Lo scienziato è in parte responsabile ticamente del suo lavoro e delle sue invenzioni.
Molta nuova tecnologia arricchisce I ricchi e impoverisce i poveri. C'è una questione etica grande come una casa sullo sfondo.
Ai tempi di mio padre la tecnologia era la moto. La moto era un elemento equalizzante. Mio padre potrei girare l'Europa a costi bassissimi.
Io ho scoperto la fissione nucleare. Ho abbandonato tutto quando ho intuito i pericoli ambientali e non solo. Tutto assumeva una rilevanza politica.
E il baby design di domani? Ho una gran paura. Le conseguenze etiche sono immense. Già oggi parlo solo di possibilità e vengo aggredito come un criminale. Cosa possiamo fare oggi per rendere meno difficili le scelte di domani?
Storia. La scienza di ieri era più vicina ai bisogni della gente. Oggi i programmi o sono astratti oppure sono commerciali.
Luce elettrica telefono frigorifero Radiotelevisione fibre sintetiche antibiotici vitamine e vaccini. Ecco le conquiste della scienza di ieri. È oggi?
Oggi ci si occupa di telefoni cellulari! Imo. Qui c'è una grande gaffe dell'autore il quale non comprende come la tecnologia per i ricchi sia destinata a ricadere sono i poveri. Parlando di cellulari la cosa oggi ci appare della massima evidenza.
Il progresso etico compensa quello scientifico. La scienza che avanza ci mette davanti a dilemmi sempre più gravosi. Informatica biotecnologia neuro tecnologia.
E le case a buon mercato? La sanità buon mercato? E l'istruzione a buon mercato? Cosa può fare la scienza per questi che sono i veri bisogni umani? Imo qui l'autore non coglie che noi non vogliamo una sanità a basso prezzo un'istruzione a basso prezzo!
Il GAP tra tecnologia e bisogni umani e oggi più ampio che mai. L'etica deve servire a colmarlo.
I verdi hanno fatto il loro dovere frenando certi programmi. Ma oggi sono una minaccia quando demonizzano la tecnologia. La tecnologia può risolvere i problemi della tecnologia.
Non dobbiamo credere che l'uomo rinuncia all'auto miglioramento. Dobbiamo darlo per scontato e muoverci di conseguenza.
BREAKING THE SPELL of religion is a game that many people can play. The best player of this game that I ever knew was Professor G. H. Hardy, a world-famous mathematician who happened to be a passionate atheist.
There are two kinds of atheists, ordinary atheists who do not believe in God and passionate atheists who consider God to be their personal enemy.
Paul Erdös was another world-famous mathematician who was a passionate atheist. Erdös always referred to God as SF, short for Supreme Fascist. Erdös had for many years successfully outwitted the dictators of Italy, Germany, and Hungary, moving from country to country to escape from their clutches.
And now comes Daniel Dennett to take his turn at breaking the spell. Dennett is a philosopher. In Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon1 he is confronting the philosophical questions arising from religion in the modern world.
Why does religion exist? Why does it have such a powerful grip on people in many different cultures? Are the practical effects of religion preponderantly good or preponderantly evil? Is religion useful as a basis for public morality? What can we do to counter the spread of religious movements that we consider dangerous? Can the tools and methods of science help us to understand religion as a natural phenomenon?
Dennett defines scientific inquiry in a narrow way, restricting it to the collection of evidence that is reproducible and testable. …He does not accept as scientific the great mass of evidence contained in historical narratives and personal experiences. Since it cannot be reproduced under controlled conditions, it does not belong to science. …
He quotes with approval and high praise several passages from The Varieties of Religious Experience, the classic description of religion from the point of view of a psychologist, published by William James in 1902. …James is examining religion from the inside, like a doctor trying to see the world through the eyes of his patients. …He studied the personal experiences of saints and mystics as evidence of something real existing in a spiritual world …
For Dennett, the visions of saints and mystics are worthless as evidence, since they are neither repeatable nor testable. Dennett is examining religion from the outside, following the rules of science.
He explains them tentatively as products of a Darwinian competition between belief systems, in which only the fittest belief systems survive. The fitness of a belief system is defined by its ability to make new converts and retain their loyalty. …it has nothing to do with the truth or falsehood of the beliefs. …
He observes that belief, which means accepting certain doctrines as true, is different from belief in belief, which means believing belief in the same doctrines to be desirable. He finds evidence that large numbers of people who identify themselves as religious believers do not in fact believe the doctrines of their religions but only believe in belief as a desirable goal.
The phenomenon of “belief in belief” makes religion attractive to many people who would otherwise be hard to convert. To belong to a religion, you do not have to believe. You only have to want to believe, or perhaps you only have to pretend to believe. Belief is difficult, but belief in belief is easy.
He quotes Alan Wolfe, one of the sociologists who study American religious organizations and practices: Evangelicalism’s popularity is due as much to its populistic and democratic urges—its determination to find out exactly what believers want and to offer it to them—as it is to certainties of the faith.…
Like Hardy and Erdös, Dennett plays the game of breaking the spell by making religion look silly. Many of my scientist friends and colleagues have similar prejudices. One famous scientist for whom I have a deep respect said to me, “Religion is a childhood disease from which we have recovered.” There is nothing wrong with such prejudices, provided that they are openly admitted.
In a long chapter entitled “Morality and Religion,” he blames religion for many of the worst evils of our century. He blames not only the minority of murderous fanatics whose religion impels them to acts of terrorism but also the majority of peaceful and moderate… Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.
He quotes with approval the famous remark of the physicist Stephen Weinberg: “Good people will do good things, and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things—that takes religion.” Weinberg’s statement is true as far as it goes, but it is not the whole truth. To make it the whole truth, we must add… Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.
The main point of Christianity is that it is a religion for sinners. Jesus made that very clear. When the Pharisees asked his disciples, “Why eateth your Master with publicans and sinners?” he said, “I come… Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.
I see no way to draw up a balance sheet, to weigh the good done by religion against the evil and decide which is greater by some impartial process. My own prejudice, looking at religion from the inside, leads me to conclude that the good vastly outweighs the evil. In many places in the United States, with widening gaps between rich and poor, churches… Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.
Dennett, looking at religion from the outside, comes to the opposite conclusion. He sees the extreme religious sects that are breeding grounds for gangs of young terrorists and murderers, with the mass of ordinary believers giving… Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.
I see religion as a precious and ancient part of our human heritage. Dennett sees it as a load of superfluous mental baggage… Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.
in the end,” he says, “my central policy recommendation is that we gently, firmly educate the people of the world, so that they can make truly… Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.
To give the recommendation a concrete meaning, the meaning of the little word “we” must be specified. Who are the “we” who are to… Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.
“We” might be the parents of the children to be educated, or a local school board, or a national ministry of education, or a legally established ecclesiastical authority, or an… Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.
The control of education is the arena in which political fights between religious believers and civil authorities become most bitter. In the United States these fights are made peculiarly intractable by the legal doctrine of separation of church and state, which forbids public schools to provide religious instruction. Parents with fundamentalist beliefs have a legitimate grievance, being… Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.
When public education was instituted in England in 1870, eleven years after Darwin’s theory was published, Huxley was appointed to the royal commission which decided what to teach in the public schools. Huxley was himself an agnostic, but as a member of the commission he firmly insisted that religion should be taught in schools together with science. Every child should be taught the Christian Bible as an integral part of English culture. In recent times the scope of religious instruction in England has been extended to include Judaism and Islam.… Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.
The teaching of religion in public schools coincided with a decline of religious belief and a… Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.
Dennett also advocates more intensive research on religion considered from a scientific point of view. Here again, we can all agree with the recommendation, but we may disagree about the meaning of “research.” Dennett limits research to scientific investigations studying religious activities and organizations as social phenomena. In my opinion, such research, looking at religion from the outside, can be helpful but will never throw much light on the central mystery. The central mystery is the perennial sprouting of religious practices and beliefs in all human societies from ancient times until today. My mother, who was a skeptical Christian like me, used to say, “You can throw religion out of the door, but it will always come back through the window.”
Let me state frankly my own philosophical prejudices in opposition to Dennett. As human beings, we are groping for knowledge and understanding of the strange universe into which we are born. We have many ways of understanding, of which science is only one. Our thought processes are only partially based on logic, and are inextricably mixed with emotions and desires and social interactions.
To understand religion, it is necessary to explore it from the inside, as William James explored it in The Varieties of Religious Experience.
The sacred writings, the Bhagavad Gita and the Koran and the Bible, tell us more about the essence of religion than any scientific study of religious organizations.
We can all agree that religion is a natural phenomenon, but nature may include many more things than we can grasp with the methods of science.
The best source of information about modern Islamic terrorists that I know of is a book, Understanding Terror Networks, by Marc Sageman.2 Sageman is a former United States foreign service officer who worked with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In Chapter 5 of his book, he describes in detail the network that planned and carried out the September 2001 attacks on the United States. He finds that the bonds holding the group together, during its formative years in Hamburg, were more personal than political. He concludes: “Despite the popular accounts of the 9/11 perpetrators in the press, in-group love rather than out-group hate seems a better explanation for their behavior.”
We have no firsthand testimony from the young men who carried out the September 11 attacks. They were not as highly educated and as thoughtful as the kamikaze pilots, and they were more influenced by religion. But there is strong evidence that they were not brainwashed zombies. They were soldiers enlisted in a secret brotherhood that gave meaning and purpose to their lives, working together in a brilliantly executed operation against the strongest power in the world. According to Sageman, they were motivated like the kamikaze pilots, more by loyalty to their comrades than by hatred of the enemy.
... Feynman’s voice and personality come through clearly. He talks about real people and their problems, not about philosophical abstractions. He is interested in religion as a way for people to make sense of their lives, but he is not interested in theology...
... Polkinghorne has the opposite bias. He is a scientist who is also an ordained minister of the Church of England. To be ordained, he went through formal training in theology. For him, theology is as real and as serious as science...
... Polkinghorne has the opposite bias. He is a scientist who is also an ordained minister of the Church of England. To be ordained, he went through formal training in theology. For him, theology is as real and as serious as science...
... Polkinghorne compares two historic intellectual struggles, one from science and one from religion. From science he takes the discovery and development of quantum mechanics, a struggle that has lasted from the beginning to the end of the twentieth century. From religion he takes the theological understanding of the nature of Jesus, a struggle that lasted from the time when Saint Paul was writing his letters shortly after Jesus’ death to the modern era of diverse views and diminished certainties...
... Polkinghorne argues from the detailed concordance of the two struggles that science and theology are two aspects of a single intellectual adventure. He sees theology as dealing with God in essentially the same way as science is dealing with nature...
... To share it, you must disregard a crucial difference between science and theology. When all is said and done, science is about things and theology is about words. Things behave in the same way everywhere, but words do not. Quantum mechanics works equally in all countries and in all cultures...
... If you have not grown up in Polkinghorne’s culture, where words such as “incarnation” and “trinity” have a profound meaning, you cannot share his vision...
... Feynman has no interest in scholastic arguments. He is concerned only with human problems. He has a deep respect for religion, because he sees it as helping people to behave well toward one another and to be brave in facing tragedy...
... He writes about students who come to college from homes where religious belief is strong, and then find that exposure to modern science is calling their beliefs into question. He has seen at first hand the anguish that some of these students experience...
... Most Christian believers are able to reconcile their general belief in God and in the teachings of Jesus with a considerable skepticism about details...
... It is a curious accident of history that the Christian religion became heavily involved with theology. No other religion finds it necessary to formulate elaborately precise statements about the abstract qualities and relationships of gods and humans. There is nothing analogous to theology in Judaism or in Islam. I do not know much about Hinduism and Buddhism, but my Asian friends tell me that these religions also have no theology. They have beliefs and stories and ceremonies and rules...
... The prominence of theology in the Christian world has had two important consequences for the history of science. On the one hand, Western science grew out of Christian theology. It is probably not an accident that modern science grew explosively in Christian Europe and left the rest of the world behind. A thousand years of theological disputes nurtured the habit of analytical thinking that could also be applied to the analysis of natural phenomena...
... On the other hand, the close historical relations between theology and science have caused conflicts between science and Christianity that do not exist between science and other religions.... Polkinghorne writes books to prove to himself and to us that his theology and his science can live together harmoniously...
... The Bible story tells us that when Jesus was twelve years old and his family was visiting Jerusalem, he seized the opportunity to spend three days talking with the learned doctors in the Temple, and all that heard him were astonished at his understanding. Whether that story is true or not, he must have had many opportunities to sharpen his understanding by talking with the learned doctors in Zippori....
... After visiting Capernaum, I no longer think of Peter and Andrew as simple fishermen. I think of them as young men about town, who made a living by fishing but were also immersed in the Greek culture of the city. ..
... Jesus was no simple peasant, but grew up in intimate contact with an urban and overwhelmingly Greek culture...
... the man who took charge of the new religion, Saint Paul of Tarsus, was a thoroughly Hellenized Jew. Saint Paul preached to the learned men of Athens in their own language. In his writings he laid the foundations for what became orthodox Christian doctrine...
... This history has left Western civilization with a strangely divided legacy. On the one hand, the religion of Jesus as we find it in his teachings recorded in the gospels, a religion for ordinary people trying to find their way in a harsh world. On the other hand, the theology that turned the Christian religion into a demanding intellectual discipline, a breeding ground for scholars and ultimately for scientists. Feynman is writing about the first, Polkinghorne about the second...
... The fourth gospel, the Gospel of Saint John, shows us a very different Jesus, much more Greek in spirit...
