The Moral Instinct

This story by Steven Pinker in the New York Times is all about where morals come from. Just pasting what I thought was particularly interesting - although it is all interesting:

"The only other option is that moral truths exist in some abstract Platonic realm, there for us to discover, perhaps in the same way that mathematical truths (according to most mathematicians) are there for us to discover. On this analogy, we are born with a rudimentary concept of number, but as soon as we build on it with formal mathematical reasoning, the nature of mathematical reality forces us to discover some truths and not others. (No one who understands the concept of two, the concept of four and the concept of addition can come to any conclusion but that 2 + 2 = 4.) Perhaps we are born with a rudimentary moral sense, and as soon as we build on it with moral reasoning, the nature of moral reality forces us to some conclusions but not others.

Electoral compass

Just about everyone is doing this electoral compass thing (you can too!) but thought I'd post my results as well. The pencil shows my position on the political spectrum. Looks like I am rooting for Obama:

by doing our best

It has been years since my last post - and much has happened to celestial. But I just finished a wonderful biography of Rosalind Franklin, the crystallographer whose experimental data helped Watson and Crick to deduce the structure of DNA, by Brenda Maddox. Among other things, the book contains this letter that she wrote to her father while doing her undergraduate degree at Cambridge University. I find it utterly inspiring and eloquent. It represents my own views of religion and science better than anything else I have read:

You frequently state, and in your letter you imply, that I have developed a completely one-sided outlook and look at everything and think of everything in terms of science. Obviously my method of thought and reasoning is influenced by a scientific training - if that were not so my scientific training will have been a waste and a failure. But you look at science (or at least talk of it) as some sort of demoralising invention of man, something apart from real life, and which must be cautiously guarded and kept separate from everyday existence. But science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated. Science, for me, gives a partial explanation of life. In so far as it goes, it is based on fact, experience and experiment. Your theories are those which you and many other people find easiest and pleasantest to believe, but so far as I can see, they have no foundation other than they lead to a pleasanter view of life (and an exaggerated idea of our own importance).

I agree that faith is essential to success in life (success of any sort) but I do not accept your definition of faith; i.e. belief in life after death. In my view, all that is necessary for faith is the belief that by doing our best we shall come nearer to success and that success in our aims (the improvement of the lot of mankind, present and future) is worth attaining. Anyone able to believe in all that religion implies obviously must have such faith, but I maintain that faith in this world is perfectly possible without faith in another world…

It has just occurred to me that you may raise the question of a creator. A creator of what? … I see no reason to believe that a creator of protoplasm or primeval matter, if such there be, has any reason to be interested in our insignificant race in a tiny corner of the universe, and still less in us; as still more insignificant individuals. Again, I see no reason why the belief that we are insignificant or fortuitous should lessen our faith – as I defined it.

Sources:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/SCfranklinR.htm
http://joejp.blogspot.com/2006/03/rosalind-franklin-dark-lady-of-dna.html