RSLC Blogs

After hearing President Obama's inaugural speech many scientist are joyous and excited over the phrase "restore science to its rightful place".  Check out the New York Times articles on the scientist reactions and an essay on science: Scientists Welcome Obama's Words and Elevating Science, Elevating Democracy.

The latter article discusses the relationship between science, religion, and ethics.

The knock on science from its cultural and religious critics is that it is arrogant and materialistic. It tells us wondrous things about nature and how to manipulate it, but not what we should do with this knowledge and power. The Big Bang doesn’t tell us how to live, or whether God loves us, or whether there is any God at all. It provides scant counsel on same-sex marriage or eating meat. It is silent on the desirability of mutual assured destruction as a strategy for deterring nuclear war.

Einstein seemed to echo this thought when he said, “I have never obtained any ethical values from my scientific work.” Science teaches facts, not values, the story goes.

Worse, not only does it not provide any values of its own, say its detractors, it also undermines the ones we already have, devaluing anything it can’t measure, reducing sunsets to wavelengths and romance to jiggly hormones. It destroys myths and robs the universe of its magic and mystery.

So the story goes.

But this is balderdash. Science is not a monument of received Truth but something that people do to look for truth.

That endeavor, which has transformed the world in the last few centuries, does indeed teach values. Those values, among others, are honesty, doubt, respect for evidence, openness, accountability and tolerance and indeed hunger for opposing points of view. These are the unabashedly pragmatic working principles that guide the buzzing, testing, poking, probing, argumentative, gossiping, gadgety, joking, dreaming and tendentious cloud of activity — the writer and biologist Lewis Thomas once likened it to an anthill — that is slowly and thoroughly penetrating every nook and cranny of the world.

Nobody appeared in a cloud of smoke and taught scientists these virtues. This behavior simply evolved because it worked.

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So does science have its own ethics?  If so, what are they?

Are those ethics compatible with our Christian values and ethics?

What do you think about the quote: "Science is not a monument of received Truth but something that people do to look for truth."?

How should the relationship between religion and science look like?

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By the way, as many of you know I'm NOT a scientist but I do love science.  They were my favorite subjects in school.  I wasn't much of a chemistry guy as much as a physics guy.  I'll share my story about the "SLUDGE TEST" some other time.  But many of you are involved in the scientific field, what do you think about those questions?  What about President Obama's speech?  I'd love to hear from you all.

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