A man got to have a code. —Omar, The Wire.
One of the central tenets of the New Atheist program lately being peddled by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, et al., is that rational atheism does not entail moral nihilism. But what happens when scientists, working in the new field of moral psychology, find out that our moral thinking depends less on reason than it does on naturally-selected instinct?
Steven Pinker, in a long essay in this week’s New York Times Magazine, recognizes the threat:
“Morally corrosive” is exactly the term that some critics would apply to the new science of the moral sense. The attempt to dissect our moral intuitions can look like an attempt to debunk them…. The whole enterprise seems to be dragging us to an amoral nihilism, in which morality itself would be demoted from a transcendent principle to a figment of our neural circuitry.
Pinker thinks that he can save the appearances, but his solutions aren’t very convincing. (more…)
An ode for Paula Dobriansky, John Baird, and all the other nihilists in Bali who press on toward a “triumph where all things falter.”
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A Forsaken Garden
Algernon Charles Swinburne
In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,
At the sea-down’s edge between windward and lee,
Walled round with rocks as an inland island,
The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.
A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses
The steep square slope of the blossomless bed
Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses
Now lie dead.
It appears that E.O. Wilson has given up on consilience:
So, will science and religion find common ground, or at least agree to divide the fundamentals into mutually exclusive domains? A great many well-meaning scholars believe that such rapprochement is both possible and desirable. A few disagree, and I am one of them. I think Darwin would have held to the same position. The battle line is, as it has ever been, in biology. The inexorable growth of this science continues to widen, not to close, the tectonic gap between science and faithbased religion.
In place of religion, Wilson puts forth something he calls “scientific humanism”:
Both of these world views, God-centred religion and atheistic communism, are opposed by a third and in some ways more radical world view, scientific humanism. Still held by only a tiny minority of the world’s population, it considers humanity to be a biological species that evolved over millions of years in a biological world, acquiring unprecedented intelligence yet still guided by complex inherited emotions and biased channels of learning. Human nature exists, and it was self-assembled. Having arisen by evolution during the far simpler conditions in which humanity lived during more than 99 per cent of its existence, it forms the behavioural part of what, in The Descent of Man, Darwin called “the indelible stamp of [our] lowly origin”.
On its face, nothing could be more unobjectionable. (more…)
1/ Gustave Doré’s illustration of Paradiso XXXI*:
2/ From An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything,” Garrett Lisi’s proposed model of the universe, which is based on the E8 geometry**:
The Guardian reports today that J. Craig Venter, runner-up in the race to map the genome, has “built a synthetic chromosome out of laboratory chemicals and is poised to announce the creation of the first new artificial life form on Earth.”
According to the article, Venter and his team have built from scratch a chromosome of 381 genes for a new bacterium they’re calling Mycoplasma laboratorium. With techniques invented by Venter’s team, they’re able to insert the chromosome into living bacteria and encourage it to take over for the host’s DNA. In this way, a bacterium based entirely on Venter’s synthetic genome may be born. He has already filed a patent for the new organism.
With characteristic immodesty Venter calls the step “a very important philosophical step in the history of our species.” “We are dealing in big ideas,” he said, “We are trying to create a new value system for life.”
Venter’s rhetoric is pitched to land him back in the only place he’s ever really happy: center stage in the media spotlight. And if the Guardian article is any indication—the subhead for the article reads “Breakthrough could combat global warming”—the world’s media stands ready to help. (more…)
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