On 21 May 2014 12:35, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > Only 1% of the world views, and specifically as they bear on ethics and > morals - which is where Bruno thinks the "person centered" view will be a > big paradigm shift. >
OK, in that sense I agree. I also have doubts about Bruno's views on this (but if comp ever becomes mainstream science it would certainly be a paradigm shift of *some* sort!) But of course that isn't what you were thinking of. The "dominant metaphysics" on Earth is religion, which is person centred, especialyl when it comes to saying what people can and can't do. But I'm still not sure it's at 99%, even so. So maybe I exaggerated a little and it's 4% (the fraction of Americans > that self identify as atheists). > Well, to start with we were talking about the World, not America. The population of the USA is only around 5% of the world's population (if I've done my sums right), and they also have one of the highest standards of living on the planet (not to mention one of the most wasteful societies), so they're hardly representative. But more to the point, being an atheist and subscribing to a scientific viewpoint aren't necessarily the same thing. There have been plenty of scientists with religious beliefs, and there are atheists whose worldview is only vaguely scientific. For example, a friend of mine who's a fairly famous poet and novelist is a "militant atheist", but I wouldn't say he particularly subscribes to a science based view, (except in a vague sort of way, as most people in the West probably do). It's much more that he thinks religion is a bad thing. Contrariwise, I'd say a lot of people in the West pay lip service to the scientific worldview without necessarily understanding it. So if you asked the person in the street if s/he considers science to have the potential to answer most fundamental questions, I suspect rather more than 4% would say yes, including many who also profess to be at least nominally religious. So like my friend I suspect a lot of people are "nominally" science-oriented, and would probably only consider that science can't explain abstruse philosophical questions like why there is something rather than nothing (perhaps) . So IMHO it's actually quite hard to distinguish what proportion of the world takes a science oriented view, or indeed to even determine to what extent a given person does. Given its pervasiveness in Western society I suspect science has quite a large influence, but it's hard to quantify. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
