Life outside numbers and religion

I speak disparagingly of positivist scientific ethos in the disciplines at universities, particularly in sociology, what I am truly speaking of is the narrow focus and emphasis on numbers. There is life outside numbers, in my view.

I am starting to see, though, that a more important area to place my interests and scorn isn't against something that is a question of mere research approach, but rather against an entire movement that is diverting scientific resources. That movement is the ensemble of thought, work, power and people that centre around the notion of intelligent design.

A friend of mine (who is somewhat of an independent and public academic and whose opinions about life and thought I respect greatly) has been bringing the issues in this to my attention recently, directing me to the cadre of thinkers who are being dubbed the new atheists. These are a group of influential scientists, including Richard Dawkins and Steven Weinberg.

An excellent overview of the issues can be found here for science and here for religion And what I grapple with when I read overviews like these and I contemplate them, and when I link it back to the philosophy I'm currently reading, is the incredible arrogance of the human animal, that must believe that humans are of paramount importance to the world and that the beauty and elegance of the universe must be the creation of a conscious omnipotent being who sees humans as "his" children. But I also seem some arrogance in some of the science positions, for simply rejecting outright the fact that humans have long seemed to need some sort of spirituality.

Weinberg makes an excellent point in this presentation though that the approach to truth in science is that science doesn't have heroes. He says that science stamps out wishful thinking and its role is to stamp out religious belief in order free the world from the taint of religion. I think these are a valid point, and an excellent place to place some of my own fundamental beliefs. And I believe that I don't have to believe in a deity in order to act in an ethical and moral fashion. So how do I fashion my own morality and ethics?

It came up in class this week too, while reading and discussing Bhabha, that I seem to leave no room for morality and was implicated as an amoral scholar. I argued that this wasn't true but was then flummoxed. In what do I base my own beliefs in right action? How do I conceive of the right way to act and live, when I feel the need and fundamental rightness of doing has to lay outside of both science and religion?

Heavy questions. So what I'm trying now to suss out, then, through reading more of these new atheists, watching some of the lectures around these debates between science and religion (such as these and these) and through books like Somerville's Ethical Imagination (points of which are presented here in the Massey lectures), is what is it that directs my own sense of "right" behaviour and belief in the absence of an omnipotent director deity.

I'm working on papers that try to see what it is about the human imagination and concepts of agency that requires us to believe in some sort of transcendent human purpose and design, some ineffable spiritual will. Don't know where I'll end up with all of this, but for me, at the moment, the journey is the thing.