science and morals interact. I would say that all science provides is the information and the means to do the engineering. Whether or not we should is a whole other matter, and we might turn to religion as reliably as science for the answer to that question. If science provides us with any insight at all, it may be to force us to acknowledge that, at this juncture, we lack the intelligence, knowledge, and technology to rationally improve on the results of a stochastic process of selection that has been going on for about 4 billion years. Evidence for this is easy to find: We can't make a protein to do what we want to from scratch without relying on stochastic processes like phage display. We utterly lack the ability to rationally design proteins, period. The best we can do now is stick different natural motifs together in a modular fashion, tweak them a little, and hope our chimeras don't to more harm than good. Given that obvious limitation, we would be remiss if we thought we could rationally design people. The best we can do now is, unscientifically, determine that being happier, taller, stronger, smarter, etc. is "better", try to figure out what makes happy, tall, strong, smart people the way they are, and then try to replace "faulty" genes with the preferred version we discovered (unscientific motivation, value-laden criteria, leading to morally neutral scientific discoveries, the fruits of which are then applied unambiguously).
I think faith and ethics will guide us in our assessment of what a "better" person really is. I think that is quite appropriate, since, thinking scientifically from a chaotic or an evolutionary perspective, there may be no real reason to favor one form of a gene over another, since we cannot predict the future or the value of an outcome beyond our own needs.
poster:Adam
thread:34863
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20000526/msgs/35671.html