Slashdot Mirror
Is The U.S. Becoming Anti-Science?
smooth wombat writes "As a follow-up to a recently posted Slashdot article, Reuters UK has an article which poses the question: is the U.S. becoming hostile to science? From the article: 'Among the most significant forces is the rising tide of anti-science sentiment that seems to have its nucleus in Washington but which extends throughout the nation,' said Stanford's Philip Pizzo in a letter posted on the school Web site on October 3. Cornell acting President Hunter Rawlings, in his state of the university address last week, spoke about the challenge to science represented by intelligent design which holds that the theory of evolution accepted by the vast majority of scientists is fatally flawed. Rawlings said the dispute was widening political, social, religious and philosophical rifts in U.S. society. 'When ideological division replaces informed exchange, dogma is the result and education suffers,' he said." What is your take?
You bet.
Can you please prove (using science, of course) science? I mean, for something that uncovers The Truth, surely it can demonstrate that it, itself, is The Truth.
Now, I imagine that just about everyone reading this is thinking: "This is just a perfect example of all the anti-science BS that's going around." You keep telling yourself that. And while you're at it, say that God is invalid because he can't be proven. And that proving science is BS.
The real problem, as I see it, is not that America is becoming anti-science, it's that science is becoming anti-anything-else. Science is a handy tool that we can use to better understand what we observe, and then (optionally) use that understanding to some end. It does not provide The Truth and never will, though it _can_ give The Scientific Truth, and that's usually good enough. Too many people are losing sight of that and are proclaiming science is God/The Truth, and anything else is blasphemy.
> There are quite a few people in the world who attack Christians for being ignorant of science, then go
> and attack Christianity without having made any attempt to understand it. Providentially, I'm both a
> physicist and a Christian.
Understand it? there is no simple "understanding of it" that is possible. This is clearly demonstrated by the facts that:
1. so many "followers of the book" are quite eager to kill one another over differrences in their interpretation of it
2. so many christian religious schools spend so much of their time learning how to interpret minor parts of the bible in order to support their particular sect
3. there is any value in graduate studies in christian theology - if the book was "understandable" and not subject to so much interpretation then it would read like a printer repair manual.
Back to your post:
> as is clearly shown by Peter's dream in Acts.
Beyond the question of whether or not the thousands of christian, jewish, and islamic sects would agree with you in your interpretation...please, if there is a god that is omnipotent and omniscient I would sincerely hope that he would communicate a little more clearly than via one person's dreams from 2,000 years ago. Heck, it sounds like something out of a Diskworld novel.