A lot of people view the scientific explanation of the creation of the universe and the religious explanations as contrasts; one represents logic, the other represents faith. One represents cynicism, the other hope. However, my personal philosophy is a bit of a meld between the two.
I am a firm and fast believer that life as we know it is just a series of seemingly unconnected occurrences that happened. I believe this on both the largest scale imaginable presently (life in the universe) and on the smallest scale (the existence of even a single microscopic bacteria). In my opinion, we, and all life, is just the result of a number of chance scientific happenings that occured billions of years ago that just happened to bring us to our present course. I believe there is no true afterlife, no heaven, no hell. However, unlike many people, I am optimistic, not cynical; hopeful, not dispondent.
Why? I have faith in evolution. If we have truly evolved from the simplest forms of bacteria into our present forms, we certainly have reason to be. Can bacteria feel pain? Sadness? Anger? Love? Many often seem to ignore that if evolution is true, our emotions are as much a biological product of our evolution as our ability to walk upright. Imagining the dryness of the world with the abscence of emotion, optimism is a necessity. I, for one, look forward to the development of new emotions, allowing man to appreciate and explore the world as he has never before. And for that, I have hope and faith in science.
The idea of science representing cynicism seems bizarre to me. I think this must only be the case for religious conservatives who view it as a threat to their dogma.
Science, to those who appreciate what it is, represents one of mankind’s finest accomplishments and a valuable tool for understanding his universe.
Have confidence in science to do this - what it was designed to do, for it has a well proven track record. But science is designed merely to provide knowledge. Because knowledge is power, it only empowers human beings. It will empower evil human beings to do evil, and good human beings to do good.
When it comes to faith and hope, these are best placed in the human heart. Let us hope that we will have the goodness and wisdom to use science for good, because science itself is mindless and mute on the matter.
Who knows? Bacteria react to environmental pressures, and so I am guessing it has to have some sort of recognition of what it is feeling.
Interesting statement.
In a world with the absence of emotions, I don’t think we’ll even know what optimism is and so it may not be a necessity. Many luxuries can be thought of a as a necessity today, as our desire become difficult to please. We sort of don’t know what we need as oppose to what we want.
Science can also destroy us, I guess it depends how you look at it. (biological warfare e.g anthrax, weapons of mass destruction, replace labour, etc). But yeah, it does have its benefits (cures for illnesses, decreasing poverty, etc). I guess we have to give up something in order to gain something.
Just because evolution made it where we have emotions does not mean that having emotions is necessarily a good thing. Evolution does not have a reason or direction it is heading. It just happened to be that Earth had just the right conditions to allow life as we know it to exist. Plus, I do not like the idea of making humans or life anything special. That can lead to things like religion and George W. Bush.