Bad Science & Bad Religion
The times when I agree with something Deepak Chopra says are rare enough that this seemed worth noting:
I was trained as a scientist, but you don't need that to realize how badly the waters are muddied between religion, science, and politics these days. When John F. Kennedy ran for President in 1960, there were dark mutterings that as a Catholic he would take political orders from the Pope. That was nonsensical and prejudiced, yet somehow Pres. Bush is tolerated for taking his science from the Bible and then turning it into politics.
His version of the Bible, or perhaps his personal connection to God, tells him that microscopic clumps of embryonic cells contain a soul. Such a position merges bad science with dubious religion. Jesus made no comments about babies' souls, just as he made none about two other "moral" points that Bush hammers on, abortion and homosexuality. Bush didn't bravely adhere to a moral line that he wasn't going to cross. That might be his version, but no politician has the right to call everyone who disagrees with him immoral. Doing it on religious grounds is just as shaky.
[Deepak Chopra, "The Sad Legacy of Bad Science and Bad Religion", Hufington Post, 21 August 2006.]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Speaking of Science
One Response
Subscribe to comments via RSS
Subscribe to comments via RSS
Leave a Reply
To thwart spam, comments by new people are held for moderation; give me a bit of time and your comment will show up.
I welcome comments -- even dissent -- but I will delete without notice irrelevant, rude, psychotic, or incomprehensible comments, particularly those that I deem homophobic, unless they are amusing. The same goes for commercial comments and trackbacks. Sorry, but it's my blog and my decisions are final.
on Wednesday, 23 August 2006 at 19.21
Permalink
I fail to see where science, bad or otherwise, enters into Bush's thinking about embryos and stem cell research. The best I can tell, it's purely a faith-based conviction about when life begins.
Whether those clumps of cells contain a soul can never be proven or disproven.
However, Bush's faith might be shaken on this point a bit if only curiosity would lead him to learn more.
Fertilized eggs fail to secure a footing in the womb all the time. And even ones that get a footing dislodge or fail to thrive, eventually being carried off during menstruation. In these instances the woman is usually unaware she had been impregnated.
If this happens a bit later on, which isn't that unusual either, you have what's known as a spontaneous abortion. Farther along yet, it's called a miscarriage.
Spontaneous abortions have a very high correlation with the zygote or fetus being grossly defective. Miscarriages can happen because of that or because something goes way wrong with the mother or the pregnancy.
It's thought these outcomes are part of nature's way of keeping the human species going, by not burdening people with severely abnormal offspring that require exceptional efforts to care for. Back when just getting enough to eat was a big, never-ending issue, and dangers of all kinds loomed large, it was undoubtedly a saving grace. Those pregnancy failures also likely keep problematic genes out of the gene pool to some extent.
In any case, procreation isn't a slam-dunk proposition. Logically, if God had meant it to be, He could've engineered things so that every conception would result in a birth of some sort unless interefered with by the hand of man. That this isn't the case leads me to conclusions at odds with those expressed by Bush.