Replies

>>Science does not lead to Dachau; ideology perverting science led to Dachau.

Wow, thanks. Glad we don’t have any Science Perverted by Ideology here in America! I am shocked; shocked! How dare someone accuse GoreBULL warming of that.

Yes, indeed. I think Stein misspoke. It’s not science that leads to murder, but what I would call pseudoscience.

Darwin’s ideas did, indeed, play a part in Nazi ideology—survival of the fittest, the right of superior races to rule over or eliminate inferior races, and so forth.

Whether that kind of Social Darwinism is a natural extension of Darwinism, or a distortion of it, has been a matter of argument. I won’t go over it here. In either case, the Nazi version of Darwinism amounted to a pseudoscience, not real science. It was, however regretably, a commonplace of 19th-century European thought that the Caucasian race was superior to all the other. This way of thinking found its full flower in Nazism, and was largely discredited as a result.

So, either Stein misspoke, or he failed to make himself clear. Science and religion are compatible, or should be compatible. Certainly the Catholic Church teaches that they are (see, e.g., Fides et Ratio, or some of Pope Benedict’s recent comments). Indeed, the rise of western science and technology was largely a product of the Christian intellectual mindset.

Physicist Jacob Bronowski, who lost family in the death camps, said it best in the early 1970’s. The Holocaust was not the result of science, it was quite the opposite - it exemplified how men behave when the are absolutely certain they are right, with no basis in reality. Same goes for the islamofascists, or any similar nutjobs.

What Stein is really saying is that science itself is value-free. Science, in the absence of “love of God and compassion and empathy,” (his phrase) can indeed lead to horrors. We’ve seen science in the willing service of totalitarians and fanatics, over and over. We’re seeing it again in the anthropogenic global warming cult. Secular, anti-religious scientists like to portray themselves as noble elitists, far above “primitive superstitions” like religion, which are for the boorish masses. Typical sneering liberal snobs

Stein: When we just saw that man, I think it was Mr. Myers [i.e. biologist P.Z. Myers], talking about how great scientists were, I was thinking to myself the last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do they were telling them to go to the showers to get gassed … that was horrifying beyond words, and that’s where science — in my opinion, this is just an opinion — that’s where science leads you.

What a crock of ykw. This is all anyone who likes or admires Science needs to know about Mr. Stein or where he is coming from intellectually and the audience he is playing to. Jews contributions to Science are legendary, how would Stein countenance a Palestinian telling him that it was Jew's embracing of Science that leads to their “abuse”, “genocide”, or “apartheid” against Palestinians?