Religion and Space Exploration
Jun. 18th, 2007 07:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jsburbidgeSo Charlie Stross has ruffled feathers with his taking apart of some naive assumptions about space colonization.
The reactions are illuminating.
Many of them have an assumption that if we (as a species) want something badly enough we can get it, and that the laws of physics will conveniently accommodate themselves to our wishes. "Previous barriers have gone down; this one will as well, although we don't know how yet".
Several somewhat more balanced commenters, including Charlie in the comments, have referred to this as "religious" in nature. In fact, it's less rational than a normal religious argument. The general outline for a religious argument is: "There is some event (past or future) for which evidence is present but incomplete [from the believer's view]. We will accept this event because it is implied by the rest of our belief system (which similarly has incomplete, but not completely absent, evidence". (For a much expanded version of the above, see Newman's Grammar of Assent.) That is, a believer in Christianity accepts (say) the Resurrection (past) and the Second Coming (future) because he/she accepts the general revelation of Christianity on grounds which do not necessarily command automatic acceptance from everyone's point of view, but which have some basis of acceptance (personal revelation, historical records, Thomas's Five Arguments, etc.) from the believer's point of view. However, what the arguments presented amount to is "We have no actual grounds for believing that ways around the obstacles exist. But it's important to us, so there must be a way around them." This is going beyond the fides quaerens intellectum approach of classical Catholic Christianity (at least) to the mentality of a five-year-old who assumes that anything that it wants to do must be possible because it wants to.
A number of other reactions evince a dedication to the idea of the continuation of the human race in whatever form which is reminiscent of nothing so much as Weston in C.S. Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet. Lewis, of course, opposes an explicitly Christian viewpoint to this sort of affection for an abstraction of our distant descendants to argue that it is incoherent. The Oyarsa of Mars' comments, I think, should suffice to provide a counterpoint to that view.
The reactions are illuminating.
Many of them have an assumption that if we (as a species) want something badly enough we can get it, and that the laws of physics will conveniently accommodate themselves to our wishes. "Previous barriers have gone down; this one will as well, although we don't know how yet".
Several somewhat more balanced commenters, including Charlie in the comments, have referred to this as "religious" in nature. In fact, it's less rational than a normal religious argument. The general outline for a religious argument is: "There is some event (past or future) for which evidence is present but incomplete [from the believer's view]. We will accept this event because it is implied by the rest of our belief system (which similarly has incomplete, but not completely absent, evidence". (For a much expanded version of the above, see Newman's Grammar of Assent.) That is, a believer in Christianity accepts (say) the Resurrection (past) and the Second Coming (future) because he/she accepts the general revelation of Christianity on grounds which do not necessarily command automatic acceptance from everyone's point of view, but which have some basis of acceptance (personal revelation, historical records, Thomas's Five Arguments, etc.) from the believer's point of view. However, what the arguments presented amount to is "We have no actual grounds for believing that ways around the obstacles exist. But it's important to us, so there must be a way around them." This is going beyond the fides quaerens intellectum approach of classical Catholic Christianity (at least) to the mentality of a five-year-old who assumes that anything that it wants to do must be possible because it wants to.
A number of other reactions evince a dedication to the idea of the continuation of the human race in whatever form which is reminiscent of nothing so much as Weston in C.S. Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet. Lewis, of course, opposes an explicitly Christian viewpoint to this sort of affection for an abstraction of our distant descendants to argue that it is incoherent. The Oyarsa of Mars' comments, I think, should suffice to provide a counterpoint to that view.
