Recently, a friend posted a meme on Facebook that proclaims, "Science Flies You to Mars. Religion Flies You Into Buildings." Having just flown back from the Red Planet, jet lag perhaps impeded his thinking. But that meme reminds me of the classic Tom Lehrer song about Wernher von Braun, the German scientist who played a crucial role in developing the V-2 rocket for the Nazis. Thousands of von Braun's V-2's flew into English buildings during the Second World War. As Lehrer sang,
Some have harsh words for this man of renown,
But some think our attitude
Should be one of gratitude,
Like the widows and cripples in old London town
Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun.
It would not be fair to draw a line from the Nazi war machine to the landing of Curiosity -- at least not a straight line. But von Braun reminds us that science neither exists in a historical vacuum nor supplies its practitioners with a moral compass. The scientific method of observation, hypothesis and experiment only serves to create a body of reliable knowledge. It offers no advice on what to do with that knowledge, except to use it to pursue more knowledge. And it sets no limits on what scientists do in that pursuit.
Examples are easy to find. We might dismiss the experiments conducted in the concentration camps as the results of Nazi ideology. But how do we explain then the experiments conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service in Guatemala in the 1940s? Or the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which African American men went untreated, in order to discover the long-term effects of the disease? Or the work of the virologist Chester Southam, as described by Rebecca Skloot in her engrossing book, "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks." During the 1950s Southam injected cancer cells into hundreds of people without their knowledge. Although he insisted that the procedure was safe, he never injected himself. As he told a reporter, "Let's face it, there are relatively few skilled cancer researchers, and it seemed stupid to take even the little risk" (Skloot, "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks," 126-136, esp. 134). If scientific endeavors are privileged, then privileged too are those who pursue them -- Southam believed that his life was worth more others' precisely because he was a scientist.
Based on Skloot's account, it could be argued that religion finally put an end to his experiments. Three doctors resigned from a Brooklyn hospital rather than cooperate with his research. The doctors were Jewish, and they were derided as being "overly sensitive because of their Jewish ancestry" (Skloot, p. 132). This was the claim of the director of medicine who had agreed to let Southam experiment on patients at the hospital, a man named Emanuel Mandel -- ironically, another Jew. Perhaps Mandel saw Southam's research as a response to the rabbinic imperative to preserve life. But the action of those three doctors was shaped by the same rabbinic imperative. Mandel's criticism suggests that, besides Talmudic teaching, those doctors felt real solidarity with fellow Jews who had suffered in Nazi experiments. As a gentile, it might not be my place to say who was truer to the Torah, but even an outsider can see who had the better ethics.
This is not to smear science and scientists. But besides science there is another kind of knowledge: history. And the histories of "science" and "religion" deserve more thought and attention than a Facebook meme allows. That history is still being made. In the 1970s Federal law mandated the creation of Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) to oversee the ethical issues of human experimentation -- not that IRBs are above conflict of interest and dubious ethical assumptions. They are also limited to work done in the U.S. When ABC reported on the Guatemalan experiments, it quoted Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, who argued that pharmaceutical companies still routinely carry out experiments in developing countries, where there is "less vigorous regulatory oversight." There's no scientific reason not to.
The history of science is not limitless benevolence. The history of religion is more than violence, and even the violence committed in the name of religion needs more thought than this. Against the opportunism of von Braun, we might set the Jesuit priest Rupert Mayer, imprisoned for opposing the Nazis, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor executed by the Third Reich for his involvement in the German resistance (including possibly plans to kill Hitler). Martin Luther King was inspired by the Gospel -- not science. The martyrs of El Salvador -- Maura Clarke, Ita Ford, Jean Donavon, Dorothy Kazel, Oscar Romero, the victims of the death squads at the Universidad Centroamericana -- all were guilty of violence: the violence of witnessing against the prevailing wisdom of their time, against a common-sense that accords other humans the same dignity it offers lab rats. That violence continues in the arrest of Sister Megan Rice, 82, for breaking into a high-security nuclear facility to proclaim, ""Swords into plowshares, Spears into pruning hooks!" (Isaiah 2:4).
Like the scientists who landed Curiosity on Mars, these people embraced a difficult discipline -- that's why they're called disciples. My friend is neither a scientist nor religious, and I'm not sure what discipline is involved in circulating hate-memes on Facebook. It seems fairly clear that it has little to do with science or religion, at least as he understands those things. Shall we do a study and found out?
Chris Stedman: Finding Common Ground With 'Sacred Ground'
Jacques Berlinerblau: Secularism: Where Are the Women?
Religion: Answers that cannot be questioned (ever)
Science on the other hand has a history of stunning successes in producing knowledge about reality.
If religionists want to play on the level of which flavor of ice cream is the best, no one has any issue. But they don't, so we do. The fact that science is an excellent tool which people of questionable or nefarious ethics can use as much as anyone else is irrelevant to this.
Additionally, it is simply going too far to say that the scientific method has no value for examining beneficial ways for humans to live and interact with each other.
"religion is unique in the manner in which it makes its arguments. By beginning with an *explicit* abandonment of reason in favor of faith."
But yet science supports the view that life inside the mechanism is irrational. As Hawking/Mlodinow state, the evidence supports the view that our actions are determined by the embodied brain following the known laws of science, and not by some agent acting outside of those laws. Our actions are determined rationally by the incomprehensibly complex logic of the biological mechanism, but the experience of the conscious "I" is only part of that mechanism, the fragile immaterial "ego", the true nature of which is addressed by religion. Whether you believe in some form of partial "free will" or not, it is clear that we do what we feel like doing and not what we can determine we "should" do by some feat of boot-strapped rational inference. The true nature of our decisions was beautifully elucidated years ago by the neurologist Antonio Damasio in his book, "Descartes Error". Religion is an expression of the human condition in its scientifically knowable irrational glory, and not the reason for it.
Religion does not inform. It directly commands its followers what to do or what not to do, based on the ancients' understanding of how the universe operates.
While I disagree with this meme on so many levels, I do not disagree with the idea that it's far safer to think and work scientifically than religiously.
We have been in what one group of philosophers calls "the post-atheism age" for the last quarter century. It means that they are willing to take a second look at religion. Not in order to justify dogmatic religion but simply because of the questions their philosophy cannot come to terms with. They have questions that traditional religion cannot answer either.
I have argued that when it is posed as between religion and science, we usually end up talking past each other. The comments on this thread so far illustrate that. I expect more of the same as comments accumulate. If we wish useful information, let philosophy address both religion and science. That means that both then will have to learn to understand philosophy. Let's see if the radical advocates of either religion or science are capable of learning something new.
Until that time it's just mental thumb twiddling to do so, so no, let philosophy not address both religion and science until you give some reason it should bother with religion at all.
I have yet to see anyone actually do that.
"7 Towards a Conclusion: Heterodox Religion and Post-Atheism
Philosophical and in particular phenomenological approaches to religion have in recent times given witness to an increased interest in and respect for the religious. The work of Jean-Luc Marion (Marion 1998) is the obvious reference point here, alongside the thinking of Emmanuel Levinas (Levinas 1981) and the later work of Jacques Derrida. (Derrida 2002) As I have suggested in this essay, Foucault’s last work on Christianity in his unpublished fourth volume of the history of sexuality, entitled Confessions of the Flesh, (Foucault 1999) is another instance of this tendency, albeit a rather earlier example. Moreover, Foucault’s focus on the technologies of Christian religion can trace a direct genealogy back to the yet earlier explorations of Bataille and Klossowski."
It's from an essay provided free by the journal Minerva published in Vol 10, 2006, by Jones Irwin, an academic philosopher
Christianity also answers the questions of why this world is such a mess and what is needed to transform and redeem it.
In the case of Curiosity, the motivation was to expand our knowledge.
In the case of 9/11 the motivation was to appease an invisible tyrant.
Even the evil and cruel experiments performed on prisoners and unwitting servicemen could produce a better understanding of nature, but they are not possible without the irrational dehumanization of those who cannot defend themselves.
Science is a-moral, and can be used by anyone to suit any purpose. Religion (the Abrahamic traditions) are immoral and dehumanizing by their very nature.
Good people who follow those religions ignore 99% of what is written in their holy books, and that is a good thing.
"It's up to humans to use science morally and do no harm." Ramen!
It also gave us the capability to fly remote sensor platforms to Mars. And, incidentally, the capability to build those planes that got flown into those buildings.
"The history of science is not limitless benevolence. The history of religion is more than violence, "
Indeed. But the history of science contains ZERO exhortations to violence also. That's the flip side of that not providing a moral compass thing. While religion contains them in multitudes. And while yes other belief systems can stray down that path as well religion is unique in the manner in which it makes its arguments. By beginning with an *explicit* abandonment of reason in favor of faith.
And once you abandon reason, how do you reason with purveyors of violence if they decide that is where their faith is directing them to go? Once they've been led down the "because God says so"" path, and you've told them God's mind is beyond their comprehension and works in mysterious ways so if that doesn't seem to make sense it doesn't matter, and that they just need to take everything on faith.. there's no easy way to come back from that.
Which leads, among other places, right into the side of a building.
The respondent also discusses “faith” and “reason” in a way that we’ve all seen before. The obvious problem with his approach is that both “reason” and “faith” are necessary in any thinking person. Faith in Jesus, for example, is largely grounded in the reported experience of those who claim to have witnessed his resurrection. It’s an extraordinary historical claim that defies common experience – but so are claims about the Big Bang, Higgs bosons and Martian rovers – all of which I believe, btw. I don’t object on principle to trusting the extraordinary experience of others, because without such “faith” there is very little I could “reason” about.
SCIENCE contains zero exhortations to violence. Yes. Really.
And I see we're a fan of playing fast and loose with the many many definitions of faith in order to claim that "faith" is necessary in everyone.
Some version of "faith", certainly. But there are a great many kinds of faith and religious faith is only one of them. There is "faith" as an expression of confidence in extremely reliable data. There is "faith" as a description of well EARNED trust. There is "faith" as an expression of loyalty and commitment to an ideal or principle.
And then there is "faith" as religion so often uses it. "Just believe what you're told and forget that pesky evidence stuff".
And no, nobody NEEDS that kind of faith.
And comparing people telling stories about a guy magically rising from the dead then vanishing into thin air with claims we have *solid empirical evidence for*? Just sad. Yes, they're all "extraordinary". But the difference is that the latter have extraordinarily solid and absolutely verifiable evidence *backing them up*.
Premise. we humans have the capacity to be mindless brutes: petty, selfish, vicious, destructive, etc. Children can be like this, and while most of us 'learn better' over time we never entirely rid ourselves of those attributes.
Science creates things and offers them up blindly for people to use. Those of us in mindless brute mode can/will use those things destructively: turn medicine into poison, fuel into bombs, or just produce endless, pointless waste. But science has nothing to say about this, it just keeps on with the process of blind creation.
Religion tries to steer us out of mindless brute mode. It can/does fail because people in mindless brute mode will use religion the same way that they use the products of science - destructively. But religion does have something to say about that; it tries to help people 'learn better'.
Dump a bunch of pawer tools into a grade school classroom and suggest that they build something - that's science. Toss in a teacher whose goal it is to keep them from slicing each other to ribbons - that's religion. Some teachers turn out to be brutes and twist the message the wrong way, some students refuse to listen or think. Things go wrong, resentments build, problems ensue, such is life. But you can't really think they'd be better off with no guidance whatsoever, right?
"Religion tries to steer us out of mindless brute mode."
No It Does Not.
"Some teachers turn out to be brutes and twist the message the wrong way,"
And that's why it doesn't.
You don't get to say what way is "the wrong way" because religion provides no means by which one person's conclusions based on faith can be deemed to be more correct than another. One person might use religion for the ends you claim,. another might use it to opposite ends, and there is ZERO mechanism within "religion" for anyone to say the first person is doing it right and the second person is doing it wrong.
If you disagree, tell me how we determine which person is correct about what the all powerful inscrutable super-being whose mind is beyond our understanding *really* wants them to do.
War is a terrible thing, which is why it should always be a last resort.