Word: appleyard
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...think any intelligent person has that attitude. A President is just a man who is fallible. As we note the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II, we recall that the same logic produced blind obedience to orders by the Nazis and the Japanese militarists. Keith Appleyard Brighton, England When my brother died in Iraq, we accepted his death with grace and reverence for his service. Sheehan's conduct is embarrassing and dishonorable. The media portray her as a hero, a David vs. a Goliath. I see a weak woman who has sacrificed her son's honor...
Last summer a journalist named Bryan Appleyard rode this discontent to the top of England's best-seller lists with a neoconservative polemic called Understanding the Present, subtitled Science and the Soul of Modern Man. In Britain, the book inspired headlines such as FOR GOD'S SAKE FIRE THE BIG BANG BRIGADE. Its publication in the U.S. has begun to strike sparks. Science, maintains Appleyard, devalues questions it can't answer, such as the meaning of life or the existence of God. Its relentless advance has driven the magic out of the world, leaving us with nothing to believe...
...Appleyard would lay the woes of the 20th century at Stephen Hawking's wheelchair. Commenting on Hawking's oft-expressed hope that physicists may soon construct a theory that would unite all the forces of nature into one mathematical equation suitable for a T shirt, a so-called theory of everything, he declaims alarmingly that it could be used to predict that "a particular snowflake would fall on a particular blade of grass or that you would be reading this now." Never mind that such deterministic ambitions died long ago with the discovery of quantum uncertainty. Faced with that prospect...
...Physicists can neither prove nor disprove that Jesus turned water into wine, only that such a transformation is improbable under the present admittedly provisional physical laws. Quantum theory and tensor equations are part of nature as much as trees and rains and sex. We are, all of us, including Appleyard, free to make what we want of it. We are free to wake up every morning grateful for the feeling of sunshine on our face or grumpy for the prospect of tomorrow's rain. The fact that science cannot find any purpose to the universe does not mean there...
...this be alienation, make the most of it. We could have used a little more in, say, Nazi Germany. If history teaches us anything, it is to beware people who know the truth. Appleyard and his neoconservative friends moan about the demise of moral and cultural authority and bash liberal democracy because it fails to choose. But the failure to choose is itself a choice. What it chooses is that people are, or can be, grownups. That too is a value, the notion that we all individually or collectively may be the salvation of one another. Cosmic ignorance does...