The Sins of Science
According to many scientists, the clergy and the Church are:
- fanatical;
- anti-intellectual;
- irrational in their mindlessly blind faith;
- moralistic and intrusive;
- eager to impose their arbitrary values onto people;
- prone to persecuting those who disagree with them “for their own good” or to save them from themselves;
- closet Inquisitors, torturers, and killers for their petty god.
A ridiculous stereotype, sure. But I’d like to point out that scientists are themselves not innocent of crimes against humanity. Consider all the terrible weapons which have been created, especially in the 20th century, and are being created now. It is scientists who are doing this work, contrary to any kind of ethical imperative or religious impulse to love our fellow man, etc. As Oppenheimer famously thought after witnessing the first nuclear bomb test, “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” according to the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. “‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun,” Tom Lehrer sings. Then there are the numerous issues such as stem cell research, about whose ethically controversial nature most scientists apparently could not care less. In short, an NT may give you the means to your ends, but it takes an NF to figure out if the ends ought to be striven for.
The moral from this tu quoque is, let’s understand each other, rather than thinking the worst of our temperamental complements.