"A Pat for David Brooks"
Posted by John Horgan on The CSW Blog
Kneejerk liberal that I am, I reflexively distrusted David Brooks when he filled William Safire’s center-right slot on the Times oped page. And early on Brooks’s support for the invasion of Iraq and castigation of antiwar critics so infuriated me that I avoided reading him. But Brooks, like Safire before him, has earned my grudging respect through his consistently energetic reporting, lively writing and eclectic choice of topics. Today, for example, in a column titled “Neural Buddhists,” Brooks reflects on scientific investigations of morality, altruism, spirituality, religious and mystical experiences. After he notes that many researchers are seeking not to debunk spirituality but to provide a deeper understanding of it, I expected Brooks to knock Dawkins and other “new atheists” for gross reductionism. He does, sort of, but then he moves on to a more subtle, interesting position. “In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other,” Brooks concludes. “That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation.” In other words, we may be headed toward new, more rational, less dogmatic forms of spirituality that avoid the extremes of religious fundamentalism and science-worshipping atheism. Sounds good to me.
Science Shapers Speak:
Online Interviews with Icons of Science
Over the past 25 years, I've had the privilege of interviewing many of the greatest scientists, philosophers and mathematicians of the 20th century.
My colleague Suhas Sreedhar and I plan to place digital versions of these interviews online together with transcripts so everyone can appreciate them. The name of this online archive will be "Science Shapers Speak: Online Interviews with Icons of Science."
So far, we've posted excerpts from interviews with two physicists: John Wheeler , who died last Sunday and was one of the most imaginative explorers of the implications of quantum mechanics and relativity; and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who won the 1983 Nobel Prize for specifying the mass-now called the Chandrasekhar limit-above which stars catastrophically collapse. Soon we hope to post excerpts from interviews with philosophers Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper.
We welcome your feedback.
- John Horgan
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