Reason Rally (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, March 31, 2012, 15:50 (4598 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

MATT: Sitting on a fence means that there are really two *different* sides: and if your assertion is that both are based on faith, then the distinction is false. There's either faith, or no faith.-Ugh, this is like saying that there is no difference between Manchester United and Manchester City, because they're both football teams. There has to be a distinction between opponents in no matter what sphere: on the left are the atheists, on the right are the theists, and slap bang in the middle are the brother agnostics xeno and dhw. The distinction is not between faith and no faith, but between one faith, another faith, and no faith. So stop messing around down there, Matt, and come back on the fence with me.-Tony has offered us a magnificent litany in response to the Reason Rally. A brilliant piece of writing, observation and reasoning, if I may say so. Thank you. It's only your last paragraph that brings a furrow to my fence-sitter's brow.-TONY (B_M): I don't sit on the fence because I do not admit its existence.-Surely you admit that there are theists and there are atheists. Why won't you let those of us who are neither sit on our fence in between?-TONY (B_M): [Science] insulates itself from moral responsibility.-Maybe some scientists do. Science itself is (or perhaps "should be") the study of the material universe. Morality is not its remit. If scientists behave immorally (or "insulate themselves"), one should not blame science, any more than one should blame Christianity for the un-Christian acts of many so-called Christians (ditto Islam, Judaism etc.). -TONY: It has become a soap box for narcissistic rabble rousers to tout how much more they think they know than everyone else while looking down their noses and foaming at the mouth when anyone mentions anything that falls outside their narrow minded purview.-I'll wave the flag with you when it comes to those vociferous bigots you describe, but I'd like to think they are in a minority, and of course they're not confined to the scientific world. Your description is equally applicable to fundamentalists of all religious and political persuasions. In both past and present, such people have done far worse things than foam at the mouth, all in the name of God, Allah, or some political ideology. So let us condemn bigotry and fundamentalism in general, and bigoted, fundamentalist scientists in particular, but let's not condemn science.