The Case for Theism

[Cyberman]

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So? Science advances as we learn new things. For instance, Charles Darwin proposed a mechanism for evolution but didn't know precisely how it might work. The discovery of DNA blew the field wide open. However it would take something pretty drastic to completely overturn much of what we know.

I think the idea that 'science advances' is highly questionable.

There is a misunderstanding in Western thought that truth will set us free. Free from religion, free from ignorance, free from the evolutionary bonds that tie us to our animal past. This is a myth, a Socratic dream.

Socratic philosophy was born of a mystical experience, Socrates inner 'voice of God'. The rational examination of life is founded on faith, there is no connection between human well-being and increased knowledge about our world. We are blinded by the evolutionary imperatives that drive us, we seek genetic perpetuation, not truth. To think otherwise is to fall into the pre-Darwinist trap of imagining humans are different from other animals, it's unscientific.

As evolutionary biologist, Robert Trivers points out, evolution will 'select for a degree of self-decption, rendering some facts and motives unconscious so as not to betray - by the subtle signs of self-knowledge - the decption being practiced.'

Science will never be used chiefly to persue truth,or to improve human life. Science cannot be used to reshape humanity into a more rational species. We look back into history and see how irrational humanity has been and we imagine we have moved beyond that, that we are better than our ancestors, but this is a delusion. We may have found new ways to deceive ourselves through scientific endeavour but we are just as irrational as a species as we have always been, and future generations will recognise this about us as we recognise it about our ancestors. It is a curious stance that humanity as a species must and will be rational, one that has no evidence to support it, and yet it lies at the heart of modern scientific faith.

Folklore has grown up around an old English King, Canute. It is said he once stood against the waves to demonstrate his power, and as expected the waves carried on and he dissapeared under the water as the tide came in. We can hold science up, Canute-like, against irrational human behaviour but, like ancient Kings, we too will be washed away.

'Science advances' is a cacophonic hymn from the church of delusional humanists.


MM

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You seem to be confusing the use of the term "science advances", meant in the sense that the body of scientific knowledge increases as new discoveries and tools are made, with the sense of "science advances society", which I certainly did not say. If the latter is what you mean, then that would indeed depend on how such knowledge is used. The discovery of atomic reactions was used both for peaceful and politico-military purposes, which carry the potential for making the world more prosperous and less stable respectively. Far from being "a cacophonic hymn from the church of delusional humanists", the term as I employed it could more correctly be called a truism if anything. Maybe you can think of an area of science in which we know less than we did previously, because I'm buggered if I can.

"Science will never be used chiefly to persue truth,or to improve human life"? Tell that to the millions of people who annually survive medical conditions and traumas which only too recently in history would have been fatal; including my own mother, who around twenty years ago endured, and survived through emergency medical intervention, a brain haemorrhage. Hell, remember it next time you or someone you know and love develops an infection, or needs dental work.

Oh, and when you make cultural references, please be sure to get them right. Bear in mind that as an Englishman I am not unfamiliar with King Canute (or Cnut, as he's now rather dyslexically known). The legend has him defying the tide of the River Lavant, not as an Ozymandias-style exercising of his power over nature, but as a clear demonstration that no-one, not even a King, has that sort of power. In other words, he knew ahead of time what was going to happen and proved it to anyone who thought otherwise.