Quote Originally Posted by denuseri View Post

News Flash: The focus on "pure" or godless science has allready got us on a path of self destruction and just in those same short years where we went from flying to the moon and back until today. Those years where we were so busy consuming the benfits of our new god "our science" that we spent those years living in such a fashion that our collective arvice and gluttony are likely now going to kill us all off in the near future.
If you check the credentials of the politicians and CEOs who took the decisions to use damaging rather than beneficial technologies, you will find, firstly, very few science graduates, and secondly, very very few atheists. (I may be wrong, but my impression is that it's not possible to get to high office in the US as a professing atheist.) So it's not exactly fair to blame godless scientists for the mess we are in. So far as I can see, it was the new god Mammon that did most of the harm.

In any case, this whole godless-scientist stereotype is about as far from the truth as most stereotypes. You will find as many believers in the average science faculty as in the arts departments next door; all Thorne was saying is that if you're a believer and a scientist (like me), you believe the facts first, and if the facts disagree with your religion, you accept that your religion needs to be adapted.

Richard Dawkins has attracted a fair amount of criticism from scientists for promoting the idea that atheism is the only "scientific" viewpoint. There are plenty of us who find the world all the more spiritually awe-inspiring because we believe in all the fabulous scientific story of its creation from nothing in a cloud of fire, and the growth of living things from primal molecules to glorious complexity by their own simple efforts to survive better than the next being. As far as I can see, most Pagans are scientifically educated: perhaps that's why we're drawn to creeds that value matter as well as spirit.

But like it or not, Thorne was right: one of the main strands of resistance to conservation comes from fundamentalists who say that (a) God made the world for Man (sic) to use, so nobody should tell us not to, and (b) the Rapture is due any time now, so there is no future to conserve resources for. You couldn't make these people up.