In Tired of all the religious garbage? It’s time to become an Enlightenist, Muriel Gray tries to back away from any debate about theism and atheism, and writes, “Enlightenists believe in the awe-inspiring, wonder, beauty and complexity of the universe, and aspire to unpick its mysteries by reason, constant questioning, observation, experiment, and analysis of evidence. The bedrock of our morality is empathy, from which logically springs love, forgiveness, tolerance and a profound desire to make a just, egalitarian society and reduce suffering. The more knowledge a person has, the more they question and understand the real world, and the more they are required to analyse what is true, then the greater the increase in empathy. Enlightenists care and wish to do good not because a vengeful God tells them to, but because intelligence suggests it is the only and the right thing to do.”
It’s time to become an Enlightenist
This entry was written by , posted on November 1, 2006 at 01:47 pm
Filed under Asides and tagged atheism, enlightenists, Religion.
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7 Comments
My problem with science is it has a history of being wrong. If you went bact 500-800 years and look at the shit we believed (non religion) it is amazing. I am curious what in 100 years we will look back on and say what the fuck were we thinking.
I am not saying science is bad just that science always proves science wrong.
It’s called being a self-correcting process, and as opposed to being a reason to disparage science, it’s one of the (if not the) major reason why science is so powerful.
I understand that but the problem is that a person can love science but not what science proves or says because it is probably wrong.
I don’t accept such a blanket statement as science “probably being wrong,” because it’s not necessarily about whether a conclusion is wrong or right, but whether it is supported by the evidence. Good science — open science — gives you access to the thinking and investigation that leads to a particular conclusion (or lack thereof). Looking at the data, you can say that it doesn’t support the conclusion drawn by the scientist, but that’s not the same thing as saying that “science is wrong,” because you’re using the same scientific method to critique the scientist’s conclusion.
“Science” is not wrong. Some scientists are.
Good point but my point is that we are not scientists so we have to take what they say as true when in most cases as technology evolves we find out they are wrong. The act of science is right but what it proves can be wrong. If that makes sense?
In 100 years people will look back at us and say “they believed what, those fuckin morons” or whatever.
If what it proves is wrong, then it didn’t very well prove it, does it?
I know what you’re getting at, though. It’s the whole “Newton was right until Einstein showed he was wrong” thing. There’s an amazingly influential essay/book that I think you should read. It’s called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas Kuhn (this is the guy who brought the concept of scientific paradigms to the forefront, a concept that you, as a former pupil of Mr. Butler, should immediately recognize). Kuhn is an historian of science, and his book argues that a major revolution in science (as in the Einstein one mentioned above)…:
Basically, Kuhn argues that scientific communities operate within specific paradigms, and that revolutions occur when a scientist comes along who operates outside of the accepted paradigm and who can offer experimental evidence to support the rationalization of that paradigm. It’s not that the former scientists were wrong as much as they were misguided by their paradigm.
Or something to that effect (I’ve only read selections from the book, not the whole thing).
One more quote, I think, will help clarify his argument: “[The] need to change the meaning of established and familiar concepts is central to the revolutionary impact of Einstein’s theory. Though subtler than the changes from geocentrism to heliocentrism, from phlogiston to oxygen, or from corpuscles to waves, the resulting conceptual transformation is no less decisively destructive of a previously established paradigm…Just because it did not involve the introduction of aditional objects or concepts, the transition from Newtonian to Einsteinian mechanics illustrats with particular clarity the scientific revolution as a displacement of the conceptual network through which scientists view the world.”
Science is good.
http://www.drudgereport.com/irak.jpg
hahaha