Implications of Scientists Discussing Religion

A recent article related a discussion in the upper echelons of scientists about the decision to allign themselves with mainstream religion in the fight against anti-science.

As you can well imagine Professor Dawkins was one of the scientists on this panel. Two other scientists were on the panel: The Astronomer Royale, Martin Rees and Steve Jones.

If you read the article carefully you can come up with some implications of the discussion.

1) The Astronomer Royal, Richard Dawkins and Steve Jones are all atheists.
2) The assumption in their conversation is that their intended audience (scientists) are also all atheists.

The three were sharply divided on the topic of aligning themselves with mainstream religion. The Astronomer Royal wants the alignment, Dawkins and Jones did not. It is, of course, amazing that someone in public should actually agree with anything Dawkins says on the topic of religion. Most commentary about Dawkins is so derogatory, inflamed and wild claims that he is a 'fanatic' or bringing about fundamentalist atheism are shouted when he calmly talks about the problems inherent in religion.

The major problem with making mainstream religion an ally of science as described by Dawkins is that it legitimizes the idea that non-rational discourse - or faith - is the key to knowledge in the material world. Any implication of that nature should be avoided I suspect he thinks, because he doesn't want religion to take a role in science.

Yes, of course, he is right. However, religion already has a level of legitimacy. That probably isn't going away. No, we aren't going to run around in an alliance with religion and tell them they can make any scientific statements. Not going to happen.

Politics, by its nature, is about compromise. Right now, there are millions, perhaps even a billion secularists, atheists, agnostics, freethinkers, deists in the world. However, even with this large number of people who are proponents of rational thought we are in a weak position.

The nature of the people in these groups is not toward homogeneous cooperative groups. Fractured in many idealogical realms even united we need allies in the fight against unreason.

Without allies, unreason will once again take over the world. The problem is that at present we are so dependent on reason and the by-products of reason, science and technology, that the loss of reason as a commanding force and moving forward for humanity will most likely result in the loss of human life - and I'm not just talking about a few people.

Anything we can do to avoid that error condition should be considered (even if sometimes outright rejected). An alliance with mainstream religion, on the topic of science and technology and the furtherance of the improvement of the human condition - is acceptable compared to total loss to the propaganda of the fundamentalist religionists which wish to deny science fact, limit the increase of science unreasonably and with all their fighting risk the destruction of humanity.

Please not that I'm not saying that science should not be limited. Genetic modification of any species for the improvement of those species is exciting, but unless we have the restraint to test such changes (even changes to humanity) and understand if they present any dangers - we could be playing roulette with humanity's existence.

Focus, control and discipline are necessary in order to ensure the continued future of humanity.

Some interesting science articles today

Some interesting articles in science that have come out today:
DNA/Genetics - figuring out junk DNA - http://tinyurl.com/yt8pns

More evidence for a Mars shoreline? - http://tinyurl.com/2rpwuu

ISS Computers on the Fritz - http://tinyurl.com/3y5knu
I think this is a bit more alarming than they make it out. In my opinion, if they had to abandon station, its orbit would degrade and make it nearly impossible for a new docking. There might also be problems in that since the computer shut down - that it might be hard to re-start remotely.

Baby Monitor Picks up space shuttle video - http://tinyurl.com/2koxv5

I'm not sure what this has to do with Dental plans - but at Dentalplans.com - commentary on activities of two of Saturn's moons - http://tinyurl.com/34dp9s

Now that's really weird, the website just seems to be a collective shop for dental coverage site...

Hope you find the articles of interest.

Angelic Layer and Science

It might not have come out yet in this blog, but my wife and I are huge anime fans. I've been watching just about anything that I can from shows on cartoon network, Adult Swim, Netflix rentals, YouTube (Japanese recordings with English Text) and even a fan site BleachPortal.net to get in my fix of anime.


I search for anime shows that my son can watch. I'll let him watch stuff that is much more violent than most parents - I don't believe that what people watch on TV leads to what people do in reality. If this were the case then it would be quite clear that Japanese culture should be far more violent than United States Culture - and this is directly opposite to available information.

To the topic of this particular post: Angelic Layer is a low-violence and low-person violence anime that my son likes to watch. Young children control dolls on a field called the Angelic Layer where those dolls become capable of following the user's mind commands to do things on the layer. There is a lot more to this show, like a slight sexual tension between the main character and one of the male characters that so far in two disks hasn't resulted in anything more than a he likes her - and the guy getting all embarrassed. The main story line follows the main character as her doll battles other dolls on the Angelic Layer and she becomes a competition player. So, the violence that does happen in the show are dolls fighting dolls, no blood, still a little violence; however, it is clear on the show that the fighters are not people - even though they look like people.

Recently there have been articles like this one - depicting a game system with an add-on device that allows the user to use their mind to control the actions of their character inside of a console game. This immediately brought to my mind the idea of Angelic Layer. The art of moving things in the real world is far more difficult (especially given the activities of the dolls in Angelic Layer) than moving pixels in a game.

On the other hand, we are increasingly becoming more capable in the robotic arena. If this is the direction we are going with in gaming, there isn't a reason why we couldn't in ten years create something very much like Angelic Layer.