In a message dated 7/23/02 11:18:20 AM GMT Daylight Time,
andrea.sosio@italtel.it writes:
> Hello again Squonkstail... (BTW, was your message actually full of "?", or
> was it a character encoding problem (see below)? Unfortunately I'm not sure
> how many actual questions did you put...) While I agree that science is
> somehow close to art, that applies to science as it actually is (as it is
> actually done by humans) rather than to the theoretical idea of science.
> Scientists do work in a somewhat artistic mode for a relevant part of their
> professional lives, but still they are bound to the theoretical idea of
> science, i.e., the constraint of empirical truth. It is thus hard to
> compare creationism and evolution. You might compare them based on general
> beauty (your "is creationism more artistic than evolution?") but you can't
> compare them based on the flavour of beauty science has chosen as its
> defining constraint: objective (empirical) truth. Creationism is not a
> scientific theory, or it is a scientific theory without much empirical
> evidence in its support (although some creationist will certainly insist
> there is plenty of evidence...something I really can't buy). So what kind
> of comparison can we do? Among all "stories" about how it all began,
> creationism might be, for someone, more appealing and more beautiful than
> evolution. Among all scientific theories about how it all began,
> creationism simply has no place. Given that "true" is somehow a subtype of
> "good", we have been educated and taught to give it a special status. Maybe
> due to this education, a "beautiful" story about how life began might be
> something useful for story telling in a beautiful summer evening, but it
> cannot be a satisfactory replacement, in my mind, for a "true" story. A
>
>
>
Hi Andrea,
Intellectual v social pattern filtering in a nut shell?
And with creationism social patterning is winning?
God help us. (joke.)
I appreciate what you say about day to day scientists working like artists.
And Poincare felt the beauty a mathematician appreciates is the same as the
artists - so even maths is art?
All the best,
Squonk.
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:02:27 BST