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Is Doing Science Good?

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  • Is Doing Science Good?

    Could we have unleashed a monster?

    Link

    --------

    Is our science necessarily a blessing? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

    Yesterday, I went to the doctor again having a sore throat and some lightheadedness. Turns out, I have strep. I am supposed to be able to go out into the world again on Thursday. For now, I am feeling a bit miserable.

    Last night then, I was doing some gaming while listening to N.T. Wright. That’s something that usually always gets me thinking. Wright talked about Paul and the world he lived in and why he did what he did.

    As I took my medication last night for Strep, I started considering it. What did people do in the time of Jesus when they had a sickness like this? There weren’t really medications that they could take that were as effective as what we have today. I really am thankful to live in this world where I can have medication available.

    That got me considering about the nature of science. We have done this with medication and that is certainly a good use of the science that we have. However, why should we develop the science to work on this problem? We could just as easily poison everyone with a medication as we could cure them.

    We have many things we could do with science, and sure, we do use science for weapons of war, but even when we do that, we don’t go out full throttle with them and unleash them on anyone else who disagrees with us. Had we wanted at one time, we could have taken over much of the world being militaristic.

    Let’s imagine that we could go back to ancient Rome and give them the means to launch a nuclear weapon. Do we have any reason to think they would not have nuked Carthage in the Punic Wars? We could say that they would have made medication also and given it to all their people, but why think that? Rome wasn’t known for taking care of the poor. It would be better to take care of the elites and the military.

    Today, we don’t really have this concern. It seems like a given to us that you care for the poor among you. It seems like a given that you try to use nonviolent means before going to violence. Why do we think differently?

    It’s because before science became the force that it is on the scene, Christianity became a force as well. Our values were drastically changed by Christianity and most of us don’t realize that there is a background Christianity behind much of our moral thinking even if we don’t recognize it. Because of that, when we developed science, we thought of the ways that we could use it to help us and to explore the cosmos. We developed weapons of war so we could defend ourselves, but never with the intention of a militaristic takeover of the rest of the world. Again, ancient Rome would likely have done the opposite.

    We are often told that we have a lot of blessings today because of our scientific enterprise, and I agree with that. However, if we didn’t have the moral categories we have, we could easily turn most any place we wanted to into Hiroshima or Nagasaki. We could easily infect the world in biological warfare and kill billions. It’s a blessing that we have this science today, but a better blessing that we have the moral teachings of Jesus that guide us.

    Yet what will happen if we ever abandon that heritage and the morality that has been given to us?

    In Christ,
    Nick Peters
    (And I affirm the virgin birth)

  • #2
    Bioethics is a tricky field, and that just deals with one subset of science.

    To underscore the point in this blog post, we have already seen a historical example of what happens when science is paired with a society that has no thought for morality: The grotesque medical experimentations done by Nazi Germany.
    "I am not angered that the Moral Majority boys campaign against abortion. I am angry when the same men who say, "Save OUR children" bellow "Build more and bigger bombers." That's right! Blast the children in other nations into eternity, or limbless misery as they lay crippled from "OUR" bombers! This does not jell." - Leonard Ravenhill

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    • #3
      Originally posted by Apologiaphoenix View Post
      As I took my medication last night for Strep, I started considering it. What did people do in the time of Jesus when they had a sickness like this? There weren’t really medications that they could take that were as effective as what we have today. I really am thankful to live in this world where I can have medication available.
      I was reading about Faust on wikipedia yesterday (from which we get the term 'Faustian bargain')... apparently in the original 16th century version of the story, Faust's great sin that irrevocably damned him was his desire to be a Doctor of Medicine rather than a Doctor of Theology, as it showed a preference for human knowledge over divine knowledge. Your post made me think of that.

      We have done this with medication and that is certainly a good use of the science that we have. However, why should we develop the science to work on this problem? We could just as easily poison everyone with a medication as we could cure them.

      We have many things we could do with science, and sure, we do use science for weapons of war, but even when we do that, we don’t go out full throttle with them and unleash them on anyone else who disagrees with us. Had we wanted at one time, we could have taken over much of the world being militaristic.
      If have tried to point this out to Christians before, without much success, but humans make moral choices over immoral ones a massive majority of the time. Insofar as some variants of Christianity try to heavily emphasize the immorality and fallenness of humanity and convince themselves that humans continuously sin, they are simply empirically wrong.

      If you made a robot, which in every situation had a randomized 50% chance of making a moral choice and 50% chance of an immoral one, its behavior would be absolutely morally atrocious even when compared to some of the worst humans. So the question then is not "why are humans sinful" because they aren't in the sense that they sin less than would be expected by random chance, the real explanation needed is why humans are good in the sense that they do good more often than random chance. Some Christians try and get around this by redefining sinfulness to mean 'doing anything bad even once ever', but that's pretty untenable because we don't define being a good person as 'doing anything good even once ever', and it distracts them from realizing that humans are much better people than random chance.

      Let’s imagine that we could go back to ancient Rome and give them the means to launch a nuclear weapon. Do we have any reason to think they would not have nuked Carthage in the Punic Wars? We could say that they would have made medication also and given it to all their people, but why think that? Rome wasn’t known for taking care of the poor. It would be better to take care of the elites and the military.
      Cultural studies seem to show that societies substantially change their social values if their material needs are being met vs not. If they live in an environment where everyone is struggling for survival, they're more likely to be hierarchical and less likely to value the lives of others. If they live in an environment where their material needs are being met, they will become egalitarian, culturally liberal, value human rights etc.
      "I hate him passionately", he's "a demonic force" - Tucker Carlson, in private, on Donald Trump
      "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism" - George Orwell
      "[Capitalism] as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of evils. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy" - Albert Einstein

      Comment


      • #4
        I'm still picturing the size of the catapult that the Romans would have needed to launch a nuclear strike on Carthage.

        I'm always still in trouble again

        "You're by far the worst poster on TWeb" and "TWeb's biggest liar" --starlight (the guy who says Stalin was a right-winger)
        "Overall I would rate the withdrawal from Afghanistan as by far the best thing Biden's done" --Starlight
        "Of course, human life begins at fertilization that’s not the argument." --Tassman

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