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althea_gw

Cultural Meaning of Scientific Conclusions

althea_gw
18 years ago

This editorial was in my local paper yesterday. I agree with the authors conclusion of the debate between science and intelligent design. The 2nd to the last paragraph has this provocative statement: "The real issue is the cultural meaning of scientific conclusions, which need not be identified with the views of scientific or religious extremists.".

What conclusions drawn from science are culturally meaningful?

Here's the full editorial.

Last update: October 1, 2005 at 7:00 PM Editorial: Science, religion/The discussion needs recasting October 2, 2005 ED1002A The debate over whether to teach intelligent design in science classrooms is, ultimately, discouraging and sad. It demeans both scientific inquiry and religion. There are important issues to be discussed at the junction of the two, but Intelligent Design isn't one of them, and science classrooms are the wrong venue. From a public policy perspective, the danger of the Intelligent Design movement is its potential for undermining the integrity of scientific inquiry and science education, both central to modern life and the advancement of the human species. Science is a method and a process; integral to it is testing and refinement. Hypotheses are proposed, and other scientists are invited to test them, to shoot at them and see if they stand up. If repeated testing and refinement validate a hypothesis, it becomes a theory, an exalted status in science. Evolution is one of these, along with gravity, as Ken Keller observes in his essay on the cover of today's Op Ex. Intelligent Design isn't science, and it isn't remotely an alternative to the theory of evolution, which grows stronger every day as new scientific techniques are applied to testing its validity. Intelligent Design is a belief, and a marginal one at that, held principally by adherents to an intolerant religious literalism. Most adherents to most of the world's great religions have no problem with the methods of scientific inquiry or with the empirical conclusions that result from it. John Brooke, an English science historian, tells, for example, of Charles Kingsley, an Anglican priest and amateur scientist who was a contemporary of Charles Darwin. For Kingsley, Brooke says, "a deity who could make all things make themselves was far wiser than one who simply made all things." Botanist Asa Gray, Brooke writes, believed that "Darwin had illuminated the classic problem of theology: the problem of pain. If competition and struggle were preconditions of the very possibility of evolutionary change, then pain and suffering were the price levied for the production of beings who could reflect on their origins." It is also true, Brooke points out, that the great scientific intellects mostly belonged to spiritual men: Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Darwin, Pasteur and Einstein all held religious beliefs, albeit quirky and idiosyncratic. Science \-\- including evolutionary science \-\- and scientists can neither prove nor disprove the existence of a creator; that's beyond their ken. It is, Brooke writes, wrong to assume that "once a naturalistic account has been given for the origins and development of the universe the gods can all be buried." Similarly, those with strong religious views can't be allowed to use the levers of political power \-\- whether in a school board, a legislature or Congress \-\- to undermine science. That's what the current trial in Dover, Pa., is about: whether Intelligent Design has a place in a science classroom. It doesn't. The important conversation about science and religion, one that should take place away from the science classrooms and labs, concerns the cultural and religious implications of science. "Debates so often construed in terms of an essential 'conflict between religion and science' usually turn out to be something else \-\- and far more interesting," Brooke writes. "The real issue is the cultural meaning of scientific conclusions, which need not be identified with the views of scientific or religious extremists." That's the discussion truly worth having. It would be far more elevating \-\- for both religion and science \-\- than the current simplistic contretemps over Intelligent Design. http://www.startribune.com/stories/1519/5644916.html


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