science and ethics

In today's New York Times, an article on science and religion. The article presents a false dichotomy - EITHER we keep science and ethics separate, OR religion provides the ethics. The third (and I hope, obvious) explanation is ignored: that maybe science can provide the ethics.

Note that I say science and not scientists. A scientist in one discipline may be hopelessly bigoted in another. Religious people may collect examples of scientists who have created bombs, etc. But for every example of a bad scientists, I can show a bad religious person, and also show that the scientist in question based his ethics on religion.

Science is simply a rational approach to truth. For example, science can demonstrate that cooperation helps survival, and skin color creates less difference than random variation. Most important, science is testable, and if it is proven wrong it changes (or else it isn't science). To find systems of ethics based on science, just Google words like atheist or humanist and ethics.

To illustrate: My daughter's homework this week requires her to see how different religions approach an ethical issue. To help her, I found the nearest I could find to official statements on a hot ethical topic (in this case, stem cell research) from various religious and non-religious web sites, including Catholic, Anglican, Unitarian, Humanist, and others. On this topic at least, it is pretty obvious that the less religious you are, the more likely you are to be well informed, sympathetic to others, non-judgmental, and concerned about real consequences as opposed to imagined ones. Based on this, science has better ethics than religion.