News Item: <“It’s a religion in the sense of religio, it’s what binds us together. It is a form of devotion: the scientific study of the world is simply a kind of worship of it, a very detailed, painstaking, and often tedious daily worship, like Zen,” award-winning science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson…> in a lecture.
In the never-ending battle between science and religion, there are two extremist positions: One views religion as total nonsense which has no place in a science-informed society, and the other engages in sophistry to show that science and religion are the same.
Some of this latter kind have argued that religion too is a science; others, as in this instance, like to say that science itself is another religion.
Calling religion a science may make some religious people happy, but I am not sure how many practicing scientists will be comfortable when their discipline is described as another religion.
They may take some consolation from the fact that this is done by one who is good at writing fiction.
February 8, 2010
Spurts of Thought 