29 May 2007

Faith and science, again.

Dawkins, again:
"If we are too friendly to nice, decent bishops, we run the risk of buying into the fiction that there's something virtuous about believing things because of faith rather than because of evidence. We run the risk of betraying scientific enlightenment."

Yeh, yeh. Now he's moving into shooting himself in the foot territory. After all, the context is some scientists saying that alliances with moderate religious people is in the interests of scientific enterprise. Too right it is; quite a lot of scientists actually are 'religious', in fact science was, arguably, driven by religious convictions.
And Dawkins still seems not to have got over positivism: where is his learning that all human knowing rests on believing as the likes of Polanyi and Popper have shown and that the kind of certitude he has is not 'scientific' either, as per Popper (and to believe otherwise is faith, Hume would agree).
Scientists divided over alliance with religion | Science | Guardian Unlimited

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