Blog #9

Barclay Paragraph Practice:

Many people including, Steven Pinker and John Lehrer, say that art and science are two different topics that are for separate ideas. Pinker, who is a linguist and science author who knows that “science and religion belong to ‘non-overlapping magisteria’.” He argues that “science gets the empirical universe; religion gets the questions of moral meaning and value.” Science is referred to as the facts and known in the world, it is something that can be analyzed. Whereas, religion, referring to art, is something that is unknown, can not be tested or overanalyzed to find answers about it. Lehrer an American author who studied neuroscience and brought together science and humanities to understand human behavior talked against his belief that art and science should come together. Lehrer said, “The novel is just a work of fiction, which is the opposite of experimental fact.” Science contains facts and is something that can be tested, but art (the novel) is something made up, there are no hard facts that what the book contains is actually real. Both Pinker and Lehrer argue that science and art are two different topics that cannot be apart of the same thing because one is facts and the other is unknown.

The way we see the world is not something that just comes out of thin air it comes from knowledge and facts. Steven Pinker is a psychologist, linguist, and science author who knows what science brings to the table and the way we view the world. According to Pinker, “[T]he worldview that guides the moral and spiritual values of an educated person today is the worldview given to us by science.” One can not go about the world looking at it without having the knowledge of science and how it shapes our morals and values. We know things are the way they are because of scientific facts which affect the way we see things for what they are. Like Pinker, I know that there is science that an educated person has to have in order to know their rights from their wrongs and know their values. One has to know that without cause and effect, like in science, there are things that happen because of the way we view the world. If you are an optimistic person and see someone hurting someone else, it is in your morals to help the person getting hurt because of the knowledge you have from science, in this case, cause and effect. You helped the person because you view the world as a place that can get better, there are just steps that need to happen for the world to be better. Which is why our worldview does not come out of thin air but from science.