“No” is not a” loving answer” to someone whose genetic screen shows they will die slowly and painfully in the next couple of decades from Huntington’s chorea. “No” is not a loving answer to the African child with limbs torn off by a land mine. “No” is not a loving answer to the starving Somali infant. “No” is not a loving answer to every tortured existence in this world today, suffering and dying without comfort or hope.
This statement reveals the problem scientists have in this debate: the scientific method itself. The above are assertions, and therefore if the scientist demands that assertions be testable, verifiable, and falsifiable, the assumption is that there can be a scientifically proven absolute morality. In the thousands of years of human civilization, even though perhaps the central question of our existence has been “What is right, and what is wrong?”, this has never been proven.
We are limited by our perspective – by our experience of time as going in one direction, and by the fact that it has not ended. By the fact that experientially we are subjective, and can only interpret the experience of others through a subjective lens. By the fact that we cannot say “this would have happened had that not happened” to things such as “What if Hitler had been killed as a child?” or “What if we’d never used the bomb on Japan?” Who can say what horrors we actually avoided, or whether the world would have been better, if we could have avoided certain historical events.
Therefore, we cannot clearly say whether things which seem immediately cruel are not loving in the end to mankind. They may be cruel, indeed. Any assertion on any side is unfalsifiable, and the scientific community seems to be incapable of recognizing when it is making unfalsifiable claims.
@llewis has a profoundly reasonable approach to the argument – and it appears to have been built up as a defense to this built-in hypocrisy found in certain claims by the scientific community. Unfortunately, the reasonable approach to the argument reinforces some of the profound bias in the reasoning of the underlying questions in the argument. First, the approach to the argument that everyone has subjective bias is true. However, this does not undermine the fact that scientific attacks on creationist and biblical theories are valid attacks. Creationist theory is not a scientific theory, and it cannot get away with saying that we all have bias to ignore this problem. The underlying assumption of Creationist theory is that the bible gives a factual picture of the history of the universe because it is the word of God. Let’s accept that it is the word of God – but what if God spoke to man in metaphors because to discuss the real nature of the world was something he was not ready for? What if God inspired Genesis as the metaphor not for what happened, but what is happening…for instance, man and woman eating from the tree of knowledge and toiling from then on is something that is happening right now as we struggle for the truth that was lost when we gained sentience? What if it is written from the perspective of God – and therefore it has already happened – but the past tense isn’t appropriate for us, because it is happening – in essence, what if Genesis is in the wrong place in the Bible? Because it is impossible to say that the Bible claims anything because there are so many interpretations of it and for it, it is unfit as a document to build scientific claims of the origins of the universe.
What both sides appear to be doing is forgetting that there is no scientific way to measure matters of faith and belief, so it is a silly question for science to address. It is ridiculous for Christians to claim there is scientific proof for Creationism, and it is ridiculous for scientists to demand objective evidence of the effects of prayer. In both cases, we have the problem of subjectivity, which disallows for any objectivity – and is the issue that I think is addressed in @ETpro‘s question about social sciences. Once people are part of the factors that must be measured, and psychology of people to boot, the answers will always be messy – because unlike data, which can be misleading but not deceptive, people are by nature deceptive – both to themselves and to others.
Composing members:
0
Composing members:
0
