Alien Life and Human Purpose (el. knyga) (skaityta knyga) | knygos.lt

Aprašymas

The question of whether we are alone in the universe has held humanity s attention for thousands of years. Alien Life and Human Purpose does not offer an answer to the empirical question of whether life exists outside the planet Earth. Instead it provides a rhetorical examination of the way major historical figures connect their arguments for the absence of alien life, or unity, to their philosophical, religious, and ethical agendas. An enormous amount of scholarly work examines the role of the geocentric solar system as a scientific myth anchoring the medieval value system in Western Europe. This book argues that unity had a complimentary mythic function and more importantly continues to play such a role in shaping modern social values. Although the unity myth has often existed in the background of society, shaping institutions and values, during periods where relativism gained prominence, its opponents actively wielded the unity myth as a response. Plato used the unity myth against the sophists, Anglican theologian and philosopher William Whewell against the utilitarians, co-discoverer of evolution Alfred Russell Wallace against the Social Darwinists, University Professors Frank J. Tipler and John D. Barrow against the postmodernists, Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee against defenders of the principle of Mediocrity, and Simon Conway Morris against the neo-Darwinists. These individuals presented scientific defenses of unity and then used the fact of unity to claim the universe is teleological, knowable, and ordered, rather than chaotic and relativistic. The high profile clashes over relativism almost always found in bestselling books, demonstrate the importance of the understudied discourse of the unity myth."