onoway, on May 22 2008, 10:40 AM, said:
While 'science' doesn't impose moral restraints on people, nor (really) does religion.
For every Mother Theresa, I will give you a Spanish Inquisitor. For every saint, a butcher or suicide bomber. For every "thou shalt not kill" a passage in the old testament telling jews to kill all the males in a besieged town (a war of aggression, btw) and to rape all the females.
What science does is to remove the mystical claptrap from the existence of morals.
Evolutionary psychology is a relatively new discipline (but, then, science is a relatively new way of looking at the world), and it reveals logical theories of WHY morality evolved.. why we have love, and friendship, as well as why we have rivalries, wars, murder, rape and so on. As in any scientific discipline, the ideas will continue to develop...one of the major distinctions between science and religion is that science, by definition, incorporates the notion that knowledge can accrue and understanding improve... we find out knowledge.. whereas religion entails knowledge being revealed to us.
If we want to live lifes in which we can avoid instinctive reactions (mob thinking, buying into patriotism as a cover for seizure of power by an elite, or making a war of aggression, and so on) it behooves us to understand the factors that make us tend to think or feel in certain predictable ways.. ways that politicians and religious figures consciously or unconsciously know how to manipulate. It is when we are ignorant of the workings of our own brains that we are at our most vulnerable.
Religion requires the refusal to acknowledge that we are what we are... the result of billions of years of random physical processes mediated by natural selection... it requires that we look outside of ourselves.. to some imaginary higher power... for guidance. Science liberates us from that superstition and proffers hope that we can effect meaningful change, meaningful improvement in the moral behaviour of humans, by understanding what drives us to commit unspeakable acts as well as acts of incredible compassion and bravery.
So, I agree that 'science' contains no moral guidance... but it needn't... religion doesn't either... to the extent that it sets out moral guidance, it does no more than resonate with the innate moral sense that the majority of humans inherit as part of our evolutionary heritage.
BTW, I fail to see any distinction between the propensity of politicians to change their positions due to self-interest and the position of most organized religion. I am, by virtue of my birthplace and current location, more familiar with christianity than other organized religions, but it certainly seems to me that the history of christianity is replete with examples of bending to the wind of prevailing fashion. Heck, most of our holidays (holy-days) are based on pagan celebrations, not christian beliefs. And the church no longer routinely burns heretics at the stake. And the Mormon church backtracked on polygymous marriages only after the government cracked down on the practice.. dressing it up as a convenient 'revelation', and so on. Besides, name a US politician who doesn't wrap himself or herself in the bible! You can't get elected as President without at least professing to be guided by 'god'.