Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Science and Ethics

A few weeks ago John Dickson finally made it onto ABC's Q and A program. This was a long time coming because, being a big fan of Dickson, I'd noticed people suggesting he should go on for quite a while. Notably, after Cardinal Pell's appearance with Richard Dawkins.

I highly recommend watching the episode- it covered topics such as what Christianity says about science, what science says about ethics, the teaching of creationism in schools and more. It's good to see Dickson showing the Australian public a reflective, thought out, reasonable Christian position on many issues, in contrast to the brilliant mind of a brilliant scientist appearing unintelligent and poisoned by his scientistic philosophical bias.


Anyway, I have a minor claim to fame from last week's episode- a tweet of mine appeared on the show! See the above video at 8:22.

My tweet was:

Science helped create the atomic bomb. Ethics?

To elaborate, my tweet was prompted by Krauss's response to the first question of the night, where the audience member asked where our values will come from if we place our future hope in science instead of religion, given that science has no ethical boundaries. Krauss's response was incredibly disingenuous. He claimed that truth telling and full disclosure is central to science, and therefore science promotes ethics.  

If Osama Bin Laden orchestrates a terrorist attack and then admits his involvement, is he then being ethical because he's telling the truth? No. Ethics is much bigger than that. Science tells us what is (eg: "This is a cell") but it cannot tell us what we ought to do ("We ought to save lives by cloning this cell"). The motivations for deciding what we should or should not do with information must come from somewhere external to the impersonal scientific method. In other words, even if science can consistently manage to progressively find the truth about the universe, this doesn't mean it can then tell us what to do with that truth. It tells us nothing about that.