“Now shall I walk or shall I ride?" asked W.H. Davies. 'Ride,' Pleasure said; 'Walk,' Joy replied.” But either is preferable to sitting in a stuffy classroom when it's Spring in February.
A new dawn awaits us in Bioethics today, specifically Craig Venter's account of the "dawn of the digital age of biology." O brave new world!
I wonder why they've not honored Professor Dawkins, then? He's a biologist. His Unweaving the Rainbow was the first book we ever read in this course, steeped as it is in the naturalistic and humanistic spirit.
Or exo-biologist Sagan? As Dawkins put it, appealing to the sense of wonder in science was his special forte.
The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that makes life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living is finite.From what he's told us so far, Alex Rosenberg just doesn't feel it. How sad for him, not to realize that spirit means breath, and breath means life.
And how sad for benighted biologists and any other contrarians laboring under the misapprehension that learning more of life's detailed codes renders their product banal or, indeed, less than wondrous.
So if the Templetons are serious about seeking reconciliation between science and religion (which Rosenberg repudiates), they really should give their award to an exemplar of atheistic, humanistic, naturalistic spirituality. John (End of Science/Rational Mysticism) Horgan, feeling queasy about having accepted Templeton money a few years ago, agrees:
the foundation should state clearly that it is not committed to any particular conclusion of the science-religion dialogue, and that one possible conclusion is that religion — at least in its traditional, supernatural manifestations — is not compatible with science. To demonstrate its open-mindedness, the foundation should award the Templeton Prize to an opponent of religion, such as Steven Weinberg or Richard Dawkins. At the very least, the foundation should post this essay on its Web site.It's still not there, as of this a.m.
As for Rosenberg's repeated claim that biology (hence all life, including ours) is devoid of explicit conscious purpose: that may be true of lower-order species still solely reliant upon instinct, but how can it possibly be true of a species intelligent enough to raise and ponder and write about the issue in the first place?
Unless epiphenomenalism is to be rehabilitated we must proceed on the assumption that our deliberations will generate purposes, and actions in their pointed pursuit that must influence the course of events in our life-world. Life per se and in the abstract may lack purpose, but intelligent life can't leave home (or return) without it. That's the real purpose-driven life, the perennial "darting to an aim" (as Emerson put it), shooting the gulf of meaning day after godly day in perpetual transition to a new state. Evolution does not pursue a goal, but the members of an intelligent evolving species do. That's what keeps them going. "Life only avails, not the having lived." That's not nihilism, Alex.
Here would be a good place to revisit Flanagan. "Scientism is the brash and overreaching doctrine that everything worth saying or expressing can be said or expressed in a scientific idiom... The simple and obvious point is that not everything worth expressing can or should be expressed scientifically. Scientism is descriptively false and normatively false."
But let's not leap to conclusions. Rosenberg's not finished having his say, yet, and Saganism's waiting in the wings.
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