Obviously (what's the Left problem with GM food?)

Carl Remick carlremick at hotmail.com
Sun Oct 22 08:44:26 PDT 2000



>Carl's concatenation of science and religion works only on the level of
>rhetorical phrasing, but rapidly descends into meaninglessness once the
>terms are taken seriously. ...
>
>When Carl uses the term science, he doesn't know that this is merely a
>compacted way of saying 'to question everything, taking only the
>objective as warrant for knowledge'. (By contrast faith founds knowledge
>on belief.) So, 'faith in science' isn't really faith. It means faith in
>the evidence of the sense, which is to say, that every proposition
>should be tested....
>
>to my mind it
>seems that Carl's lazy elision of faith and reason is stupid.
>--
>James Heartfield

I can't accuse you of laziness, James. However, your strenuous efforts do nothing to refute my point that belief in science is, at base, a religious belief. A technological society involves much more than a mere willingness to "test every proposition." It involves a willingness to stake countless lives and great fortunes on claims that are merely provisional and subject to endless correction. As we so often see, one generation's industrial miracle is merely the next generation's high-toxicity cleanup job. (Again, the problem with GM technology is its potential for creating an uncontainable, self-replicating disaster -- beyond the scope of any such remediation).

The really curious thing is, even if certain scientific findings are in fact true in an objective sense, most people have to accept that fact as a matter of faith. For a scientist, proof of principle comes from studying two microscope slides and realizing that slight variations in the shapes shown thereon confirm a hypothesis. If shown those same slides, however, a layperson will see only indistinguishable blobs; that person can believe in the "proof" provided on faith alone.

Carl

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