Re: [asa] Creation Care

--- David Opderbeck <dopderbeck@gmail.com> wrote:

>(Quoting Randy) *You say "it's irresponsible to ingore contrarian views". I
would ask, on
> what basis do you decide which contrarian views to reject and which ones to
> value? Who is the arbiter?*
>
>David: Why must there be a single person or single community that serves
> as arbiter? That approach always leads to tyranny.
>
> Reason, wisdom, experience, common sense, faith, and revelation, in varying
> proportions as the circumstances dicate, is the basis on which we need to
> evaluate truth claims and make decisions. A recapture of the classicle
> virtue of phronesis and the Biblical virtue of wisdom is what we need. The
> last thing we need is to abrogate our duty to think for ourselves to some
> supposedly authoritative community. Most people are not as stupid as other
> people think they are.
>
> It seems to me that you're coming dangerously close to the zeitgeist that
> takes "the literature" as a sort of secular scripture and the scientific
> community as a sort of secular priesthood. Of course practical wisdom
> relies on the recommendations of trained experts and recognizes the motives
> of the experts' political critics -- but it never, never sloughs off the
> duty to think carefully and weigh everything in the balances simply because
> of expert authority. Even beyond the simple and obvious truth that all
> human knowledge is historically and socially situated, we as Christians know
> in particular the every temporal social structure, every community,
> scientific, ecclesiastical, political, familial whatever, is deeply
> corrupted by sin and therefore cannot be authoritative in an ultimate
> sense. To put it in somewhat Kuyperian terms, each of these communities
> have a certain type of authority and certain roles within their given
> spheres, as well as certain relationships to each other; none of them is a
> meta-authority.
>

In addition to the responsibilities that fall on the political process as
outlined above, the responsibility falls on the scientific community

* To communicate with the public as clearly as possible,
* To publicly correct politicians who misinterpret or misrepresent the results
reported by the scientific community

Scientists communicate among themselves quite well. They have less success
communicating with the public (with a few exceptions, including Richard
Dawkins).

Bill Hamilton
William E. Hamilton, Jr., Ph.D.
248.652.4148 (home) 248.821.8156 (mobile)
"...If God is for us, who is against us?" Rom 8:31

 
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Received on Fri Jan 26 10:48:15 2007