hutch (02/16/83)
saumya k. debray makes the following statements in a reply to an
article about the prophecies of Jeremiah. I have no idea what the
original was, so I don't know whether Saumya is replying to anything
that was stated in the original, but:
Reason may, on occasion, have questioned the existence of God, but it
has not - to the best of my memory - persecuted the devout. Poor Galileo!
Science is open-minded enough to throw itself open to questioning and to
change. It can tolerate nonbelievers without demanding a Jihad.
If Science has created weapons of death, it is the forces of Unreason
that have unleashed them upon mankind (remember Einstein et al.'s letter
to Roosevelt about the A-Bomb?).
I, a freethinker by temperament, a rationalist by belief and a scientist
by profession, find that a source of deep satisfaction.
"Reason" has not only persecuted the devout, but it even persecutes its own.
For example, the dogma is still taught in biochemistry that the DNA is the
"living" part of the cell, just as the dogma it replaced was that the cell
nucleus was the "living" part and the cell wall before that. There are
cliques and established power groups in EVERY human organisation, even one
as loose as the "community of scientists".
Saumya, I hope you don't expect us to accept that "science" and "reason"
are actual entities. Your anthropomorphic treatment of "science" and "reason"
and "the forces of Unreason" is too generalized and vague to be seen as more
than propaganda. If you want to say that the ideal attitude for a scientist,
or even the prevailing attitude among scientists (I doubt it) is one of fair
open-minded examination of questioning and change, then I would be less
offended at your apparent estimation of my capacity for delusion. In fact,
the commonest attitude I have seen among the materialist scientists of my own
acquaintiance is one of extreme intolerance of anything that threatens their
own theories and philosophies. This goes to the extreme that Christians
in certain college classes have been harrassed and humiliated before classes
of 150+ people about their "obvoiously deluded superstitious beliefs".
The mystic-scientists are often just as bad, although (in my experience) they
tend to be less personal in their intolerance.
The weapons of death are created by men and women. They are weapons when they
are created, and it is naive to think that they will not be used. Knowledge
of any kind, tools of any kind, can be made into weapons if enough time is
spent figuring out how to do it. The concept of "reason" does not enter into
it. The concept of "ethic" and the notions of "right and wrong" ARE relevant
to the creation and employment of weapons.
Not afraid to discuss philosophy in an inappropriate net,
Steve Hutchison
...decvax!tektronix!tekmdp!dadla!hutch