Brain-food via Mimi Smartypants. YES I HAVE BEEN AWAKE SINCE 0725 OW

[idoru]

An article i think many of you might find interesting -- Raising Children With Secular Values in a Religious WorldA good chunk of this resonated with me, as i was raised not going to church. And yet! i have morals and values! i wouldn't necessarily call myself an atheist, and the 'committed secularist' title has a strange ring to it. i have

Comments

[ta_rando]

As a person skeptical about both science and religion (each to varying degrees), I would certainly agree with your statement about science: it's a changing, working model. However, I don't think this means science is growing "more perfect". As it eliminates untruths or problems, it picks up more along the way. It certainly adapts itself with time to incorporate new knowledge and trends of thinking. However, there are certain tenets it will always revolve around (at least since the advent of what we would consider modern, systematized science).

I think the same is true of organized religion. The Christianity of today would be totally unrecognizable when compared to the Christianity of, say, three hundred years ago. It has adapted istelf to modern and pomo thinking, asking new questions and encountering new problems. Despite these changes, it still revolves around a few central tenets.

To hold science up as a paragon of thinking and rationality over religion is foolish--like every other human discipline it is flawed by our necessarily limited perspectives. It is not a constantly building knowledge-base, but a shifting, constructed paradigm. We find a cure for an old disease, a new one pops up. We think we've uncovered everything, and a new system of thinking jars our brains loose. I'm not saying it's not valuable, just imperfect and imperfectable.

[fuzzyamy]

It is not a constantly building knowledge-base, but a shifting, constructed paradigm.

Actually, I think it's both. Well, not a singular paradigm, but a series of paradigms. Multiple paradigms can coexist within science, and the constantly building knowledge base assists in the shifts.

We find a cure for an old disease, a new one pops up.

That doesn't negate that we still are constantly accumulating data to support current and new theories. New diseases emerge: this is a fact of life. We didn't discover HIV until the 1980s because it didn't cause death and human disease until the 1980s. This wasn't a flaw in our shifting perspective, this was viral evolution in action.

We think we've uncovered everything...

No scientist actually thinks that. If we did, we wouldn't be in the business.