.....OK, enough about YouTube and livers. Celebrated philosopher—and Darwinian atheist—Daniel Dennett can be heard interviewed recently on BBC radio: BBC interview......The conversation includes three authors, including brain expert Raymond Tallis. Dennett enters the conversation 12 and a half minutes in.
.....Even more recently, Dennett participated in a debate about religion (with Robert Winston). To hear that, go to Guardian debate. Dennett’s portion starts at 22:47.
.....Among other things, Dennett says
You’ll be glad to know that these conversations are thoughtful and intelligent. It ain’t Fox news......If religion isn't the greatest threat to rationality and scientific progress, what is? Perhaps alcohol or television or addictive video games. But although each of these scourges—mixed blessings, in fact—has the power to overwhelm our best judgement and cloud our critical faculties, religion doesn't just disable, it honours the disability. People are revered for their capacity to live in a dream world, to shield their minds from factual knowledge and to make the major decisions of their lives by consulting voices in their heads that they call forth by rituals designed to intoxicate them.
.....Right now, Sayed Parwez Kambakhsh, a young student, is on death row in Afghanistan, sentenced to execution for committing blasphemy. Imagine! We're living in the 21st century and in "liberated" Afghanistan blasphemy is still a capital crime. Most of the rest of the world is unwilling to tell those bent on carrying out this barbaric sentence that they are simply wrong.
.....You don't have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps. Indeed, if you are religious, you don't have to be crazy in the medically certifiable sense to do massively crazy things. And—this is the worst of it—religious faith can give people a sort of hyperbolic confidence, an utter unconcern about whether they might be making a mistake, that enables acts of inhumanity that would otherwise be unthinkable.
.....Other institutions or traditions may encourage a certain amount of irrationality—think of the wild abandon that is often appreciated in sports or art—but only religion demands it as a sacred duty. This might not matter if we could treat religious allegiances the way we treat differences in taste: if you have a taste for kick-boxing or heavy metal bands, that's your business. Not so with religion. Its arena includes not just the participants but all of life on the planet.
.....The better is enemy of the best: religion may make many people better, but it is preventing them from being as good as they could be. If only we could transfer all that respect, loyalty and intense devotion from an imaginary being—God—to something real: the wonderful world of goodness we and our ancestors have made and of which we are now the stewards.
18 comments:
Um, let's go back to YouTube and livers.
Religion is the greatest threat to scientific progress?
Torabora makes the case that science is the greatest threat to scientific progress!
Imagine the gene splicing experiment that escapes the lab and introduces a contagion that wipes out human kind or simply eats all the petrochemical based products humans manufacture. Whoops, billions die.
Imagine a rogue computer programmer that introduces software into the the NORAD computers that induces our nuclear missile strike forces to believe America is under attack and we counterattack with a massive several hundred warhead counterstrike. Chaos ensues. No cable TV for decades.
Imagine a nuclear power plant crew that screws around with a training drill and blows the lid off a reactor and melts the core into a festering ball of nuclear Goo (that's even worse than SOCCCD Goo!). The resulting radioactive plume circles the globe and makes uninhabitable an area half the size of Italy for the next million years. Whoops....already did that number! But there's always the potential for more of that nonsense!
Imagine that science invents a contraption that allows people to talk to one another at indefinite distances. The RF emissions cause all the users to develop brain cancers and they die. Billions die.
Imagine the widespread use of herbicides inadvertently kills off all the bees. Famine results. Billions die.
At 3 A.M. it's hard to carry on with this subject but let me note this. As long as our religious nut friends keep their zany stuff inside their mosque, church, synagogue, or compound, little harm occurs to science. That is why "freedom of religion" needs " freedom from religion" as a corollary. But do not believe that science can't be it's own worst enemy.
It is. That was the purpose of that Greek myth about fire. The Greeks had it going on.
God be with you and may He bless your day with joy and happiness.
The problem is that the religious nut jobs do not keep to themselves (except maybe for Jehova's Witnesses, who only knock on the door once in a while.) Otherwise, there are the religious types, so sure they are right, and so sure you will be better off when they bring you to your knees.
Tora, none of those scenarios you mentioned are science in and of themselves, they are mistakes; all of which are seemingly inspired by Hollywood.
None the less the idea that they should "keep to their [insert place of worship]" is an interesting idea - but what happens when there are religious scientists? Do their opinions matter just as much as the scientists who don't believe in invisible friends? Also, as 9:19 said, something tells me they wouldn't agree to the "Just stay in your corner" contract; some of them feel it is their god-given right to control the damned world - what then?
There IS a conflict of interest in this situation, I'm one that believes you gotta pick one or the other, you can't mix n match rationality and irrationality "some of the time" and get a healthy individual. Ladies n gents, I assert that the rational way, is the right way.
I don't believe that Science is a threat to itself, In fact mistakes in the past have proven more beneficial to science then a hinderance (after all, mistakes still provide information; i.e. what NOT to do) and if the scientifically minded (i.e. the rational, morally conscious) individuals are running the show, then Hollywood-esque catastrophes will have no place in reality.
Wow: I don't always agree with bohrstein, but I have to chime in on this one, torabora. The scenarios you mention are not science; they are human beings making grave errors with applications of scientific knowledge and technological invention.
And the Greek myth about fire was about hubris, not science--and hubris is every bit as present and every bit (if not more) destructive in religion as in other human arenas.
Thanks for the great reference and excerpt, dear, rational Chunk.
4:19 When Oppenheimer and Groves blew the first A bomb at Alamagordo there were Cassandras that believed that there was a chance that the nuclear fire could not be contained and the criticality would somehow not be contained. The explosion could extinguish life on earth, it was thought by some.
So the trigger was pulled anyway.
It didn't and a few short years later we foolishly exploded a thermonuclear device magnitudes of destructive power more than the A-Bomb. A far more sciency guy named Teller was at the helm of that explosion. Fermi noted that Teller was a monomaniac with several manias.
That's nice.
Stalinists, Chicoms, Frogs, Brits, Israelites, Paks, and Indians all followed on. As we know, other unsavory characters itch at the nuclear trigger too. At least W got one of 'em whacked by a really low tech method...a rope ;).
It is not an accident that a nuclear explosion occurs. It is a product of scientific inquiry. Same goes for chemical and biological weaponry. While the use of such devices and methodologies may perhaps be driven by religious fervor, so far it seems to me that the motivator has simpily been murder to achieve a compliant state of affairs in its victims survivors by the attacker. Praying doesn't get this kind of work done. All who play at these destructive technologies must walk the same path. It matters not a wit what their supernatural tendencies are.
The threat during the Cold War was mutually assured destruction. Both sides meant it and even if it was an accident the result would have been the same.
Nowadays we are fishing around deep in the bowels of the nuclear realm. Strange and wonderful glimpses of truth are being revealed in the high energy chamber colliders.
But consider this, what if all those black holes our astronomers see out there are what's left over after an experiment gone awry by some nosy, too bold, being?
It won't even make the papers.
I'm sorry that you believe that an accident is acceptable. Science without boundaries is far more dangerous than religion.
Getting dead at the hands of rational science is just as dead as at the hand of religious zealotry. Humans have made it thousands of years with untold numbers of religious beliefs. Science has been around about three or four hundred years and it's getting pretty wild what it is coming up with...both good and bad.
BTW Chernoble was real, not Hollywood and it is STILL not wholly contained. The whole planet has been poisoned. Who cares if it was an accident? How crassly flippant is an attitude like that?
The planet is getting to a point where its carrying capacity is being strained. Science is not only developing methods of killing mass quantities of people but it is also responsible for developing ways of feeding and keeping alive longer the same. Common sense tells anyone that the merry go round can't last forever and science will be at the center of the storm.
I'm really having a hard time rationalizing all that I know. Something needs to change and I fear the secular AND the religious.
I miss Art Bell.
Art Bell, from Harvard?
Also, the false dilemma of science w/o boundaries v. religion is unpersuasive, vague, and ambiguous.
Didn't Art Bell run away to the Philipines and marry a mail-order child bride six weeks after his wife died?
And he left the latenight airways into the ether.
BTW she was 20, the wedding was in the PI and attended by he family. You have a dirty mind.
oooh, struck a chord!
Okay, so Art married his Philipina bride a scant four months after the death of Ramona. Yes, his new bride is 20 years old to Art's 60-something age. Excuuuuse me. No mail was involved.
I miss Art too - helluva comedy show.
Who's Art Bell?
Radio star Art Bell is the #1 promoter of conspiracy theories. Evidently, he has never heard a conspiracy theory that he did not like. That would make him an idiot.
Or a cynic.
See http://www.csicop.org/sb/9712/baker.html
--CW
but Art does have a hot young babe for a wife, doesn't he?
I wouldn't exactly call him a "promoter" of conspiracy theories. Can't ever remember him fancying any particular one or another.
His radio show was a clearing house for every insomniac lunatic who could reach him with a phone at his Pahrumph transmitter at 3AM though. If it wasn't chutapagrahs it was hollow earth or greys or shadow people or alien abduction. The parade of crazies was inexhaustible.
Just to keep things real he would occasionally entertain an explorer or a real scientist to confuse the the really stupid.
He got quite wealthy with the routine and inexplicably just walked away from it all although the program remains in syndication.
The program provided respite from consideration of all the REAL stuff we are confronted with in todays wired world. We all know as much as we can find time to learn. It seems as if a certain degree of desensitization occurs with this info overload. A person tends to know a little about a lot of things and knows little about the depth of things. It is sorta like knowing your way around the neighborhood and not knowing who lives in most of the houses. It's "shallow" knowledge. When you go to find out more it's an uncertain enterprise that more can be learned either quantitatively or qualitatively.
Meanwhile the clock of my life ticks on.
I've got "Existential angst".
Did I say that right?
"As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns...the ones we don't know we don't know".
D. Rumsfeld
Geez, Torabora, please re-read 4:19 and 8:02 above. And please impose some word limits on yourself! Or: as so many have suggested to some others in this venue: get your own blog! You are still confused about what science actually is.
I think TB is an asset here, as an interesting voice of disagreement at times.
"It is inexcusable errors in design of humans that makes reactors dangerous" (exact quote)
Elana Filatova- photo chronicler of Chernoble.
Men have feet of clay and scientists are men. Our civilization cannot last as it presently is constructed.
It lacks intelligent design.
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