Last fall, a few days before Halloween and about a month after the publication of Mind and Cosmos, the controversial new book by the philosopher Thomas Nagel, several of the world's leading philosophers gathered with a group of cutting-edge scientists in the conference room of a charming inn in the Berkshires. They faced one another around a big table set with pitchers of iced water and trays of hard candies wrapped in cellophane and talked and talked, as public intellectuals do. PowerPoint was often brought into play.
The title of the "interdisciplinary workshop" was "Moving Naturalism Forward." For those of us who like to kill time sitting around pondering the nature of reality - personhood, God, moral judgment, free will, what have you - this was the Concert for Bangladesh. The biologist Richard Dawkins was there, author of The Blind Watchmaker, The Selfish Gene, and other bestselling books of popular science, and so was Daniel Dennett, a philosopher at Tufts and author of Consciousness Explained and Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. So were the authors of Why Evolution is True, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World, Everything Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized, and The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions - all of them books that to one degree or another bring to a larger audience the world as scientists have discovered it to be.
Read the rest of this interesting article HERE.
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"When a chain of reasoning leads us to deny the obvious, we should double-check the chain of reasoning before we give up on the obvious."
i hold no grudge against science. In fact, i loved science and the scientific method. But the Neo-Darwinist (or Social Darwinist) world view is just as dangerous as religious fanaticism, perhaps even more so. And modern science is 'infested' with their views (we should not forget who they really worked for).
We assume them to be more highly educated and therefore better able to argue, but instead they use their education & arguments to inflate their pride and prop up their ego in the most ugly way.
The religious never claim to search for the truth, or to a lesser degree their truth is one where faith plays a most important part. If they find none, it is no failure on their part.
On the other hand, these scientific materialists' claim of having absolute certainty of the truth that there is no God and other supernatural beings is just delusional, for want of a better word. Just because we cannot prove there is a God (or gods) does not mean there is proof that there is no God either.
As scientists, the burden of proof fall heavier on the side of science- they should be able to proof, without a doubt, that God does not exist. Faith is a belief but knowledge is certainty. And science is based on certainty of (real) knowledge.
Most people would say religious people are often ignorant. It could be true but these Neo-Darwinist and materialist are not much better; they are only marginally less ignorant.
The truth is, even the smartest of us know almost nothing about the universe, much less of life. Knowing something or even a lot of things is still incomplete knowledge. And having an incomplete knowledge could only mean we know nothing. If that is not a humbling experience, i don;t know what is. That is the stance that, perhaps, everyone should take.
We are held in awe of the universe and of life itself. And i am held in awe of my nieces every time they do something amazing, like saying "could you not smell the sweet aroma of the cake?" over the phone just the other day.
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