[FoRK] Clay Shirky kicks off the new year...

[Bill Humphries]

On Jan 2, 2008, at 1:27 PM, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar wrote:

> http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_index.html#tudge
> The Omniscience and Omnipotence of Science
>
>> I have changed my mind about the omniscience and omnipotence of  
>> science. I now realize that science is strictly limited, and that  
>> it is extremely dangerous not to appreciate this.

But you do not get a free "therefore there is a God" out of that  
statement, but I think you realize that.

There are things which we don't know, corners we can't see around, and  
huge icebergs lurking below the surface which we won't know about  
until we hit them.

I try to be a positivist, and hope we can engineer or discover tool  
kits for testable questions about them.

But it's okay to answer: we, as a species, don't know the answer to  
that, and don't have a way of asking the question in a way that yields  
a testable hypothesis.

-- whump