Postby Technomancer » Fri Mar 10, 2006 12:15 pm
You know this really bothers me. I can understand that for one reason or another people don't think that extraterrestrial life is likely, or even possible. But the idea that we should refrain from even looking, or from following any line of investigation that might challenge us in our beliefs. The whole point of doing science is that we might be wrong, and because of this we must investigate, we must experiment and must follow the data without regard to religion or ideology. And to say that one's religious beliefs not only trump empirical evidence, but serve as a justification for shutting down scientific inquiry is truly anethma to me both as a scholar and as a Christian.
By the way, SETI cost your government peanuts. It was a profound act of waste on the part of US congress to cut the program, because all of the equipment had already been bought. All they needed to do was pay the electric bills and a few people's salaries. That would maybe have come to at most three hundred thousand dollars per year in addition to the couple of million already spent. Keep in mind that this was a time when NASA's entire budget was ~5% that of the Pentagon.
The scientific method," Thomas Henry Huxley once wrote, "is nothing but the normal working of the human mind." That is to say, when the mind is working; that is to say further, when it is engaged in corrrecting its mistakes. Taking this point of view, we may conclude that science is not physics, biology, or chemistry—is not even a "subject"—but a moral imperative drawn from a larger narrative whose purpose is to give perspective, balance, and humility to learning.
Neil Postman
(The End of Education)
Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge
Isaac Aasimov