[ExI] Science or Scientism?

[John Clark]

On Fri, Nov 2, 2018 at 8:00 AM BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:


>
> *> there are many questions that do not have scientific answers because
> they were not legitimate scientific questions to begin with. Many of these
> questions concern the things that are most important of all: faith, hope,
> love, truth, beauty, and goodness — these do not lie in the territory of
> science.*


Hope, love, beauty, and goodness are all important virtues in my opinion
but I don't expect science to say anything about them. Science can inform
me what the universe's opinion about various things are but these virtues
are not about the Universe's opinion they are about mine, and even the
Universe doesn't know more about my opinion than I do. But truth is
different, science can help us get more of that. As for faith, in my
opinion faith is not a virtue at all, I think it's a vice.
>
>
*> most people do not believe in an inherent conflict between science and
> religion,*


I am not most people.


> > *and the historical evidence suggests that they are correct.*


Tell that  to the religious nuts who burned Giordano Bruno alive or
threatened to torture Galileo and imprisoned him for life or to the Taliban
who kill doctors who try to vaccinate children. Or tell it to any
evangelical Trump voter who thinks the universe started not 13.8 billion
years ago but in 4004 BC .

>
* >we typically find deep-seated conflicts between values that have only
> tenuous connections to science and religion.*


I don't understand why so many people typically feel that in order to be a
good person one must be a religious apologist.

John K Clark
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