Philosophy

I am amazed at how many comments on this web-log prove at least the first part of the following proposition:

The left think the right are evil, and the right think the left are dumb.

People with such a narrow world view really should get out and about a bit more.

I wrote these two laws down on a scrap of paper years ago. I still have the scrap of paper but not the original reference.

Harris’s First Law:
Belief in the truth of a theory is inversely proportional to the precision of the science.

Harris’s Second Law:
The creativity of a scientist is directly proportional to how much he knows, and inversely proportional to how much he believes.

“…when people are starving, lacking clean drinking water, getting poisoned from indoor air pollution, and dying from easily curable communicable diseases, they let the environment get ravaged, too. Your solution is to deal with the environment first. But shouldn’t we, morally and practically, help them gain wealth first, so they can take care of the environment too?” says Bjorn Lomborg author of The Skeptical Environmentalist to Carl Pope from the Sierra Club.

Read the complete text in the latest issue of Foreign Policy it begins

Is the world getting greener? Or are we selling it short for a fistful of greenbacks? Apparently, even committed environmentalists can disagree. When Carl Pope looks out his door, he sees the polar ice caps melting, ecosystems on life support, and clean water disappearing. But Bjorn Lomborg believes humanity’s backyard has never looked better. Who’s got it right?

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3084

“I know of an argument which, although it is almost-unbelievably bad, has not only escaped critism by philosophers, but has received the endorsement of coutless philosophers. I think it is the worst argument in the world…” and so began a note from D.C. Stove at the University of Sydney in 1986. To find out which argument he is referring to read more at …

http://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/stoveworstargt.pdf .

Be sure to scroll down to the second page at the link.

“Most prophets overestimate how much the world would be transformed by social and political change and underestimate the forces of technological change.”

I read this last night in the new “column of conjecture and speculation” by Stephen Dawson in the latest IPA Review (vol. 57). The quote is from late US physicist Gerard K. O’Neill.

And I wonder, what will power the world in 2100, from where will our drinking water come, and how will we be managing/not managing the rangelands of western Queensland and NSW?

According to ABC Online, the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) has turned to the Church in its campaign to halt climate change.

The ACF has formed an alliance with the National Council of Churches to encourage Christians to write to, or visit, their Federal MP to lobby for a re-think on water and energy use.

Reverend John Henderson, the general secretary of the National Council of Churches, says Christians have a moral obligation to help fight climate change:

“These are basic issues through the teachings of the New Testament and the Old Testament,” he said.

“This is not new to us. I mean the Christian Church comes out of a long community, in fact it comes out of more than 2,000 years of community life where people have learnt to live with the world in which they are placed.”

While the ACF and mainstream Christian Churches are, in my view, both essentially faith-based institutions, how much of their base philosophy is compatible when it comes to the environment and how it should/might be managed/not managed? For example, while the ACF generally advocates a “hands off” approach to nature i.e. exclude people from the landscape and don’t manage it, in the bible Noah took a “hands on” approach i.e. built the ark to save the animals.

What do you think?

One of my definitions of sustainability has been salvation in the church of the environment.