Science Knows Best
By KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH
Published: October 1, 2010
Sam Harris heads the youth wing of the New Atheists. “The End of Faith,” his blistering take-no- prisoners attack on the irrationality of religions, found him many fans and, not surprisingly, a great body of detractors. In “Letter to a Christian Nation,” a follow-up prompted by the responses of Christians unhappy with his first book, he set out, he said, “to demolish the intellectual and moral pretensions of Christianity in its most committed forms,” and so acquired, no doubt, more friends and more enemies. Certainly both books have had a wide and animated readership.
Sam Harris - Jeniffer Roper - The New York Times
His new book, “The Moral Landscape,” aims to meet head-on a claim he has often encountered when speaking out against religion: that the scientific worldview he favors has nothing to say on moral questions. That claim often keeps company with the thesis, elaborated by the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, that science and religion have “nonoverlapping magisteria.” The authority of science and the authority of religion cover different domains, Gould thought, and the methods of each are inappropriate for the study of the other’s problems. Religion deals with questions about what Harris calls “meaning, morality and life’s larger purpose,” questions that have no scientific answers.
Harris, who has a doctorate in neuroscience, holds the opposite view. Only science can help us answer these questions, he says. That’s because truths about morality and meaning must “relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures,” and science alone — especially neuroscience, his field — can uncover those facts. So rather than consulting Aristotle or Kant (let alone the Bible or the Koran) about what is necessary for humans to flourish, why not go to the sciences that study conscious mental life?
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Read more here/Leia mais aqui: The New York Times
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NOTA DESTE BLOGGER:
Alguém precisa escrever urgentemente um livro intitulado "Sam Harris's Delusion" (A ilusão de Sam Harris). Especialmente um que aborde o status epistêmico da ciência sobre o cérebro humano -- quase não sabemos nada, e vem um cara especialista em neurociência dizer que as outras formas de saberes não são saberes, e que a ciência é a única forma de saber que nós podemos confiar? Pergunte isso aos sobreviventes de Hiroshima e Nagasaki e do Holocausto (experiências científicas de Mengele), aos que foram inoculados com sífilis e gonorréia na Guatemala, y otras cositas mais que a ciência que sabe melhor cometeu contra a Humanidade.
Vade retro, Legião, ooops, Sam Harris...
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