Do we have souls?

[GliderGuider]

108. No, you make sense - I get what you mean.

I appreciate that in order to communicate a scientific idea one needs evidence. I have a different prioritization of science and art though, partly because I'm so totally jaundiced about the effects of human technology on the planet. What I keep coming back to is how little of the human experience has anything to do with science in the way we understand it today. It may seem to us that science is the very pinnacle of human achievement, but to me that's simply because we're embedded in a couple of hundred years of post-enlightenment global industrialization.

I'll take a Bach cantata over a new scientifically-proven knock-reducing gasoline additive as evidence of human accomplishment, any day of the week. I hold beauty as one of the highest of human values - a value that has been driving us to ever greater heights since well before the days of the Lascaux cave paintings. Now it's true that evidence played a part there too - after all, we were developing new pigments experimentally 100,000 years ago. But the reason we did that was not to make paint, the reason was to make paintings.

In a sense science is like the ego: a great servant, but a lousy master. When we venerate the concept of scientific evidence to the point of worship, we risk committing the same error that religions do - all dissenting world-views risk being judged as heresy.