Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Arthur C. Clarke, 90 Orbits Around the Sun
Wired Science has this sad news about the passing of a great visionary writer of the 20th and 21st Centuries. His "Last Message to Earth" is on YouTube.
I just hope he takes this, my fond farewell in the right way: "Sir Arthur, you made Science my Religion." Or as Jose Rizal once wrote, Sic itur ad astra!
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5 comments:
I liked his "View from Serendip". While Science can never be my religion, he has made it interesting enough to be my worldview.
blackshama,
To me there is no difference, and some time ago, even the Catholic Church believed that, and did more than anyone else to prove it. Perhaps it will again...
Maybe it is because we try too hard to distance or separate science from religion
After all, the Latin derivative of the word religion means simply to reconnect man to his nature. This Augustinian interpretation is favored even by modern scholars.
Religion manages certainties while Science manages uncertainties. That is the main difference.
Richard Dawkins and company may have raised his science to a religion by stating with certainty that religion will fade away! Dawkins has substituted his belief system and made it into a religion. Dawkins must eat more crow!
Cardinal Schonborn of Vienna (with apparent approbation of Benedict XVI) has substituted his view of design (the existence of which was theologically defined as certain) as Science. Schonborn has taken a bite more than he can chew!
Hi Amadeo, Blackshama, There is a very interesting debate on the Dawkins website between him and a Mathematician, who gave him tit for tat on every major point he had made. Irishman if I recall. Worth looking up because there he makes the point that it was not always so that Religion was about "certainties"--that that happened only because as an imperial, global institution, the Catholic Church and many other religions, like Islam, lost "the dimension of depth" -- a concept from Paul Tillich. That dimension of depth, I think is being plumbed for Religion now by the best scientists. If there is anything I don't like about Dawkins, it is in fact his tone of "certainty" in all things. It is unscientific because the object of religion, God, is a thing whose mystery endures. Even if Religion seems to deny this mystery by dogma, Science ought not to follow suit. I might not agree with the Mathematician on many things, but Dawkins' ripostes to him would not have been mine. I would've scored the debate to the Irishman.
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