Ham to Platt, Michael,Andre, Steve and all: Aren't we carrying "Faith" a bit too far by applying it to Science? After all, if it requires faith to accept empirical evidence as factual, then you might as well say that all experience or reasoning is a matter of faith.
Andre:Hi Ham and All: 'If scientists had simply said Copernicus was right and Ptolemy was wrong without any willingness to further investigate the subject, then science would have simply become another minor religious creed. But scientific truth has always contained an overwhelming difference from theological truth: it is provisional. Science always contains an eraser, a mechanism whereby new Dynamic insight could wipe out old static patterns without destroying science itself. Thus science, unlike orthodox theology, has been capable of continuous growth. As Phaedrus had written on one of his slips,'The pencil is mightier than the pen'. (Lila p226). IMHO it is also well to remember that 'preference' through some sort of 'consciousness' , 'design', 'creator' etc are views expresed in hindsight. I.e. looking back 'upon' evolutionary developments. We have only an inkling of an notion of all the processes and alliances forged that were succesful. How do you tell the brujo from the saint (at all the four 'levels')? And perhaps we only 'value the succesful ones. That is; we see them.But how much do we not see/ have we not (yet) seen (of those processes already taking place)? Two 'elements' that Pirsig identified (through deduction) still stand out, for me, as great insights in this whole process and, for that matter the entire MoQ: evolution, as a moral dance, towards greater freedom (from static patterns) and towards harmony. 'We can just as easily deduce the morality of atoms from the observation that chemistry professors are, in general, moral. If chemistry professors are composed exclusively of atoms, then it follows that atoms must exercise choice too. The difference between these two points of view is philosophic, not scientific. The question of whether an electron does a certain thing because it has to or because it wants to is completely irrelevant to the data of what the electron does. So what Phaedrus was saying was that not just life, but everything, is an ethical activity. It is nothing else. When inorganic patterns of reality create life the Metaphysics of Quality postulates that they've done so because it's 'better' and that this definition of 'betterness' - this beginning response to Dynamic Quality- is an elementary unit of ethics upon which all right and wrong can be based....ethics and science...integrated into a single system'. (Lila p 161) Accept it or reject it. Like it or lump it. For what it is worth. Andre Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
