I forgot to finish up...
Someone should tell the scientists who are working on cures to genetic diseases. They're acting as if some mutations are bad.
I said that science does not deal in 'good' or 'bad'. That does not mean that scientists can't deal in such things.
This is a fundamental contradiction, because scientists every day are working to cure diseases.
There is no contradiction. You just fail to understand. Medicine is based on the judgment that there is such a thing as health (good) and illness (bad).
Yes. And while the procedure for researching disease to find cures is itself scientific, the definition of the illness as bad and curing the illness as good is not scientific. Science is great for finding out how the natural world works, but it's not really going to give you an explanation of what is "good" and "bad". You'll have to use something else to make those judgements.
Yes. And while the procedure for researching disease to find cures is itself scientific, the definition of the illness as bad and curing the illness as good is not scientific. Science is great for finding out how the natural world works, but it's not really going to give you an explanation of what is "good" and "bad". You'll have to use something else to make those judgements. That thing is philosophy, the handmaid of theology, the queen of the sciences.
The problem is, if evolutionary theory makes no judgment regarding the relative goodness of various mutations, then it loses the basis for what little explanatory and predictive power it has.
Under an evolutionary rubric, mutations must be good, at least with respect to the theory, because without them evolution would not occur. We cannot, in a scientific sense, say whether specific, current, human mutations are good or bad because we cannot know what we are evolving into, and whether these mutations will ultimately increase or decrease our chances of survival.
Since we cannot scientifically say whether specific human mutations (and diseases) will ultimately increase or decrease our chances of survival, doctors may take an agnostic attitude regarding human mutations and diseases, or they can just as "scientifically" choose to cure these diseases, or they can just as "scientifically" work to cleanse the gene pool, as Margaret Sanger did.
This conclusion contradicts the first principle of ethics, which is that the good must be done and evil avoided. Clearly disease and injury are disorders of the body and intrinsic evils.