Science and love, music, art, etc. (The limitations of science)

by dhw, Wednesday, February 18, 2009, 11:49 (5554 days ago) @ George Jelliss

George: It seems that we have a different idea as to what are "fundamental truths". For me fundamental truths are those for which we have definite evidence and which form the basis on which to work towards more complicated truths, or to solve more complex or specialised problems. Biological evolution comes within this realm of fundamental knowledge. Questions of ethics and aesthetics are real and of some practical importance but not fundamental in this sense. Questions of religion and supposed paranormal events are even more rarefied. - Thank you for pinpointing this area of misunderstanding, though your relegation of religion and related subjects to the status of the rarefied is, of course, highly contentious. Let me give you two examples of Gestalten to illustrate an agnostic view of two issues that I would consider fundamental. 
 
The first relates to a very long article in yesterday's Guardian covering various creationist groups, and their intellectual contortions as they try to make reality fit in with Genesis. One quote especially leapt off the page. A geologist who works full time for Biblical Creation Ministries says: "The young-earth position is the only one that has a coherent understanding of the history that doesn't have suffering, death and bloodshed before Adam's fall." The author of the article comments: "It is, in other words, a life-or-death issue for Christianity: if evolution is true, the creation is founded on competition, suffering and mortality; there never was a paradise; a theistic evolutionist God is an accessory to eternal crime." Creationist conclusion: God is Love, and therefore the findings of modern science in relation to the age of the Earth and the sequence of life's evolution must be ignored. - The second relates to the belief that there is nothing beyond the material world. This Gestalt entails the insistence that life, reproduction and new organs came into being through chance combinations of matter, though we don't yet know how; experiences such as consciousness and thought (see Mark's latest post), love, the so-called "paranormal" etc. are easily explained though we don't yet know the explanation. Atheist conclusion: So that's settled. - The fundamental scientific truths that you listed earlier (incidentally, at least two of your great scientists were believers and at least one was an agnostic) have of course contributed enormously to our sum of knowledge, but I would suggest that in the light of the above there is room for more than one sense of "fundamental". - 
Postscript: I had drafted this before logging onto your latest post in response to Mark. I read the two articles, and was struck by Susan Greenfield's conclusion: "Just how the water is turned into wine ... how the bump and grind of the neurons and the shrinking and expanding of assemblies actually translate into subjective experience ... is, of course, another story completely." That's the story I would like to hear.