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posted by LaminatorX on Tuesday September 16 2014, @01:49AM   Printer-friendly
from the green-skinned-dancing-metaphors dept.

Alva Noë has an interesting piece on NPR about how some scientists, and cultural defenders of science, like to think of themselves as free of prejudice and superstition, as moved by reason alone and a clear-eyed commitment to fact and the scientific method. "I'm pro-science, but I'm against what I'll call "Spock-ism," after the character from the TV show Star Trek," writes Noë. "I reject the idea that science is logical, purely rational, that it is detached and value-free, and that it is, for all these reasons, morally superior."

According to Noë, a Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, Spockians give science a bad name because if you think of science as being in the business of figuring out how atoms spinning noiselessly in the void give rise to the illusion that there are such things as love, humor, sunsets and knuckleballs, then it isn't surprising that people might come to think that the inner life of a scientist would be barren. "The big challenge for atheism is not God; it is that of providing an alternative to Spock-ism. We need an account of our place in the world that leaves room for value. What we need, then, is a Kirkian understanding of science and its place in our lives. The world, for Captain Kirk and his ontological followers, is a field of play, and science is a form of action."

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday September 16 2014, @11:40AM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday September 16 2014, @11:40AM (#93929)

    Where is the author from? I clicked thru and looked at his bio on the university website and couldn't figure it out.

    What I'm getting at is I spent a year in the deep deep south in my youth and something civilized modern non-rural people don't understand is in the more rural areas ALL social activity revolves around church. Not most, all. So if your only non-familial non-business human contact is at church, and you don't go to church, that means you're a hermit. And hermits get quite a weird rep because they're hermits. So the logical argument is atheism inevitably leads to utter hermitism (in a highly rural areas) which leads to lets trash talk hermits because its fun to have an opponent and we outnumber them and they're not here to fight back.

    Note that there's also the social effect where most of the people in a church don't believe and don't find that to be much of a problem for them. They get their social activities, and theres some ritual or another that flows over them like water, but whatever. So they get really confused about non-believers too. Stop being rude and drink beer at the church sunday afternoon ice cream social like rest of the town, don't be a jerk with all this whatever that no one else believes in other than the priest, maybe.

    And a final aspect of rural life is some sillier things that are said are ritual. Just like the exact text of some formal prayer is unthinkingly said by church members who don't really believe it but its practiced ritual, outside church you get a similar boat load of ridiculousness. People who rant about evolution and abortion didn't just make this up out of thin air, they were egged on hundreds of times by dozens of other people, then they say something particularly inappropriate, maybe at a school board meeting or something, and they just don't have the good taste to know its inappropriate, because thats just how they behave. Of course they didn't figure this out logically or rationally, its just gossip. And a lot of this weird article about spock-ism or whatever smacks pretty badly of this.

    These weird beliefs usually come from people who grew up where the only possible social interaction is at church, so I'm guessing the prof here grew up in the swamps of Alabama, or as a secondary option is accurately simulating those beliefs.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 17 2014, @12:14AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 17 2014, @12:14AM (#94315)

    Where is the author from? I clicked thru and looked at his bio on the university website and couldn't figure it out.{Half-baked theory connecting Kirkians vs Spockism with churchgoers in the deep South}

    So you are debunking one half-baked theory with another half-baked theory? All based on spending a year--an entire year!--in the deep south sometime during your youth?!? At last, sir, have you no shame? Oh, the irony! Well, at least you didn't proudly thump your chest and claim to be more rationally superior to the author of TFA. There is that I suppose.