catapult magazine

catapult magazine
 

discussion

Will film and media kill science?

Default

Anonymous
Jan 13 2003
09:38 am

Is science being mistreated in pop culture? Films and media paint science to be an invincible machine that can do anything we want. Papers run stories about rich oil owners in Texas who hire scientists to give them the chance at another 100 years of life (Vancouver Sun), and numerous film makers create futuristic worlds which are supposed to be evidently based on scientific principles (The Matrix, Terminator, Contact). The issue is not with the article author or film makers, but with the perception of science as a ?wish fulfiller? by the film industry and the media. If science is being relied on to fulfill these ideals, our society will be up for disappointment and science will loose credibility. Part of science is imagining possibilities based on present theories, but a healthy perception of science needs to be rooted in the process of the scientific method.

Default

grant
Jan 31 2003
08:59 am

A “quick” question? I’ll do my best to offer a quick answer that furthers the topic at hand.

I think Christians’ criticism that postmodern philosophers are relativistic might be better directed at Richard Rorty types, i.e. at people who take a pragmatic approach to truth (the “whatever works” mentality). The people I’m referring to (Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida) really belong to a different tradition.

Both Levinas and Derrida are French Jews who have been dealing with issues of ethics after the horrors of World War II. According to these thinkers, the war clearly showed the evil of absolutes. These thinkers would not say that truth is relative, yet they do recognize the relationality of truth. Levinas, for instance, talks alot about what relationship with God ought to mean in terms of a relationship with the Other that is other than ourselves.

The reason I brought these guys up is because they offer new possibilities for looking back on the past without using the scientific method. Derrida even offers an alternative to positive science in a book called “Of Grammatology”, which tries to kick meddling science out of writing, to give writing back to itself (since its own story has been overcome and dominated by the pretended “objectivity” of history). Derrida does not do “philosophy” as such, because philosophy was born and raised as this ‘will to master one’s environment’, a will to know all of life totally, absolutely, as God knows it. Rather, Derrida agrees with Heidegger that we are called to be thinkers after philosophy, thinking beings open to the call of the Other Who makes us face our own limitations.