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On a couple of points of principle.
Perhaps not religion, but morality certainly needs to be incorporated into science. We can differ on what morality entails. The Germans that experimented on concentration camp prisoners, the Russians that did the same sort of thing, and the US government experimenting on troops and civilians all had different sorts of moral underpinnings, ones that we now disagree with. But at the time, they were all 'science'. The border between ethical and unethical, between human life worth protecting and life not worth protecting, and between when something is human life and not human life have always been moral judgements.
The problem is that religion is frequently what you get when you codify morality in a theist guise. You can get precisely the same kinds of codes without theism; sometimes those are dubbed religions as well. When such moral codes work for change that we find moral, they're good; when they're not what we find moral, then all such activity must be banned. In this case, it seems that discussion would solve the problem without disenfranchising people because of their beliefs.
The second point deals with the interaction of government supported activity and public awareness/knowledge. On the one hand, we certainly don't want the ignorant, unwashed masses daring to interfere in what we, the cogniscenti, think is right, do we? What kind of a democracy would that be? :sarcasm: It would be a technocracy, in which we dare not let people have a say in things they don't understand, and we're free from the obligation of actually engaging in discourse with the plebes. Many can't stand it when corporations take that attitude; here we want the government to have that attitude. Public debate is good; Catholic priests are part of "the public", as are fundies. So debate. At least there were objections that *could* be answered, something few here have noted: it's not a question of, "When does human life begin?", something that is not going to be resolved in a lab. The questions are concrete, and have concrete responses. This is a marked improvement in the level of discourse.
On the other hand, we've done a lousy job educating people. I've pointed out before that some students in my grad program avoided the use of microwave ovens; they believed that microwaves went into the food and stayed there--if you ate it, microwaves would be released in your stomach and partially cook you; in this, they shared a belief with some people I knew in a fundie church. This was a humanities program, to be sure, but you'd expect that somebody wouldn't say something so inane the same month she's defending her dissertation, and get no objection. Esp. when she got her bachelors from a prestigious school, and was getting her PhD from an equally prestigious school. I intruded on their group to object, and another of the students said I had been brainwashed. It was microwave *radiation*, and the food had to absorb radioactive particles. (Yeah, I said, "photons." "See!? You admit it!") That particular PhD, and her fellow thinkers, obviously prefer darkness.
The people objecting to this stem-cell research went from a facile critique of the press release. Given the all-round lack of good will (that useless detail Grice pointed out was crucial for actual discourse), this isn't unexpected. From their point of view, relevant information was left out; leaving out relevant information can be due either to lack of awareness of the audience's knowledge or due to ill-will. In this case, the writers had a different audience in mind; no ill-will was intended, and this is fairly obvious in their measured responses. Most of the critics will eventually get over their current ill-will and distrust.
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