08.25.09
Apparently scientists are serious about destroying morality
I am struck by the naivete of Myers’ denunciation of morality and/or the ‘moral code’: Morality doesn’t equal god/
I am not going to get into much argument with science types here (unless maybe perhaps I feel like it): the burden is on them to produce something more sophisticated and intelligent. Failure to do so simply feeds the attack on ‘secularism’ as discussed in previous post.
What we need is for scientists to self-disillusion themselves with science, exit the science cult (as opposed to doing science), and do some serious cultural anti-science–before reactionaries and the Bible Belt do that for them.
Do you really plan to impose sophmoric Nietzchean transvaluation of values (that piece of silly crap) on a Darwinized public?? Pause and reflect, before you start a war on science that makes the one Mooney complained of seem peanuts.
Who cares at this point: the big science hard-on, einstein and man on the moon, and all that melodrama: the point is to create a genuine secular modernity which is not dominated by the obsessions of scientism, Darwinism, and the crypto-nihilism of those who can no longer grasp the inability of current science to deal with moral questions.
Most of these questions have already been answered in the Enlightenment, and we are living through a decline from real modernity as the cancer of the Darwin fanatics nibbles away at the intelligent balance of viewpoints that created modern culture.
Questions of morality are difficult, but to simply abdicate their study in the name of evolutionary reductionism and the stupidity of group selection theories, is a puzzling embrace of mediocrity on the part of those who said they would take the high road of study.
The philosopher Kant is instructive here (and he is not a new Moses, but a philosopher whose views might be open to dialectic). But I fear those raised on scientism are too conditioned to respond to that classic critique. His views are difficult. In the name of being ‘smart’ the science geek wishes to indulge an oversimplification without the messy details of real ethical philosophy and its study. They turn away in fear from Kant: he is proof of their lack of anything but technical intelligence.
Scientism and morality | Kant’s Challenge said,
August 25, 2009 at 2:21 pm
[...] A response to a P.Z.Myers post denouncing the ‘moral code’: Apparently scientists are serious about destroying morality [...]