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fta: i assume that you are talking about Meaning as in the Meaning of Existence or Life and not meaning in a more general sense (like semantics)?
which leads me to a little aside:
i am not sure about the way in which the opposition science/religion has been cast in this thread: scientific claims and theological claims get tangled up all the time--think about the claims made about string theory as giving some access to a single, ultimate structure of reality as we know it---the idea that reality has a single ultimate structure is itself a religious assumption, a mapping of notions of some divine agency--it doesn't follow from other premises---and you see this kind of mapping all the time in popularizing books and films that address developments in, say, theoretical physics, from "the tao of physics" onto that bizarre-o film (can't remember the title) that tries to combine ramtha with arguments for quantum physics as a lifestyle---the sciences are carried out by social groups and the folk who comprise these groups have a wide range of personal beliefs that can easily get crossed with their professional activities, particularly at the level of interpretations (but also in fashioning premises for experiments/modelling procedures, etc.)--it is not like someone who works in physics, say, leaves all their assumptions about the world at the door when they put on a lab coat.
in other words, i see no reason to position science as a realm of Objectivity positioned somehow above or outside ideologies (which include various religious affiliations)---to do this is to at once give the sciences too much credit (by virtue of assuming that they have climbed out of ideologies that continue to shape the views of the rest of us) and not enough credit (you make the sciences into a machine-like operation, and strangely enough put it in the same problematic position that a religious person would be inclined to put, say, the church)---you also erase the simple fact that the sciences have histories and that these histories are marked by quite radical changes of the most basic assumptions that shape/inform various interrogations of the world.
what is also curious is the way in which this thread has moved from what was essentially a sociological question (is there a new "atheist movement" out there and, if so, why now?) to a debate about axioms particular to two abstract systems---theism/religion vs. science--in a way that seems to me to reduce both to fictions.
at the same time, the debate is interesting in its circularity--which brings me back to fta's question, and to the start of this post.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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