Extropian1,
I will not pretend to be your peer, or even close, in the content, nature and history of science. My main purpose is to learn from learned people like yourself. Its healthy to open oneself up to scrutiny and criticism, provided it is with those who have the knowledge and generosity (indeed patience!)to do so constructively.

You ask:
"Are you so foolhardy that you confidently predict science will never create a new, artificial disease?"

If a scientist were able to "create a new, artificial disease", or an aspirin for that matter, they would have no need for science. They would just say "Be!" and there it would be.

In your view, can science create a Picasso?

Grateful writes; "If a scientist were able to "create a new, artificial disease", or an aspirin for that matter, they would have no need for science. They would just say "Be!" and there it would be."

I can make no sense of your assertion, except to draw the conclusion that you are repeating nonsense gained from someone you trust. Please explain what you mean, if you know.

"In your view, can science create a Picasso?"

I don't know and I have no shame in admitting this. But science is not tasked with creating great works of art and that is a good thing for if it could the art market would suffer a drastic change. Artists would have no reason to create. Art lovers would see a grotesque devaluation of the creative genius in humankind.

You are assigning a burden to science for which it has no identifiable responsibility. Science is not in the business of imitating genius. Its great value, its purpose, is in explaining the natural world. Science is a method of revealing nature's secrets.

The way the human minds works is a major pursuit of science. Currently our knowledge is far, far, FAR from being comprehensive. The tasks of investigation and observation, of formulating inferences therefrom for testing, are daunting. Science can only research when one mind investigates another and for many years into the future the imperfections and unknowns will vastly outnumber the "certainties".

Kindly note the inverted commas. Science does not and indeed, cannot, deal in certainties. Though many scientific theories are held with great confidence the explanations they offer can never be the last word, for new discoveries may force a rethink or in rare cases an abandonment of the entire theory itself.

Science has much more important purpose than to attempt a frivolous imitation of human genius. It would have no value.

May I just correct a potential misapprehension, grateful.

When you said earlier:

>>Pericles you write: ">>Virtue and sacrifice can only be rational if there is a God.<<<<

It is possible to infer that I wrote those words, when in fact they were your own.

Which you proceeded to defend thus:

>>Man is different from nature. He has choice. If he is God-driven he chooses deeds that will please his Creator and avoids those that will not. If he is not God-driven he will only choose such virtuous deeds as serve his own personal interests.<<

I can certainly accept the first argument, since it forms the basis of many religions: do that which your God commands.

But you produce no evidence to support your second assertion. I know personally many, many individuals who accept that they have a level of responsibility to their communities, and choose "virtuous deeds" solely on that basis. In fact, I would suggest that the vast majority of us do likewise, in everything from careful disposal of garbage to acts of selfless philanthropy, both small and large.

>>He will be just, for example, when justice serves his personal interests, but if it works against his personal interests then the rational man will not be just.<<

Surely you must recognize that acts of justice are almost inevitably in one's personal interest. If this had not been the case, society would long ago have divided itself into "for-God" and "not-for-God" camps. And last time I looked, the majority of conflicts of "justice" appear in the divide between different religions, as opposed to religious vs. atheist.

>>So a virtuous deed will always be rational for the God-driven. For others, a virtuous deed is contingent on his personal interests.<<

Given that for the vast majority of individuals, "personal interest" is entirely congruent with "living in a community", I reject the need for God to appear in any of your equations.

I am not sure what the argument is about here. It could not have been god that saved the good doctor because God does not exist.

Piney of Perth, you are not alone in your thoughts, God does not exist ,

On the basis that "God does not exist" is allied with the topic heading I offer a brief synthesis of why it is legitimate to hold such a conviction.

There is no reason to be convinced that the whole of existence is NOT comprised entirely and simply of matter, its alter-ego energy and the physical laws that govern them. This scenario is the ultimate expression of William of Ockham's Principal of Parsimony, a valuable rule of thumb in the scientific method.

There is no Law of Nature [or physics] that renders this conviction invalid.

Given that the notion of gods is just one of any number of phenomena that can be postulated to exist in this universe, it is meet that we should examine the term "any number".

The sequence of natural [counting] numbers, both negative and positive is, as far as we can know, infinite. Staying with numbers, the figure for Pi has been computed to 10 billion decimal places and counting with no conclusion in sight. There is, I suggest, an infinity of things that can be postulated into existence. Within this infinity of things, somewhere, is a thing called a god. There have been, and still are, quite a few of them actually with each one clamouring for supremacy and legitimacy. Where on an imagined line of infinite length do they belong? If this discomforts some purists, perhaps we could ask then, where in a hierarchy of infinite dimensions would gods be? To my way of thinking, carrying the postulation further toward a conclusion really concludes in absurdity. For what reason should a god's claim to pre-eminence in an infinite hierarchy be recognised? What makes the claim more legitimate than Russel's teapot or Henderson's Flying Spaghetti Monster, or pink-eyed Uxigrabes for that matter?

Pink-eyed Uxigrabes don't exist? Prove it! And smile indulgently while the faithful advise that logically this kind of negativity cannot be proven.

It wasn't some god that cured Dr.Brantly, it was my P-EU. You'd better believe it Pilgrim!