A staple of the science-propaganda racket is the prophesy of marvels science will bequeath us over the next 10, 20, 50 or whatever years. TIME, Newsweek and all the science mags do this, often at the end or beginning of the year. It’s science journalism at its cheesiest—high-fat, zero-protein, fast food for geeks. (I should know; money-grubbing freelancer that I am, I’ve churned out my share of this crap.) I
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In previous posts I’ve quoted excerpts from my Q&A with Francis Collins, the Genome Project Director and Christian, for National Geographic. "Francis Collins: The Scientist As Believer" is now online, so you can see his views not only of extreme altruism and the inevitability of war but also free will and the problem of evil.
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George Bush ended his State of the Union address Tuesday night by praising individuals in the audience who exemplify “the heroic kindness and courage, and self-sacrifice of the American people.” One was New York’s Subway Samaritan Wesley Autrey, the subject of my post “Explaining Extreme Altruism.” The other was Tommy Rieman, a soldier who during a battle in Iraq in 2003 “used his body as a shield to protect
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I sent PZ Myers, the University of Minnesota biologist who writes the popular blog Pharyngula, an email about my post on Christian fatalism. PZ in turn posted this, and someone named Colugo offered the following comment:
Should we be optimistic about the prospects for people treating each other better than they have in the past? Behavioral ecology, particularly as informed by life
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In his pat-worthy 2006 book The Human Potential for Peace, the anthropologist Douglas P. Fry deplores, as I do, the widespread, fatalistic conviction that war, murder, mayhem, aggression are inevitable. He blames this fatalism in part on “the Christian doctrine of original sin. Few people may believe in it, but the view that evil is endemic has become embedded in our society.”
This is one of my chief objections
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I could have titled this post “In Defense of Selfishness,” but “cowardice” is a more precise antonym of the “extreme altruism,” death-defying heroism, I fretted over in my last post. Moreover, I like to defend the indefensible. Selfishness has its advocates (Ayn Rand, Nietzsche, the Michael Douglas character in the film Wall Street), but who sticks up for cowardice? Not Gandhi, who often said, “Nonviolence is not for cowards.”
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One of the first feel-good stories of 2007 is New York City’s Subway Samaritan, Wesley Autrey. A 50-year-old black construction worker, he was standing on the subway platform with his two daughters when a young white man nearby suffered a seizure and fell on the tracks. Autrey leapt onto the tracks and pinned the stranger down as the subway raced overhead, so close that it greased Autrey’s hair.
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Just finished Richard Powers’s splendid novel The Echo Maker, winner of the 2006 National Book Award. The book centers on Mark, a 20-something ne’er-do-well who crashes his truck on a lonely Nebraska road and ends up with Capgras syndrome, victims of which insist that loved ones have been replaced by imposters, exact replicas, like pod people. Mark’s distraught sister Karin persuades a famous neurologist/author, Gerald Weber, clearly modeled after
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What’s the difference between science and philosophy? Science addresses questions that, at least in principle, can be answered. Philosophy addresses questions that can’t. That’s also my definition of ironic science.
Is free will a scientific or philosophical question? The latter, almost certainly, even though my previous posts have implied otherwise. There is no final word on […]
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Some physicists, notably free-wheelin’ John Wheeler, whom I profiled in The End of Science, have suggested that physics might account for consciousness and other mind-related mysteries by incorporating concepts from information theory. Recent popularizers of this notion include the physicist Seth Lloyd (whom Dennis Overbye mentions in his recent Times article on free will, the […]
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