mzbk2l wrote:
LeagueOf1291 wrote:
The question of when life begins is a moral and philosophical issue, not a scientific one.
Abortion and other population control methods should be funded by individuals and private organizations that favor those methods -- not by the public.
I disagree that question of life beginning is moral or philosophical; if science can not provide an answer to a biological question, what good is it?
<snip>
Well, science, like any other discipline, is only good for what it's good for. Astronomy is no help in making cookies, and biology describes chemical processes in living things -- it doesn't define life, it merely observes its processes. Science is good for that much, but it's no good when it comes to defining what life is and when it begins.
Scientific methodology is useful for gaining empirical knowledge of certain aspects of the natural world -- and that's about where its usefulness ends. It relies on the principles of observation, falsifiability, and repeatability. We can observe things happening, we can come up with falsifiable theories about what we're observing, and we can repeat the observations to test the theories.
But none of this tells us the
meaning of the biological processes we're observing. That is a
value judgment that has nothing to do with empirical reality. Rather, when we ascribe meaning to the biological process of conception and call it life (or not), we're making a moral judgment about the
inherent value of that thing we're observing.
So scientific methodology is a way of gaining empirical knowledge -- size, weight, composition, temperature, activity -- about the pack of cells, and then we move on the the question of what it is and what it's worth.
And that inquiry is entirely outside the scope of scientific methodology.
