Thomas de Groot <tho### [at] degrootorg> wrote:
> On 9-3-2017 21:37, Shay wrote:
> >
> > Is your faith not shaken in "scientific" polling?
> >
>
> I am foremost concerned these days by the way in which science and
> scientific results are simply dismissed as irrelevant, lies, if not
> 'evil', by any person without the training/knowledge and for reasons of
> his/her own, those being political and/or religious.

You don't seem interested in the "scientific" polling question. Let's skip it.
Let's put aside all questions of bias and any reservations about the
shortcomings (and, in some areas, terrible track record) of induction. Let us
accept, for the moment, "science", not as a methodology, but as our
best-available equivalent of absolute truth.

Do you believe in science yourself? Do you eat junk food or charred meat? Watch
television within 1/2 hour of bedtime? Drink soda? Buy lottery tickets?

Science can only advise us to "Do THIS to achieve THAT." The value of THAT is a
meta-ethical proposition. We can (possibly) debate the comparative merits of
such propositions, but we'll need more sophisticated tools than "science QED" to
do so.

As for explicit denial of "science", everyone I've ever met is an implicit
deny-er of some sort.

"Believers" implicitly deny the existence of God by acting differently in public
than in private.

"Non-believers" implicitly deny a deterministic universe by offering (or even
accepting) value propositions.

The person who says "I don't /believe/ in the Big Bang"--as in "Evidence of the
Big Bang does not inform my behaviors or moral intuitions"--is arguably offering
a more rigorous description of a belief we all share.

My only point is that "science" is a poor, lazy argument for the /value/ of
fetal stem cells (or any other kind of organ harvesting).

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