{"id":1491,"date":"2009-02-08T08:46:32","date_gmt":"2009-02-08T16:46:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=1491"},"modified":"2009-02-08T08:46:54","modified_gmt":"2009-02-08T16:46:54","slug":"1491","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/1491\/","title":{"rendered":"Chuck Colson and science"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chuck Colson has weighed in on the \u201cproper role of science<\/a>,\u201d in response to President Obama\u2019s inaugural science plug.\u00a0 Colson\u2019s column is a perfect example of theological panic, the condition that besets a certain portion of the devout when they contemplate the fact that not everyone believes in God.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Anticipating that President Obama will lift the ban on federally-subsidized\u00a0 embryonic stem cell research, Colson posits\u00a0 only two reasons why anyone would back such research: either he is \u201cdriven by greed\u201d or he is \u201cdriven by a dangerous worldview called scientism.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Though Colson purports to distinguish scientism from science (and makes claims regarding the former that no one has ever advanced, such as: \u201cScientism assumes that science is the controlling reality about life, so anything that can be validated scientifically ought to be done\u201d), ultimately, what seems to most upset him is a worldview lacking a divine creator, or what he calls \u201cscientific naturalism, a philosophy that the natural world is all that exists.\u201d\u00a0 Scientific naturalism denies \u201cthe reality of those things central to our humanity: a sense of right and wrong, of purpose, of beauty, of God.\u201d<\/p>\n

Colson may be right about the last item on his list, but it is nothing more than hysterical ignorance to claim that without belief in God, humans can have no \u201csense of right and wrong, of purpose, or beauty.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 I have never met a non-believer who has no sense of the difference between right and wrong.\u00a0 If someone is not killing his parents only because he believes that God prohibits it, but that it would otherwise be OK, his religiously-based moral compass does not have much to recommend it.\u00a0 Parents teach children to treat other human beings with respect based on humans\u2019 innate ethical intuitions (which a parent reinforces with a strong dose of brute, unappealable authority).\u00a0 These intuitions can, but need not, be given an explicitly religious cast. \u00a0<\/p>\n

As for a sense of purpose and beauty, to say that these come only from a belief in God seems to me to be nothing more than an admission of one\u2019s own poverty of life force.\u00a0 Is there not purpose enough in trying to do good work?\u00a0 Or in maintaining an orderly household, caring for your family, or trying to figure out some small portion of how the world works and changes?\u00a0\u00a0 If Colson needs to consult his Bible before falling down on his knees in gratitude for the splendors and lethal beauties of the classical music repertoire\u2014or the American songbook, the delicate, syncopated poise of Fred Astaire, Brazilian Samba, or any other glorious human expression\u2014he is deaf and blind to human grandeur and pathos.\u00a0 Science does not deny that beauty exists.\u00a0 A religious worldview that sees God as the precondition for an appreciation of beauty puts beauty on a far more tenuous basis.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Colson trots out a parade of horrible that he claims emanate from scientific naturalism: \u201cmoral horrors like the killing of humans at the earliest stage of life on the spurious grounds that doing so might cure other people\u2019s diseases. Or cloning. Or medical experiments on humans, as the Nazis conducted.\u201d\u00a0 But the scientists who want to pursue embryonic stem cell research do not advocate killing human beings; they do not regard a 5-day-old embryo as a full human being.\u00a0 They are motivated by precisely those values that Colson would undoubtedly rank as uniquely Christian: a desire to alleviate suffering and improve the human condition (as well as by the sheer love of discovery and knowledge).\u00a0 Presumably, Colson would acknowledge those motivations in a researcher who is working on adult stem cell lines; but if a scientist works on embryonic stem cell lines, he is suddenly stripped of all such drives and becomes only a pawn of greed or \u201cscientism.\u201d\u00a0 This is not to say that the use of embryonic stem cells is not morally complicated, but Colson refuses to acknowledge that any opposing point of view to his own contains any possible validity.<\/p>\n

Nazi medical experiments grew out of an entire ideology of nationalist world domination, of which an unconventional pagan religiosity was only a small part.\u00a0 The rest of the West\u2019s medical ethics have evolved over time, as the revulsion felt towards the Tuskegee syphilis experimentation shows.\u00a0 It was not an increase in Christian zeal that pushed our medical ethics beyond Tuskegee, but rather the constant expansion of the Enlightenment concept of rights.\u00a0 Too many \u201cmoral horrors\u201d have been conducted by God-believers, often with official sanction, such as the possession, trade, and brutal punishment of slaves, torture on the rack, burning at the stake, massacring of opposing sects and infidels, and abuse of children and animals, to hold that what distinguishes humane from inhumane behavior is a belief in God.\u00a0 To be sure, the challenges of maintaining civil order should never be taken for granted.\u00a0 But a simplistic invocation of religiosity as the solution to cruelty or selfishness is not persuasive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chuck Colson has weighed in on the \u201cproper role of science,\u201d in response to President Obama\u2019s inaugural science plug.\u00a0 Colson\u2019s column is a perfect example of theological panic, the condition that besets a certain portion of the devout when they … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[203,175,1132],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1491"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1491"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1491\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1495,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1491\/revisions\/1495"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}