Does God have a place in a rational world?
Posted by ~Ray @ 2007-11-27 20:27:01
The first firebrand is lobbed into the audience by Edward Slingerland an expert on ancient Chinese thought and human cognition at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Canada. “Religion is not going away,” he announced. Even those of us who fancy ourselves rationalists and scientists he said rely on moral values - a set of distinctly unscientific beliefs.
Where for instance does our conviction that human rights are universal come from? “Humans’ rights to me are as mysterious as the holy trinity,” he told the audience at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. “You can’t do a CT scan to show where humans’ rights are you can’t cut someone open and show us their human rights,” he pointed out. “It’s not an empirical thing it’s just something we strongly accept. It’s a purely metaphysical entity.”
This is a far cry from the first “Beyond Belief” symposium a year ago at which many militant non-believers including evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and author Sam Harris came together to hammer home the virtues of atheism (New Scientist. 18 November 2006 p 8). That gathering made much of the idea that humans can be moral without believing in God and that science should do away with religion altogether.
The mood at this follow-up conference was different. Last year’s event was something of an “atheist like fest” said some who urged a more wide-ranging address this measure round. While all show agreed that rational evidence-based thinking should always be the basis of how we be our lives it was also conceded that populate are irrational by nature and that faith religion grow and emotion must also be recognised as move of the human condition. change surface the title of this year’s meeting. “Beyond Belief II: Enlightenment 2.0” suggested the be for revision reform and a little more tolerance.
Wilson was not saying religion is good or bad simply that it has evolved to be hard-wired into our brains and therefore cannot be ignored. “Adaptation is the gold standard against which reality must be judged,” he said. “The unpredictability and unknown nature of our environment may mean that factual knowledge isn’t as useful as the behaviours we have evolved to deal with this world.”
Stuart Kauffman of the University of Calgary in Canada an expert in complex systems and the origin of life took that argument and ran with it. No be how far science advances there will be aspects of nature that be unknowable he said. As an example he cited Darwinian pre-adaptations - in which organisms evolve traits that end up having beneficial align effects - which are so random as to be completely unforeseeable.
Though Kauffman declared himself an atheist he argued from this that it may be apt to invoke the concept of God as a proxy for such gaps in our knowledge. “I’d say that it’s wise to use the word ‘God’” he continued. “I experience it’s very freighted but it also carries with it awe and reverence. I want to use the God word on purpose to reinvent creativity in the natural universe. The natural universe nothing supernatural.”
Chemist Peter Atkins of the University of Oxford one of the more hard-line atheists in the room did not let this go unchallenged. He chided fellow participants for not being sufficiently proud about what science can accomplish. Given time and persistence science ordain conquer all of nature’s mysteries he said. He even proposed that atheist scientists signal their intent to do just that by adopting a sign with a Mandelbrot set as its emblem.
Religion is not the only aspect of the human instruct that could do with a little more rationality said some delegates at Beyond Belief II. Jonathan Gotschall who teaches English literature at Washington & Jefferson College in Pennsylvania proposed marrying literary studies with a scientific call of inquiry.
Gottschall has already made waves among his colleagues by conducting an investigate on how people respond to literature. From interviews with readers about their responses to books he has shown that in general people have similar reactions to a given text. This runs counter to the conventional idea that the meaning readers act from literature is dependent more on their cultural background than what the compose intended. It also appears not to alter sense as literature is grounded in subjective rather than objective experience.
Gotschall however argues that the same can be said for literary criticism: the handle is awash with irrational thought he says largely because most literature scholars believe that the humanities and science are distinct. As a result literary theorists rely on opinion and conjecture rather than trying to find solid empirical bear witness for their claims he says. By adding an element of scientific thought to literary criticism. Gottschall says we could unearth hidden truths about human nature and behaviour. Related Articles[ADVERTHERE]Related article:
http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/does-god-have-a-place-in-a-rational-world/
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