June 01, 2004
Catholic Nanotech?
NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition!
Apparently an article in the Summer 2004 National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly (vol. 4 No. 2) can only be described as "Genius". The article is Humanity and Nanotechnology by Tihamer T. Toth-Fejel.
Following a few links, most of the referenced work seems to relate to ten year old MNT work. As if we didn’t have enough of a nanotech schism without dragging religion into it.
Posted by Cientifica at June 1, 2004 11:02 PM | TrackBackThe "Legos to the Stars" article is eight years old, no question. But JHU's Greg Chirikjian did what I recommended in that article, and NIAC just posted his and my more recent work on Self-Replication at http://www.niac.usra.edu/files/studies/final_report/pdf/880Chirikjian.pdf and
http://www.niac.usra.edu/files/studies/final_report/pdf/883Toth-Fejel.pdf respectively (neither was available when I wrote the article for NCBQ).
But the recentness of technology cited is fairly irrelevant, since ethics and morality do not depend on technology - I am simply looking at the consequences of MNT, just as Drexler did 20 years ago in EOC.
As far as dragging religion into it, because of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, *everyone* makes non-provable assumptions about reality on which to make day-to-day decisions. If that isn't religion, I don't know what is.
Posted by: Tihamer T. Toth-Fejel at June 8, 2004 04:47 PMPerhaps the concerns about nanotechnology in this article are not based on the research which is actually being pursued on a large scale worldwide. But I don't see why religious people can't join the debate on ethics of science and technology including nanotechnology. Catholics today don't live in the Middle ages and are not known to be hostile to scientists. In fact the Vatican has a pontifical academy of science including Nobel Prize winner for Supra Molecular chemistry Jean Marie Lehn. See: http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_academies/acdscien/index.htm
Furthermore the Catholic Social Teaching includes many sensible considerations e.g. on matters of life and death, including the responsibility of scientists (under the Fifth Commandment, You shall not kill.) This ethics is based on a 2000 year old tradition, and is continuously being reformulated to be relevant to the people living today.
Finally, also renowned nano-scientists can be religious, as exemplified by Cees Dekker of the Technical University of Delft who is also openly a protestant. Needless to say that I am a practising Catholic myself.