Yes, Science does lead to killing people when Humanist-based.

What I know after observing human behavior for some fourty-five years of living is that when human beings believe in nothing higher than themselves they are capable of the most inhumane acts known to humankind.

For crying out loud in our own culture we had people who would pull a fully developed human being halfway out the birth canal leaving only it’s head inside then would stick a tube into the baby’s neck so as to suck out its’ brain whereby collasping its’ skull.

One cannot be human to do such this thing which scientists developed; bloody bastards!

They can dress irrationality up in a lab coat, but that does not make it science. I’m trying very hard to think of an example of a group that has pressed a legitimate scientific claim through violence, and I can’t come up with one. It seems to me that it’s always the people with illegitimate scientific claims who, seeing that their beliefs are being rejected by the bulk of society, want to short circuit debate, and push through their agenda by force. See for example global warming, ELF, ALF, etc. Scratch an environmentalist and what you find is an anti-science, tree-worshipping, neo-theocrat.

You may argue (and rightly so) that those people have lost their reason, but I would argue that any Christian who used violence to promote his faith has not only lost his reason, but his faith as well.

But by that logic you’ve excommunicated the larger bulk of those Christians who lived from at least the time of Charlemagne until sometime around the Age of Reason. Their faith told them that it was perfectly just to use force against non-believers, heretics, and infidels. You can argue that they are wrong, but you would have to prove it to them by resorting to reason, which they’ve already disclaimed as an inferior source of knowledge.

The whole reason why Christianity was able to separate itself from that approach was because of the historical accident that married Christian theology to Aristotelian logic. Even then, the kind of reasoning employed was at first constrained within the bounds of faith, until the discovery and approval of Aristotle’s scientific works. It’s really when men began to look outside their faith and ask how their interpretations of God’s word matched up with reality that they abandoned the rule of force. Devotion to reason accomplished that, not faith.

This hubris can extend to people who embrace scientism as well. It happens when people say, okay, the science is in, we know what we need to do, and off with the heads of anybody who disagrees because they are nothing but Luddites or religious nutjobs, when we stop trying to convince through reason and instead try to bulldoze the opposition through appeals to authority (such as Al Gore is trying to do). Using the global warming debate for example, there are scientists who refer to skeptics as the moral equivalent of Holocaust deniers. A prominent Canadian scientists, Dr. David Suzuki, called for jailing politicians who do not accept the science on global warming. There is a movement among some radical environmentalists to stop having children because of humanity’s impact on the Earth, and there have been terrorist attacks on housing developments and car dealerships. These are early signs of something truly frightening. And the perpetrators point to the… inerrancy of the science backing their position.

Now, we can argue (rightly so) that these people have lost their reason. It can also be argued that any Christian fundamentalist who uses violence for so-called religious aims has not only lost his reason, but is acting outside the bounds of his faith as well. Is a global warming fanatic who uses violence to promote his views acting outside of any moral bounds set forth by his belief system? I don’t know. If morality is entirely relative, and the fanatic argues that scientifically speaking, there is no evidence that humans have more moral weight than animals, and we need to eliminate humans to save the animals, then who is to say he is wrong?

Once again: I am not condemning science. I am merely pointing out that even people who reject religion can become violent in the promotion of scientific principles. You may argue (and rightly so) that those people have lost their reason, but I would argue that any Christian who used violence to promote his faith has not only lost his reason, but his faith as well.

Any belief system that denies the supremacy of reason and the need for men to deal with each other rationally rather than by force can and probably will lead men to persecute each other for one reason or another. In religion, faith is necessarily considered superior to reason. There are religions which compartmentalize faith and give a broader role to reason, and there are religions which reject reason out of hand in favor of faith. The latter are always evil, while the former can coexist in a free society so long as their faith does not burst its bounds and push out reason.

Fundamentalism is faith bursting its bounds. The notion that the Bible is the literal word of God, not to be questioned but only obeyed, is a return to primitivism. It is an attempt to undo the Enlightenment and return us to the Medieval period, right next to the Islamists. That is what Young Earth Creationists are trying to do. In their battle against the theory of evolution, the arguments they employ are more than an attack on one scientific theory, they are an attack on science as such. They make the same anti-reason, anti-science arguments that the left has used to advance its own irrational agenda. If we follow them down that road, if we allow respect for reason to be torn down by both left and right, we can only expect more Maos, more Stalins, and more Hitlers.

I think ‘good consequences’ and ‘bad consequences’ are fairly common sense notions, but I also said that good is that which produces a happy and prosperous life. That can be fleshed out even more, but rather than do that, and since you asked for reference to arguments that successfully bridge the is/ought gap, I recommend these two books.

At any rate, there is no authority who needs to determine whether you are living a moral life other than you. I may have an opinion on the matter, but I am not an authority that you need to recognize. Unless your notion of morality includes actions which violate the rights of others to live freely, then no one else has the right to make you be good by their standards.

of course there was Gaileo, treated like Stein is being treated by Derbyshire…..you guys should really actually watch the movie

Instead of assuming what I meant by my comment about the Democrats, you should have asked me.

I was referring to the way they advocate policies that are empirically counter-productive to the goal they state they want to achieve.

I will, however, take Raider51 seriously, and appreciate his follow-on to my stiffarm, which was quite a bit more substantive than anything I was in any mood to write after my initial posting yesterday.

Some of the other commenters here seem to be trying to shoehorn this into a left-right debate. It won’t fit that dreary old paradigm … sadly, the left is heavily represented by people who think genetically engineered crops are “Frankenfood,” that space exploration takes money away from The Children, and that nuclear power is Eeeevil, to name only the first three science-related issues that come to mind.

propagating the meme that Science-is-Bad-without-religion-to-guide-it-an-btw-we-are-just-as-smart-as-those-haughty-scientists.

;)

This is something of a strawman. Of course the argument you quote is faulty, but your defense is equally frail. You say that whatever produces good, is good. Which of course begs the question and brings us round to what authority is establishing ‘good’. I’m not a Christian, but I think when they evoke the is/ought problem, they are on solid ground. I’ve never seen a compelling argument against it. If you know of one or can direct me, I’d appreciate it.

You cited Derb’s quote by Ben Stein and suggest he’s lost it. I’d like to offer a brief apology (in the Socratic sense).
In the last century, we saw several governments adopt the notion that they, the government, were ultimate. Mr. Stein accurately identifies one of them, risking Godwin’s law. Meanwhile, Russian and Chinese governments were responsible for murdering millions of their citizens. The same century saw the Tuskegee experiment and other eugenics mischief under the banner of what Francis Schaeffer (franky’s dad) termed “Sociological law.” All these crimes were RATIONALIZED using science.
You’ll see this common theme running throughout Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism.” I disagree with Mr. Goldberg’s thesis, finding the common thread true of both Communist and Fascist and American Progressive mischief is a rejection of transcendent absolutes. “If there are no absolutes, then the state is absolute,” said Francis Schaeffer.
….
However, the absolutes vs relativism question seems to lie underneath Mr. Stein’s remarks. If just want to make him a straw man, and find an excuse to ignore everything else he says, you can frame his remarks as mere obscurantism. However, if you want to constructively engage the problems which have nettled this world for the last century or so, you might want to consider relativism’s baleful influence on Western Culture.

That is not what Stein is saying….let me translate for you.
“You stuckup snobby scientists that won’t let IDT into your curriculae and youe classrooms, you are inflexibile dogmatists rejecting the freedom of inquiry, and besides, you’re just like Nazis….wait….you ARE Nazis!”

Look Captain Ed totally buys it.

The best themes in Expelled take Academia to task for the same destructive sin. Instead of pursuing all paths of scientific pursuit, the academics have imposed their philosophy and their ideology against religion as a means to keep anyone from testing the theories of random, accidental beginnings of life. In a similar manner to what’s seen in the global-warming debate, dissenting voices are excoriated as heretics and idiots, rather than letting the science speak for itself.

dur, ID is not a science Captain Ed, sry.

Here’s someone else that is propagating the meme that Science-is-Bad-without-religion-to-guide-it-an-btw-we-are-just-as-smart-as-those-haughty-scientists.
Goldberg.

I do think Darwinism led to Nazism, in a sense. But that’s because I see Nazism as one of many responses to modernism. And Darwin, for good and ill, represents the rise of modern science — along with Einstein and others. Nazism and Communism and Progressivism were all impossible without the industrial revolution, Darwinism, relativism, mechanized warfare, mass production, etc. They were reactionary responses to these things. Those responses amounted to an express rejection of the conservative and libertarian vision of society, which is why they were leftwing.

Conservatives are coming down on the very wrong side of a new gap opening up in the Culture Wars.
There is no Bubba gap…..there is a thinker/beliver gap, a rightside of the bell curve gap/leftside of the bell curve gap, an…..IQ gap.
/gasp

One more thing….global warming is Science, global warming caused by carbonbased emissions is junkscience. You seem to be very busy alienating your potential allies (us scientists) in that battle by trying to cram IDT down our throats.

Of course.

But that doesn’t mean all practitioners of science are humble, tentative, etc. or that all people who call themselves scientists are rational and reasonable.

There are plenty of people out there who use “science” just like any religion — they pick and choose observations, concoct their own unique reality and set of moral precepts, and get very upset with people who don’t agree. There are plenty of “secular fundamentalists” who believe current scientific theory (as they understand it) is absolute truth and think “who are you to argue with the absolute truth of science?” There are many who are willing to die, or kill, for those beliefs. Sure, it doesn’t take the form of “jihad”, but pressing possibly dangerous medical treatments or experiments can be just as deadly. We’re quick to criticize Nazi scientists for experiments on Jewish prisoners, but quicker to forget that scientists in many of our own countries experimented on babies, the handicapped, etc. in the same time period, because someone considered “pursuit of knowledge” to be the overriding moral precept.

“You can’t claim that either [Mao or Stalin] was a model of rationality and scientific detachment though” — and most religious people would tell you that those who are violent in the name of their religion are hardly “models” of their faith, but rather, are perverting their religion.

As for Communism’s “pretention [sic] to science,” I completely agree with you. Unfortunately there are still lots of people — often in positions of influence in universities and government — some are even heads of state — who still believe in its pretensions. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn there are more Marxists than Christians in the faculties of our major universities.

To quote Chris Hedges, “The New Atheists [Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, et al.] embrace a belief system as intolerant, chauvinistic and bigoted as that of religious fundamentalists. They propose a route to collective salvation and the moral advancement of the human species through science and reason.

“The utopian dream of a perfect society and a perfect human being, the idea that we are moving towards collective salvation, is one of the most dangerous legacies of the Christian faith and the Enlightenment. Those who believe in the possibility of this perfection often call for the silencing or eradication of human beings who are impediments to human progress. They turn their particular good into a universal good. They are blind to their own corruption and capacity for evil. They soon commit evil, not for evil’s sake but to make a better world.”

I wasn’t aware that Conservative was a party in the US.

But I know what you mean… and hey if the Democrats stand still for 20 years, it’s possible the Republicans could catch up to them in anti-scientism.

lulz.