Scientistic-Atheist-Materialists Who Want To Assert Equality Are Up The Creek Of Amorality Without A Paddle

Looking for appropriate video for my post last night, I came across a Youtube by the semi-pro atheist-"skeptic" Rebecca Watson talking about her disappointment with some of the science guys who have had an association with the child rapist and elite sex trafficker to the super-rich and powerful, Jeffrey Epstein.   Specifically, she called out Lawrence Krauss who has so disgraced himself, especially in the period when he took the golden parachute from being an actual scientist to being a professional atheist.  I didn't get very far into Watson's not entirely unreasonable flaming of her fellow atheist-"skeptics" and others for being total and complete pigs, that is one thing on which I and Watson agree pretty much before she said something that was absurd in a revelatory way.  What she said was, contained in the first sentence of my comment.

"Krauss is a scientist so he knows what's right"? Geeesh, what a stupid thing to say. Science totally discounts morality in doing science, scientists are probably less likely to think in moral terms than those in other professions. Lots of them can and do think morally but it's not due to their science.

OK, it's been too hot to do much of the weeding I was hoping to get ahead of this week and too hot for any deep reading or thinking so I was bored and looking for a fight.*  It also pisses me off that people who can say such stupidly romantic things about science in such abysmal ignorance get enough attention so they can make a sort-of career out of spouting it.   And this morning I find one of her fans did answer it in a pretty stupid way.

Robert Dillahubris 2 hours ago

 

"scientists are probably less likely to think in moral terms than those in other professions." Geeesh, what a stupid thing to say. And she said "he knows what's right" in terms of logic, not in terms of morality. Try to keep on top of it. 

Pretty typical of ideological atheists, to which I answered.
 
Science has always, by formal agreement among scientists NOT INCLUDED QUESTIONS OF MORALITY IN THEIR SCIENTIFIC WORK. Anyone who doesn't know that holds some idiotic romantic view of what scientists do without knowing anything about what they actually do do. This has led, especially within those fields most dubiously included in what gets called science, which rub up against questions of morality, for the scientists involved to come up with some kind of clearly immoral declarations such as the one the Rutgers biologist Robert Trivers made about the crimes of Epstein, “By the time they’re 14 or 15, they’re like grown women were 60 years ago, so I don’t see these acts as so heinous". If you aren't familiar with the so-called social scientists and even some in the legitimate field of evolutionary biology to declare that rape is "natural" (and so according to their thinking "good) and not such a big deal, you don't know what you're talking about and neither does Rebecca Watson, apparently. It led Richard Dawkins to declare that some level of pedophile abuse was no big deal. Logic can't get you to questions of right and wrong, something that has been known through rigorous logical application for just about as long as logical analysis started to be studied in rigorous terms. I am never shocked, anymore, to find out that ideological atheists are so plug ignorant of the culture of mathematics, logic and science.

I am sure just about any reputable theologian would have a rather good understanding of that but I'm increasingly unsurprised to find that many scientists and, ever much more so, their pop culture fan gals and guys are even more ignorant of that plain and simple fact, that you can't turn logic to the purpose of deciding questions of moral judgement.  The most excellent practitioner of logic, of mathematics, of science who chooses to be immoral or, as I believe is far more common and so a serious problem, amoral are only more dangerous for their mastery of those areas of human culture which, by agreement, are shielded from questions of moral consideration.  

But this leads me to consider the problem for the atheists and "skeptics" of the kind I've touched on before when I mocked the scientistic-atheist-materialists  who, for themselves, claim the mantle of "Free Thought" when it is their very ideological side which has made the most sustained attack on the possibility of free thought, free will, - of anything free of deterministic, material causation - being possible. 

It's clear that Rebecca Watson, as a woman who likes the idea of equality but whose career is founded in exactly that scientistic-materialistic-atheism is rather up the creek of amorality without a paddle.  For anyone who had a realistic or even a mildly superficial knowledge of the history of the literature of science, as it deals with matters of sexual, gender, racial, ethnic, class equality would see that scientists - who are still among the most male, most white, most economically advantaged - have not been slow to assert that all of those issues and identities are unequal by hard fact of science, ignoring the scientific weakness or irrationality of their claimed "data" supporting their contentions, using every trick in their bag of those to dupe the public into believing, fully, in their sexist, racist, class-advantaged claims.   

While there are many scientists who do not do that, the formal literature of biology, of the so-called behavioral sciences are full to the top of the assertion that biologically determined inequality is a hard fact of life.  As I have made an in depth study of the literature of modern biology as concerns exactly those claims of inequality, that assertion has been a majority point of view since the imposition of natural selection and genetic determinism on the study of evolution and its asserted implications for human life and societies today.   And a lot of scientists, even those whose own field of expertise renders their understanding of biology and behavior about as callow and superficial as the typical listener to of TV on those topics, fully buy onto that program of sexist, racist, class-divisive assertion in science BECAUSE THEY LIKE THAT THOSE THINGS ADVANTAGE THEM AND THEIR IMMEDIATE FAMILY AND COLLEAGUES.  

Probably, by the way, even more dangerous is the popular level science reporting such as you can read in the so-called legitimate press or hear on NPR in the deepest level of superficiality that such "public understanding of science" is likely to be imbibed by most voters.  

I can't claim that I have any respect for the people who obtain college credentials, who work in fields in which they write things for other people to read, who bloviate on such things online on on TV or radio talk shows while being in such total ignorance of these issues.   I think if the "Skepchicks" (Watson's name for herself, so don't call me out on it) and the PZ Myers who might find that they either want to assert equality for themselves or through some vestigial remains of having grown up in the better part of Jewish monotheistic culture, feeling it's right, are deluding themselves if they think science and logic are going to replace the moral absolute that comes with the assertion that people have God given rights on an equal basis, they are not only wrong, they are willfully stupid.

*  Too hot to sleep, too, which is why I've been up at three this morning and writing this.