- “The people who will be most severely harmed by climate change have not yet been conceived” says philosopher Peter Singer in the New York Times, before asking a very provocative question that I will let you read for yourself.
- Champions of market-based solutions are predicting ‘biodiversity offsetting‘ as the next big thing. Oh dear.
- Of all the stupid World Cup tie-in products, I think this one is the stupidest I’ve seen so far.
- If you can handle being on the mailing list of Velvet toilet paper (I can’t), they’re giving away free trees this month.
The Earthbound Report 
Jeremy since you are from the religious side of things what is your opinion of this sort of attitude?
http://gerardnadal.com/2010/06/15/peter-singer-nihilism-gone-wild
That’s strangely head-in-the-sand post from someone who claims to be a scientist – he seems to see science as a ‘cultic’ competitor to Christianity, which I don’t quite understand. I don’t think he grasps Singer’s point either, as he asks the question rather than actually advocates non-existence.
That’s pretty far from my own beliefs – in fact I suspect that Dr Gerard Nadal wouldn’t recognise me as a Christian at all.
I just wonder if this points to a larger problem involving a severe identity bias, in that those who are under such a bias, even if intelligent, well educated and sincere, cannot tell the difference between rationalisations and reasoning. The real scary part is if it can happen to them it could be happening to us. After all even science is full of incidents of bias and it taking years before a new theory was accepted by the mainstream.
BTW I have a Catholic friend who would have very similar ideas to you and me
& I have to fess up I only skimmed it and missed his wider questions first time round.
I do think I would have picked another title for the article though. 🙂
Jeremy,
My comment,
” He then postulates that it is unethical to inflict such suffering on persons not yet born, with the only ethically acceptable solution being nonexistence.
“That has been the end-point of the Culture of Death all along. This cultic competitor of Christianity distorts human freedom by enlarging it to the point where the order of creation, both physical and spiritual, is eclipsed.”
clearly speaks to the Culture of Death as a cultic competitor to Christianity, not science. As for not grasping Singer’s point, I grasp it all too well. Nazi eugenics didn’t start with Hitler, but with Margaret Sanger and the American eugenics movement, it moved into Germany with the bioethicists ‘merely asking questions’. That’s always the way: verbal engineering preceding social engineering.