Gravity again

[Rev'd Seventy-Six]

"...traditions are useless now. The scientists took over and they don't
believe in anything except hubris and machines."

I disagree.  I'm an agnostic, personally, but I've read a great many
interviews with scientists who consider themselves moral & ethical
Christians, Coptics, Muslims, Jainists, u.s.w.  Their faiths-- even those
noted for being exceptionally exacting & stringent in their practices --do
not Conflict with their chosen fields because religious dogma *doesn't have
a place in what they're doing,* except in the usual academic / peer worship
sense.  I might be making your point for you here, who knows.  They are
individuals, first & foremost, and make the same crap decisions as anyone
else; popular opinion seems to be against them because their actions have a
greater probability of having greater consequences than that of the average
schlemiel.  Witness the regular whipping science has received by the
(extremely monied, fundamentalist-supported) anti-climate change crowd.  I
do not sense P making any judgment against science or scientists in his
novels.  As an engineer he admires them and sympathizes with their peculiar
place in critical events.

The men who made rocketry possible were engaged in an entirely different
kind of worship than you or I might be able to conceive of, but certainly
not a satanic one.  Witness Franz Pökler.*  *For all the horror that made
the space program possible...  I wince when I think about it because my
father was granted a scholarship by NASA  --yet,* it made the space program
possible.*  Any evolution is always a tortured dark crawl out of the
ignorant muck.  That's the history of our species and its spiritual
evolution as a whole.  Hubris or not, we might be a little wiser, a little
nearer the light than the last batch.  Who's to say the greater evolution
of science isn't to become a worldwide religion that's *cool, but cares*?*

*
You're obviously making a generalization, I just can't quite parse your
tone.  You make it sound like the game's over and humanity lost.  In my
hopelessly biased view scientists may be among the most qualified to
extricate us from the many, many messes capitalism-driven industry and
religion have wrought before it's too late.  My longtime girlfriend is an
animist and a cancer specialist & naturally I think the world of her so she
may've influenced my thinking in this, but:  I've been rereading GR
slooowly over the past month and it seems to me while P can be cynical he's
irreducibly an optimist.  I don't believe he's going to write our species
off with BE.  P don't judge.
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