Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

16
When Scientists Know Sin
The mind of man - how far will it advance? Where will its
daring impudence find limits? If human villainy and human
life shall wax in due proportion, if the son shall always grow
in wickedness past his father, the gods must add another
world to this that all the sinners may have space enough.
Euripides,
Hippolytus (428 BC)
In a post-war meeting with President Harry S Truman, J. Robert
Oppenheimer - the scientific director of the Manhattan nuclear
weapons project - mournfully commented that scientists had bloody
hands; they had now known sin. Afterwards, Truman instructed his
aides that he never wished to see Oppenheimer again. Sometimes
scientists are castigated for doing evil, and sometimes for warning
about the evil uses to which science may be put.
More often, science is taken to task because it and its
products are said to be morally neutral, ethically ambiguous, as
readily employed in the service of evil as of good. This is an old
indictment. It goes back probably to the flaking of stone tools
and the domestication of fire. Since technology has been with
our ancestral line from before the first human, since we are a
technological species, this problem is not so much one of
science as of human nature. By this I don't mean that science
has no responsibility for the misuse of its findings. It has
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