This year’s Templeton Prize winner
Catholic priest and cosmologist
Michael Heller on NPR says “Science without religion
is not only meaningless, it’s lame.” You can listen to a short interview here.
Well I certainly agree with that and the
whole science versus religion thing is lame. This would be
like trying to set up a dichotomy between and artist and his painting.
It annoys me when some of the tech podcasts I listen to will
bring this up about people being anti-science when what they are
referring to are people who have ethical concerns of application of
science. Surely if we called them anti-ethics they would thing this
charge is unfair. But I guess it is easier to demonize others via this
charge instead of talking about ethical limits on scientific research.
I guess anybody who objects to Dr. Frankenstein is
anti-science.
4 comments
Yes, exactly. You can read John Paul II’s Fides et Ratio, or just about any book by Father Jaki, but the single best short answer was given by Chesterton 100 years ago:
“It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.”
[GKC, Orthodoxy CW1:236]
–Dr. Thursday.
I like to point out groups like “Atheists for Life” when people pull out the religion card.
thats wonderful the word is getting out, it is so unfortunate that even some pious Catholics often fall for that false dichotomy
I thought about this when, of all things, I was watching a Stephen Colbert interview with a man talking about embryonic stemcell research. He glossed over the ethics of it and went on to say that China was already doing the research, so we should, too.
It floored me that anyone over the age of 25 would use the “everyone else is doing it” argument. I had (erroneously) assumed that most scientists would not model their ethics after countries known for trading in organs from political prisoners.