On a similar note, Leonard Cohen’s “Story of Isaac”
The door it opened slowly,
my father he came in,
I was nine years old.
And he stood so tall above me,
his blue eyes they were shining
and his voice was very cold.
He said, “I’ve had a vision
and you know I’m strong and holy,
I must do what I’ve been told.”
So he started up the mountain,
I was running, he was walking,
and his axe was made of gold.
Well, the trees they got much smaller,
the lake a lady’s mirror,
we stopped to drink some wine.
Then he threw the bottle over.
Broke a minute later
and he put his hand on mine.
Thought I saw an eagle
but it might have been a vulture,
I never could decide.
Then my father built an altar,
he looked once behind his shoulder,
he knew I would not hide.
You who build these altars now
to sacrifice these children,
you must not do it anymore.
A scheme is not a vision
and you never have been tempted
by a demon or a god.
You who stand above them now,
your hatchets blunt and bloody,
you were not there before,
when I lay upon a mountain
and my father’s hand was trembling
with the beauty of the word.
And if you call me brother now,
forgive me if I inquire,
“Just according to whose plan?”
When it all comes down to dust
I will kill you if I must,
I will help you if I can.
When it all comes down to dust
I will help you if I must,
I will kill you if I can.
And mercy on our uniform,
man of peace or man of war,
the peacock spreads his fan.
While we’re talking about Leonard Cohen songs (or while I am anyway), one of my faves is One of Us Cannot Be Wrong. It’s on YouTube too but take all the commenters’ advice and scroll down or hide the window because the car footage really doesn’t complement the tune or lyrics!
Paul Scofield is dead. Vale, a great actor. Among the memorable performances, Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons, his Lear, and the older Martin Chuzzlewit in the BBC TV series, Martin Chuzzlewit. Some of you might like to add some more.
spare a thought for some of the poorest amongst us who are starting a concerted campaign to ease Tony Abbott’s mortgage stress and Andrew Robb’s travel expenses stress.
“CASH-strapped Liberal MPs are mounting a behind-the-scenes push to boost their salaries of $127,060 - for serving as shadow ministers.
The push is being made on behalf of former high-fliers whose salaries were cut by about $100,000 a year when the Howard government fell.
Government ministers get an additional $92,119 if they are in cabinet, and $73,060 if they are in the outer ministry. But at no time in the 107-year history of Federal Parliament have Opposition MPs received a special allowance for being a shadow minister. They get the base backbencher’s pay - which now is $127,060.”
Oscar nails it.
Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard
Some do it with a bitter look
Some with a flattering word
The coward does it with a kiss
The brave man with a sword.
Poor old Hillsong is getting a pounding again. Their affiliated ministry, Mercy Ministries, received front-page attention in the Sydney Morning Herald this week for their abuse of young women who came to them seeking help for their psychiatric problems.
Mercy Ministries advertises free professional help for young women with such problems as anorexia, drug addictions and suicidal tendencies, but in reality deprives them of proper medical assistance, substituting instead a “Christian” approach, where unqualified staff “treat” the young women through prolonged prayer, Bible study, exorcism of demons and speaking in tongues.
One woman was told that demons were causing her anorexia. Another woman with asthma had her ventolin taken from her. When she had an asthma attack, she was told to stop acting. She was punished by having to write an assignment on why God believes lying is wrong. These and other women have had to undergo years of intense psychological and psychiatric care to overcome their treatment at the ministry.
Mercy Ministries advertises on its website that applicants should be on Centrelink payments. These payments are then transferred to the ministry. The ministry also received carers’ allowances from Centrelink. Centrelink is now under investigation for its participation in this rort.
Mercy Ministries is sponsored by Gloria Jean’s coffeeshop chain. One of its founders, Nabi Saleh, sits on the Hillsong board. It’s other founder, Peter Irvine, quit on Tuesday after the news of Mercy’s cult activities broke.
Gloria Jean’s, like Hillsong, has close ties to the Liberal party. In 2005 Gloria Jean’s was named Franchisor of the Year. However, it will not grant franchises to members of the ALP.
As the restoration of control in Tibet and the Tibetan regions of China continues,the Taiwanese are voting in their presidential election this Saturday. The outcome is still too hard to predict.
WHEN Mercy Ministries says it helps young women with “life-controlling issues”, it means in part that it aims to teach them not to be lesbians.
In line with the Hillsong Church’s strict doctrines teaching that homosexuality is an affliction that can be cured, Mercy Ministries is keen to ensure there is no lesbianism under its roof. It issues “separation contracts” to young women who make friends with each other and prevents any form of physical contact between residents.
Yeah, nevermind 150 million people being displaced within 50 years by rising sea levels in the Asia-Pacific - the main thing is to stop teh lesbianism!
Incidentally, parents and guardians: “Horton hears a who” is the best kid movie ever! While away two hours of school hols there, no problemo. Few side gags for the oldies too.
“Gloria Jean’s, like Hillsong, has close ties to the Liberal party. In 2005 Gloria Jean’s was named Franchisor of the Year. However, it will not grant franchises to members of the ALP.”
And yet when we Balmain basket-weavers took to the streets in protest to keep out these foul grinders - manky 2nd-harvest beans, vulnerable young women, it’s all the same to Teh Evil Corporate Coffee Machine - oh, how the ‘free’ market hard-heads mocked.
Did you know McDonalds donated and installed the cryogenic deep-freezers at Roswell? Fact.
[Myers]We laughed over the movie, which I hear is not only boring and poorly made, but is ludicrous in its dishonesty. Apparently, a standard tactic is to do lots of fast cuts between biologists like me or Dawkins or Eugenie Scott and shots of Nazi atrocities. It’s all very ham-handed. The audience apparently ate it up, though. Figures. Christians have a growing reputation for their appreciation of dishonesty.
Notably the makers of the film interviewed both Dawkins and Myers under false pretences and incorporated/edited those clips in the film, unfairly it appears.
No surprises there from the IDiot brigade, no tactic too low or too dirty in the long term attempt to destroy the teaching of evolution in schools by appealing to the gullible illiterati.
“…no tactic too low or too dirty in the long term attempt to destroy the teaching of evolution in schools by appealing to the gullible illiterati…”
Right, let’s see if I’ve got this right, then:
1. ID is so manifestly absurd, so dishonest, so patently irrational and a-scientific, so obviously loony spivvery that…
2. …if we allow it the tiniest inch, the teeniest toe-hold, in a functioning modern world daily dominated in the vast majority of everyone’s workaday realms by rational empirical scientific parameters and analysis…
3. ……WE’LL ALL BE ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOONED!
Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…O, whither the lonely empirical scientist!? O, won’t SOMEBODY think of the poor helpless lonely empirical scientist!
*Exits in Easter huff, munching choccie, sweeping straw (too)*
Can you think of a good reason why we should allow the lies of ID to be taught, when there’s barely enough time to teach people any proper science anyway?
Actually 1) is true and is reason enough not to teach it as part of a science curriculum. I have no problem with it being taught as part of religious studies with the preface; “some people believe…”
I was long ago consigned to the dust-bin of irrationality for reading C20th French philosophy, so I find myself on the side of ID by default on this one. I’ll be in the corner reading Isabelle Stengers if you feel like denouncing (now deeply un-) fashionable nonsense all over again.
Read the wording, the verb and subject especially:
‘…to destroy the teaching of evolution…’
I happen to think ID is subjective hooey, too. I also happen to think that great swathes of command economics is subjective hooey. But that gets taught in ‘Economics’, if anywhere. Bits of Newtonian physics are hooey now, too. Lots - all? - of astrophysics are pure speculation, provisionally subjective hooey by a fancier name. Unless you think that teaching science is a matter of delivering swathes of received facts to kids rather than teaching-by-doing a series of process-principles - which you probably do if you don’t understand what limited and fundamentally humble claims ’science’ actually makes for its authority - then you will grasp that it is not, epistemologically at least, a ‘zero sum’ game, in the sense that if you teach X, you effectively ‘un-teach’ anti-X. When a scientist says gravity exists he’s not saying ‘gravity exists’, he’s saying ‘we haven’t proved gravity doesn’t exist yet’. In a way scientists ought to be damned glads ID is taught as ’science’ because then the ID-ers accept the rules of the science game and, like flat earth theory and the ether, can get blown away on those terms in ten seconds flat. Teach it as ‘religion’, su, and those kids who were going to swallow it anyway still will, and suddenly your scientist is punching in a ring by himself.
Unless as a scientist (say) you have an unbearably grim, hysterical (and, btw, beardy patrician) view of humans’ (in)capacity to parse/juggle/layer nuance and contradiction, plus a less-than-secure confidence in your own gig’s epistemological solidity and integrity, then you won’t feel remotely threatened by a couple of lectures of the Jesus-made-the-fossils-to-trick-us ilk. In fact - my real point - if you have a genuine confidence in your own scientific methodologies and epistemologies - as opposed to a hysterical, protest-too-much anxiety about them, perhaps? - then you’ll relax and let them expose their anti-science spivvery all by ‘emselves. Dept of Rope, Enough, Petards, Auto-Hoist, etc. Most kids aren’t stupid. ID - as ’science’ - is, manifestly so. Who d’ya think gunna win?
I take Z’s point that there is a milder kind of ‘zero sum’ element involved here, in the banal time element. But come on, we teach a lot of faddish tosh in schools, alway have. I hardly think any Western Enlightenment civilisation/free market economy, with its fundamentally outcome-and-technology driven utilitarian daily demands, is in danger of disappearing in a big bang of Unicorn Theory. Here at the dawn of the third millennium we’ve got our kids living, breathing, working, existing near 24-7 arse-up and head-down on a relentlessly scientific and rational treadmill. Even if we wildly strawman and exaggerate the threat (after Dawkins, et al), or even if we do consider those relatively few biddable sprogs of those relatively few ID-obsessed cults around…well, the next generation’s unavoidable and overwhelming lived/observed ‘daily proofing’ of the triumph of the scientific rational - no matter what their oldies may spray from the pulpit - is, IMHO, more than sufficient prophylactic against some new Dark Ages society-wide jettisoning of reason ever taking hold.
Dooming our kids to live out their four-score and twentythirtyforty fifty???? in an icky beige-n’-pastel, right-n-rational, 1+1=2 (and only 2) ‘health, wealth and happiness Dullzone - a pig, in a cage, on antibiotics - is revenge enough on our billies as it is. Why not let the poor kiddies dream of origami unicorns a little, now and then?
I object only because it’s Easter and I’ve just snapped off the drill bit wot I was trying to drill out a self-tapper I snapped off yesterday in the head of the Tele I’m trying to coax into grunty splendour this w/end and I’m cranky with the utter useless fraud that is Empirical Science & Technological Methodology. And, as usual, us ‘in our own room’ believers got the collateral damage in this latest exchange b/w the zealots of either God Wars camp. (In this case for being, ‘holus-holus’, increasingly partial to lies, or something. News to me, dudes…).
Was it “Intelligent Design” when God sent me down there to be nailed to a plank of wood?
Gee, thanks Dad.
That design is about as intelligent as Microsoft products.
And BTW, when you celebrate Easter you stir up a whole lot of unpleasant memories.
So thanks for nothing.
PS, why couldn’t I redeem the world somewhere nice, like Melbourne? I love the laneway culture there. And Jerusalem has always been and still is a shit-hole.
You seem to have mistaken my intent Jack R; I don’t want to prevent anyone from believing in ID, that is not why it should not be taught as part of a science curriculum. Unfalsifiable hypotheses are not part of science. It really is that simple. That doesn’t mean that there is no worth to them as ideas, it just means that they have no business in a system which is predicated upon building theory from testable hypotheses. Shall we now teach astrology and pagan theology in science, simply because it seems churlish not to admit them?
And if you think that science is beige then you need to consider the theoretical physicists and mathematicians who use both science and imagination to dream of solutions which are at once rational, falsifiable and poetic. Their unicorns are the most wondrous of all to me. They are no less beautiful just because I can reach out and touch them.
The annual Doncaster Passion Play urgently need to borrow an ass becasue their other one is being uncooperative, if anyone here can help out the best thing to do probably would be just bring your donkey to Ruffey Lake Park tonight just before sundown. (Via the Manningham Leader.)
Oh and by the way using your computer to communicate via the internet about the unbearable dreariness of rational thought = my dose of delightful irony for the weekend.
That bit of snark prompted by the gratuitous use of the word hysterical in your screed up there. “Beardy & patrician” I am still pondering on.
Lots - all? - of astrophysics are pure speculation, provisionally subjective hooey by a fancier name
So what are all those telescopes doing, then?
What really gets up scientists nose is all this pontificating about what should be taught as science by people who have absolutely no idea what the facts are.
Did you know that astrophysical models of stellar fusion were so accurate that they forced the particle physicists to revise the Standard Model of particle physics (derived from particle accelerator measurements) and infer that neutrinos have mass? Thats the kind of confirmation that comes with a great deal more than “pure speculation”.
It’s already true that a large proportion of people in the US think the Earth is only a few thousand years old. It’s crazy. And it gets harder to teach people real science when its socially acceptable to reject it and unnacceptable to look at the details and find that scientists aren’t a bunch of wierdos theorising in advance of the data.
“What really gets up scientists nose is all this pontificating about what should be taught as science by people who have absolutely no idea what the facts are. Did you know that astrophysical models of stellar fusion were so accurate that they forced the particle physicists to revise the Standard Model of particle physics (derived from particle accelerator measurements) and infer that neutrinos have mass? Thats the kind of confirmation that comes with a great deal more than “pure speculation”.
No, I didn’t know that, Zarquon. Couldn’t tell you what the state of play in AI, neurosurgery or rocket science is exactly, either. STFW? I’ll take at face value that your k-pow! refers to some experimental observation/analysis m-o-m-e-n-t in the scientific empirical methodology cycle when the accumulated weight of data from various collegiate sources/projects transformed, by way of general peer-reviewed consent and consensus, a certain originally purely (but progressively-diminishingly) speculative theory (AKA provisional subjective hooey) into the broadly-accepted scientific norm of the moment, ie our current astrophysics status quo. Please do look up ‘provisional’, Zakkles. And understand - as I am sure you do - that everything in science is ‘provisional hooey’. Then - presto! - you’ll see with dawning joy and fraternal delight that what I said actually supports, not preemptively attacks, what you rejoindered with. Ufkc me, you lot are chippy, ain’t ya. Seriously, Z, you over-react a tad, no entirel unlike some mildly-zealous religious coil, sprung to object to the tiniest perceived dogmatic gainsay.
You too, su, in your bit about ‘dreaming of solutions’. Again, read my ‘hooey’ bit closely without your shootin’ hand already on the pearl (just ‘cos one of the whores above the saloon is waving a crucifix from the winder and pointing wildly at me behind my back). The splendiferous abstract unicorn-designing of the theoretical poet-scientists whom you urge me to consider is exactly what I had in mind when I was making the unremarkable (and I thought obvious) point that in science today’s fancy-name ‘hooey’ can and has and does (and will go on) turning by way of plod-plod grind-grind empirical methodology into tomorrow’s ‘confirmed’ (sic, after Z) un-hooey. Come on, FFS, the pair of you, I shouldn’t need to plot out how science works. We’re on the same page - get the Dawkinite chips off your shoulders. But the thing is you - we, FFS - need to keep ruthless limiting control of your methodology, what it actually ‘confirms’, if you we are to hold exactly that rational ground you claim is under threat. Over-reacting to over-reaching faith-based blind certitude with over-reaching faith-based blind certitudes of your own is what the over-reaching blindly faith-based want to do. Duh.
So…what I can tell you about your astrophysicist chums, Z, is that whatever it was that was so ‘accurate’ about whatever experimental data/measurement that correlated with whichever model/era of astrophysical speculation about stellar fusion that you/they mean…it sure as shit wasn’t a ‘confirmation’ of anything, I’m afraid, save except for our scientists’ inability thus far to ‘unconfirm’ today’s scientific ‘provisional subjective hooey’. Fine. That could mean that a) indeed, the current state of astrophysics represents absolute ‘confirmed’ truth about the astrophysical world (in which case you better ring the press, and have a convincing soundbite as to how you know that for sure), or b) our astrophysicists simply need to invent more accurate instrumentation and devise more ruthlessly-stringent methodologies/experiments to ‘confirm’ that where they’re currently ‘at’ needs more work.
As for the ‘f***-you, rube’ arrogance of your suggestion that I - or anyone, frankly - might ‘…have no idea of what the facts are’ when it comes to epistemological discussions re: science like this, Zarquon…matey, take a look in the mirror if you ever want to know why - if it’s true, as your lot claim with increasing hysteria enthusiasm, but which I frankly doubt - more and more are inclined towards scepticism about science’s epistemological cocksurity.
I have no idea whether or not you’re an astrophysicist and in any case a game of flash-your-willy is utterly moot. Anyone’s entitled to have a view on ’science’ (or any parts there-of) that is nor more or less legitimate than Albert Einstein’s, tosh. Me? OK, I have an undergraduate degree (Fac hons) in science, majoring in HPS and physics. I also flew helicopters for a decade with the Army if you think I’m some kind of more broad applied science technophobe. Fine, I’m years out of date in everything, no doubt, including the philosophy of science. But I reckon I know at least enough about both theoretical and practical science, its practise, its teaching, its limitations - and especially (like us all) how completely full of shit some scientists can sometimes be, no less so than priests and politicians - to politely sidestep condescending digs like yours.
Su, I also know enough about dictionaries to know that there’s not a single jot of ‘irony’, much less of the ‘delightful’ kind, to be extracted from my comments in the way you breezily assert. Only someone who doesn’t know what irony means could think otherwise. It’s on p. 965 of the New Oxford, middle column, three words down. Or p. 924 of the Mac.
See, su and Zarky (and Dawko, and Myers)? I can do it, too. Condescending disdain, I mean. Not very nice, is it. Sorry in advance.
Jesus @ #27, stop whining and suck it up. Without Easter overkill you’d be just another gobby kike with a persecution complex.
The splendiferous abstract unicorn-designing of the theoretical poet-scientists whom you urge me to consider is exactly what I had in mind when I was making the unremarkable (and I thought obvious) point that in science today’s fancy-name ‘hooey’ can and has and does (and will go on) turning by way of plod-plod grind-grind empirical methodology into tomorrow’s ‘confirmed’ (sic, after Z) un-hooey. Come on, FFS, the pair of you, I shouldn’t need to plot out how science works.
Well since the desire to thrust ID into the curriculum represents an attack upon the method of science rather than upon the current state of science knowledge I am still not sure what your point is? Allow untestable hypotheses in (and if you see no difference between ID and the scientific speculations of physicists then … well I don’t think you do I think you are being disingenuous) and they will just sit there; a dead and immovable weight.
I am still seeing the irony. You think willy-waving is so moot that you immediately have to get your physics/Raaf goolies out in the breeze. My brother was a physics/Raaf person at Point Cook c1975. Can I flash his goolies in my stead.
I think people have to take ID a little more seriously. Not as science but as anti-science. If you can impose it on a science curricula (and this is what they’re trying to do) you then disentangle the basis of science: hypothesis, experiment etc. You move the field toward one which is subject to theocratic authority. Something similar happend in the early part of the second millenia in the Islamic world. The result was that a culture which had made susbstantial scientific progress ground to a halt in the field. The results went arguably beyond the cessation of technological progress, they ended up in theocratic autocracy.
Was it “Intelligent Design” when God sent me down there to be nailed to a plank of wood?
No you idiot. If I’d told you once I told you a thousand times. If you borrow the car, fill the fucking tank up before you bring it back. I’m sorry I had to do this but it’s the only way you’ll ever learn.
Moreover, “fact” does not mean “absolute certainty.” The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are not about the empirical world. Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists often do (and then attack us for a style of argument that they themselves favor). In science, “fact” can only mean “confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.” I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms. — S.J.Gould, in “Evolution as Fact and Theory” Discoverse Magazine, May 1981.
This is a stronger statement that “speculative hooey”. And it means that there is a great deal that can be taught as scientific fact, and how those facts were discovered, without any need for the IDiots to bring their garbage (which has been, by the same standard) disconfirmed over and over again.
“…well I don’t think you do I think you are being disingenuous…”
Moi? Never!
OK, su, possibly, slightly, but…if so, then only for strategy’s sake, viz. keeping my powder dry for the fights against those incursions of faith into non-faith areas that are genuinely threatening. Reproductive rights, seperation of state and faith and judiciary..I know all this is of a piece - but I for one, at least, would feel a lot less concerned if my son was being ‘taught’ ID by a science teacher than a priest…
I guess my overall ‘point’ is something to do with trying to keep the pristine process-realm of ’science’ as supple and as nimble as possible by eschewing ANY blanket exclusion of subject scope on ismic grounds. A suppleness which I think that the heat of ID (etc) is starting to erode in slightly counter-intuitive ways. The point science ought to make itself constantly aware of is the way that tomorrow’s unecpected ‘empirical data’ - a flying machine appearing overhead, aliens arriving, Jesus returning, a new planet spied, AIDS killing - can throw a lot of painstakingly accumulated ‘confirmations’ out the window in a short time. Sure, it’s less likely thse days, but thus, in that spirit of humility, doth an ‘open mind’ become not just a kind of organic epistemological safety net for the Project of Science, but also remains the SUPERTOOL of the MIGHTY REASONING MIND, ta-da!! Nothing is ‘fixed’. Nothing is ‘finished’. The song goes on. Never stop thinking, never stop questioning, never stop re-examining anything. Don’t get flat-footed.
Does that mean I think someone will someone dig up God’s undeniable signature tomorrow, somewhere in the Grampians (hence the need to teach kids ID, in prep for that joyous day)? So we know how to recognise that indisputable ‘I made this’ graffito some truckie unearths while taking a roadside piss outside Dubbo? I expect not. And granted, to the zealous tin-foil hatter our scientific ‘absence of proof isn’t proof of an absence’ invariably distorts into ‘no proof of an absence = proof of an Existence’. So point taken on the falsifiability angle, su - and Adrien. Happy to keep one clunky steel-capped lab boot-heel hard on the fuckers’ gabbing dog-collar’d throats, sure. But maybe we can let them have a wriggle, a breath and a free squeal from time to time, eh? In our language, even, on our terms?
Because if you step back and think about some of the advances in rational scientific speculation-to-(practical, even)-realisation that our generation has seen play out, it’s pretty clear that the notion even of ‘falsifiabiliity’ is itself often a quantity grounded as much in imaginative speculation as the ‘hooey’ speculated. Now, in this era of micro-macro, subatomic/quantum/universe Big Science, half the (imaginative) battle for the white coaters is that very falsifiability dilemma: devising projects that are of empirical use, on near-immeasurable scales at either end, in the way you say. That’s where the line between the ‘faith’ at the heart of godism and the ‘reason’ at the heart of sciencism becomes awfully blurred, IMHO. How do we ever ‘falsify’ speculative theories about time travel, parallel universes…again, I’m not up on the cuting edge, but it doesn’t take too much - if scientists are prepared to be a bit generous (and I think they should be amply so, from their position of near-unassailable epistemological dominance in the grand scheme of today) - to concede the faintly-diverging aesthetic, at least, impulses of religious and scientific poetry.
One of the reasons people are growing mistrustful of science is exactly because, unless we want to spend forty years becoming eeprts, we simply have to take the ‘hooey’ on trust. Men like Dawkins - if they didn’t have such gargantuan ego - might actually see their current role in society not as big-dicked Crusaders hacking their way like Indiano Jones through the barbarians roiling outside the gates of Jerusalem Uni; rather, as gentle humble teachers themselves, going out to embrace the mob and win them to their god with gentle self-effacing songs from the mount.
As to me flashing my willy…well, he said I had a little one, su. He said it was little. It’s not, I tell you. Little. Look. It’s big. I’ve got a big one. Nice and big one. It’s big, everyone, I tell you. LOOK, everyone, it’s big, god-dammmit…(Re: you bro…’75 was a bit before my time, but we would have been taught by the same chaps, no doubt. Did he go through as a pilot, nav or engo?)
No you idiot. If I’d told you once I told you a thousand times. If you borrow the car, fill the fucking tank up before you bring it back. I’m sorry I had to do this but it’s the only way you’ll ever learn.
keeping my powder dry for the fights against those incursions of faith into non-faith areas that are genuinely threatening. Reproductive rights, seperation of state and faith and judiciary..
Seem in direct contradiction with this:
I for one, at least, would feel a lot less concerned if my son was being ‘taught’ ID by a science teacher than a priest…
ID is a theological incursion into science. I remember Father Rock the Franciscan Boxing priest talking about Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. It was a theological story. We gleaned moral lessons from it (or not). He never mentioned irreducible complexity which is a pseudoscientific concept. He wasn’t talking science. In science class the Bible wasn’t mentioned. I guess the Catholics having learnt you can’t beat ‘em decided to join ‘em. Or at least peacefully co-exist. They did after all invent doublethink.
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If ID is getting taught by a science teacher you have a theologically inspired bit of pseudo-scientific nonsense being taught as science. That is an incursion. There is no need to teach ID in science classes even to debunk them. Science has a method that debunks ID (as it stands, who know there may be real evidence for intelligent design in the future). One simply needs to teach the method and the theories as they stand.
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Being someone who encountered creationist biology teachers at school I can tell you they are not teaching science. They leave science and enter into the realm of sophistry, like lawyers. They ‘taught’ evolution not as a theory but as an argument to be debunked. At this time they did so by showing us a map of biological meta-history and noting how the shifts from sets of species to others appear to happen rapidly contradicting the theory of evolution which says that they should happen slowly.
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This might’ve even been honest skepticism had not Eldredge and Gould published their thesis re punctuated equilibrium almost two decades before. My creationist teachers were young enough to’ve been taught punctuated equilibrium at University. They couldn’t even use redundancy as as an excuse.
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The ID movement is an attempt to curb scientific inquiry. To bring it back under theocratic control. It’s possible that many of those involved only want to combat the notion that we’re all monkeys. But this is where it leads. And the seperation of church and state and all else can collapse as a result. It has happened before.
“This is a stronger statement that “speculative hooey”…speculative hooey…”
Indeed, but I actually said ‘provisionally speculative hooey’, Zacklarianista, which asymptotically approaches Gould’s ‘provisional assent’ effective-fact with mirror-esque precision and (inverse) proportion to the very same accumulating data/analysis. Yes, Gould’s epistle on epistemology is a real beauty, and indeed agreeably utilitarian and practical. But in a stoush with the God-floggers I’ll take my ‘technically-merely-not-yet-proven-untrue‘ over his ‘perverse-not-to-accept-as-provisionally-true‘ any day, lest I start to sound like my enemy in the heat of battle.
Still, touche, Zed. Gould’s is rather a large one.
(And no, Jesus, don’t let’s get started on yours. Anyone who goes around breezily snipping bits off the end as redundant is just skiting…).
A suppleness which I think that the heat of ID (etc) is starting to erode in slightly counter-intuitive ways.
But is it? Science seems quite open to the genuine exploration of spiritual matters judging by the esteem in which Templeton Prize winners like Paul Davies etc are held. I don’t think the attack by the the proponents of ID is motivated by a genuine desire for this kind of exploration.
For a moment there I thought you were a social constructivist. Damn I was getting all armoured up, pulling out my battle hymns etc…
My brother ended up doing survival training amongst other things, he’s in civvy street now. His ears were rooted by years of childhood ear infections so he couldn’t become a pilot.
Adrien, I don’t disagree with the concerns expressed and I certainly don;t doubt the tactics. We had a great looooong debate at Webdiary once, hosted/run by some guest ID-ers, and even though I was steeled to know what toi expect, even I was amazed at their clever deployment of tactical scientific skirmishing, semantics and pseudo jargon, the way you constantly had to step back and keep your eye on the big picture. But I have, in the end, confidence in the solidity and ‘natural intellectual law’ underpinning rationality. Equip kids with a certain set of empirical skills - exactly the same ones the ID-ers must-needs accept as the weapons du preference - and skullduggery will out! Those who believe God made fossils not in spite of but (they say) because of the current empirical data available are going to keep believing it even if God Himself saunters down and tells them to snap out of it.
I maintain that deploying rationality - and time, battle-energy, sympathy from the unradical God-fearin’ masses - rebutting ID is manifestly wasted effort. Let it kill itself, by its own sword.
I maintain that deploying rationality - and time, battle-energy, sympathy from the unradical God-fearin’ masses - rebutting ID is manifestly wasted effort. Let it kill itself, by its own sword.
It’s pretty hard to remain calm and rational in the face of this:
Nazi Germany is the thread that ties everything in the movie together. Evolution leads to atheism leads to eugenics leads to Holocaust and Nazi Germany
Oh really? That wouldn’t account for his persecution of the churches. It’s typical (but depressing) that you go for a silly riposte rather than engage with what is quite a complex argument by Gray. Particularly since you’re on the so-called rationalist side of these questions.
It’s a pretty confused article. Early on Gray says
It is true that religion has declined sharply in a number of countries (Ireland is a recent example) and has not shaped everyday life for most people in Britain for many years. Much of Europe is clearly post-Christian.
And yet he concludes:
Today secular faith is ebbing, and it is the apostles of unbelief who are left stranded on the beach.
You don’t have a belief system? A-theists in principle don’t need to care about religion as such. There’s no logical reason why they should be upset if others don’t agree that there is no God.
The Dawkinses of this world are the ones who are secular fundamentalists, blinding themselves to the complexity of religious belief and asserting it as some sort of Manichean evil regardless of its form. It’s theo-babble alright.
Speaking as a Christian who’s all in favour of secularism, I find it an offensive and ludicrously irrational stereotype.
Kim’s right, Silkworm. The Nazis saw themselves as Gottglaubiger - which basically meant ‘God believers’ who had broken with the Church, were not Christian, and rejected the idea of an afterlife.
That’s very selective quotation, Zarqon. His point is made in the rest of the paragraph which you ommitted:
However, there is nothing that suggests the move away from religion is irreversible, or that it is potentially universal. The US is no more secular today than it was 150 years ago, when De Tocqueville was amazed and baffled by its all-pervading religiosity. The secular era was in any case partly illusory. The mass political movements of the 20th century were vehicles for myths inherited from religion, and it is no accident that religion is reviving now that these movements have collapsed. The current hostility to religion is a reaction against this turnabout. Secularisation is in retreat, and the result is the appearance of an evangelical type of atheism not seen since Victorian times.
I don’t necessarily agree with his analysis of desecularisation, and I don’t agree with his apparent welcoming of it, but I think it’s right that he’s put his finger on something in terms of the anti-religious hostility - knowing no discrimination or nuance - of which Dawkins and all the rest are symptomatic.
Yes, let’s squabble over who’s camp Hitler falls in. And if we’re going to do that, let’s bring in Stalin and Mao. Most discussions that go there end up achieving a great deal, in my experience.
ID has a specific genealogy: it is the same battle that was fought around the Scopes monkey trial, and it is out of that drawn out conflict, which has never really gone away in parts of the US, that ID emerges. I think it represents a major concession to science since it is trying to appropriate at a superficial level it’s language. It is the kind of strategy that comes out of near-defeat, a rear-guard or guerilla action. Also, it attacks the least materially important part of a scientific world-view.
For my part, I am a social constructionist: anybody who can’t see that scientific facts are constructed, in a social context, out of the raw material of reality, hasn’t spent time in a laboratory. The ID types don’t believe in social construction, neither do the science warriors, but scientists do by practicing it.
The Dawkinses of this world are the ones who are secular fundamentalists, blinding themselves to the complexity of religious belief and asserting it as some sort of Manichean evil regardless of its form. It’s theo-babble alright.
Dawkins doesn’t think releigion is evil. He thinks the kind of religion that leads to
the quote I provided above about Nazi Germany is so dishonest that it needs to be opposed by people of integrity arguing against it by writing books and giving lectures.
“Religion” - as such - is just a construct of Western rationalism anyway - having the same roots as Dawkins’ own belief system. As he’d know if he ever bothered to engage with anthropological and historical writing on religion, as opposed to writing polemics.
Anyway, I don’t care about Dawkins that much. I think he’s an egotist who likes the attention. I just want to point out that not all of “religion” or everyone who’s religious is fundamentalist, believes in ID, is anti-science, etc. It would be nice if people took that into account.
Oh, for fuck’s sake. I’m really sick of this. The quotes aren’t fabricated. I could find you hundreds of other links where Dawkins says the same. Shoot me for grabbing the first one I found via a google rank.
I’m trying to say - as a Christian - I’m not surprised but just a little disappointed that I have to put up with this shite from otherwise intelligent people. I await the next atheism-fest with reference to the pathologies of Judaism or whatever.
I’m not trying to upset anyone, I think Dawkins is more understanding of religion than he is given credit for. After all, he (and I) had religious upbringings.
“Early on, many Catholic leaders criticized Nazism; after 1933, criticism turned to support and praise. Commonalities between Nazism and Catholics were anti-communism, anti-atheism, and anti-secularism. Catholic churches helped identify Jews for extermination. After the war, Catholic leaders helped former Nazis back into power.
Protestants were even more attracted to Nazism than Catholics; they, not Catholics, produced a movement (German Christians) dedicated to blending Nazi ideology and Christian doctrine.
Christian “resistance” was mostly against efforts to exert greater control over church activities. Christian churches were willing to tolerate widespread violence against Jews, military rearmament, invasions of foreign nations, banning labor unions, imprisonment of political dissenters, detention of people who had committed no crimes, etc. Why? Hitler was seen as someone restoring traditional Christian values and morality to Germany.”
“My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross.”
- Adolf Hitler, 1922
“The fact that the Catholic Church has come to an agreement with Fascist Italy … proves beyond doubt that the Fascist world of ideas is closer to Christianity than those of Jewish liberalism or even atheistic Marxism…”
- Adolf Hitler in an article in the Völkischer Beobachter, February 29, 1929
“I believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty Creator. By warding off the Jews I am fighting for the Lord’s work.”
- Adolf Hitler, Speech, Reichstag, 1936
“I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so.”
- Adolf Hitler, to General Gerhard Engel, 1941
“We were convinced that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.”
-Adolf Hitler, unknown date
“We demand freedom for all religious confessions in the state, insofar as they do not endanger its existence or conflict with the customs and moral sentiments of the Germanic race. The party as such represents the standpoint of a positive Christianity, without owing itself to a particular confession….”
I thought this was a discussion of ID and science rather than atheism and religion or Dawkins’ book and for my part I certainly don’t lump all believers in with the ID proponents. Gray is right about one thing; religion is here to stay, but the status of science and basic academic freedom in the face of fundamentalist hostility is much less sure. I am deeply troubled that otherwise intelligent people like Klaus K find themselves “with ID by default”. I am wondering why that is?
Both science and religion are systems of symbols that serve human needs - in the case of science, for prediction and control. Religions have served many purposes, but at bottom they answer to a need for meaning that is met by myth rather than explanation. A great deal of modern thought consists of secular myths - hollowed-out religious narratives translated into pseudo-science.
Gray uses the words atheist, scientist and secularist almost interchangeably throughout this article, or at least in ways that obscure the complexity of the relations between them. I think he completely mischaracterizes science by saying it serves the need for prediction and control. Is he hinting that science is inherently authoritarian? If so that is no less vulgar than Dawkins characterizing religion as the source of violence. Science serves a need for understanding, prediction is just a handy way of testing that the understanding reflects what we construe to be reality. How quickly he goes from this to modern thought consisting of coopted religious narratives. The whole article suffers from these elisions.
I don’t think that one scientist, two past-it writers and a children’s book author constitute a world wide evangelical atheist movement but put me down as a non-evangelical atheist.
Hitler and religious belief - Hitler was certainly baptised Catholic and claimed to be so. But the study I’ve done of Nazi spiritual belief systems seems to indicate they were some kind of crazy pseudo-occultists.Years ago there was a wonderful book published on this that embraced things like hollow earth theory and various other irrational non-scientific beliefs, but for the moment its title escapes me, though I’d recognise it if I saw it.
The problem I have with ID (which I freely admit is only believed in by a relatively small though influential groups of Xtan fundies and certainly not by all Xtans)is that if you take its premises to their illogical conclusion, one has to accept that a Supreme Being has designed the course of human and natural history, ie Providence. Now I have several problems with this - a lot of people, including some Xtan varieties, and all non-Xtan varieties, are left “unsaved.” Secondly, the Supreme Being, (whose existence I will temporarily accept for the sake of argument) either willingly permits evil regimes to flourish, including secular regimes that don’t believe in him/her, or actively condones the flourishing of evil, because s/he’s still around smewhere inteliigently designing. Which creates all sorts of moral questions about the nature of said Supreme Being, none of which are complimentary.
The Parable of the Old Man and the Young - Wilfred Owen
So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
and builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him, thy son.
Behold! Caught in a thicket by its horns,
A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
Those last two lines always kick my ass.
Merry Easter, war is over if you wanna, etc.
Thanks, Lefty E!
On a similar note, Leonard Cohen’s “Story of Isaac”
.
You can listen to the song here at YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOnAVTro_rE
While we’re talking about Leonard Cohen songs (or while I am anyway), one of my faves is One of Us Cannot Be Wrong. It’s on YouTube too but take all the commenters’ advice and scroll down or hide the window because the car footage really doesn’t complement the tune or lyrics!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMONrn92-mw
Paul Scofield is dead. Vale, a great actor. Among the memorable performances, Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons, his Lear, and the older Martin Chuzzlewit in the BBC TV series, Martin Chuzzlewit. Some of you might like to add some more.
spare a thought for some of the poorest amongst us who are starting a concerted campaign to ease Tony Abbott’s mortgage stress and Andrew Robb’s travel expenses stress.
“CASH-strapped Liberal MPs are mounting a behind-the-scenes push to boost their salaries of $127,060 - for serving as shadow ministers.
The push is being made on behalf of former high-fliers whose salaries were cut by about $100,000 a year when the Howard government fell.
Government ministers get an additional $92,119 if they are in cabinet, and $73,060 if they are in the outer ministry. But at no time in the 107-year history of Federal Parliament have Opposition MPs received a special allowance for being a shadow minister. They get the base backbencher’s pay - which now is $127,060.”
http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,23410906-952,00.html
Thanks Lefty, always loved that poem.
Everyone:
Bad news. Daily Flute has pulled the pin
http://dailyflute.com/?p=1365#comments
Nabokov suggested he start a Yearly Flute. I hope he does return - in whatever manifestation he cares to choose.
Many many thanks for excellent blogging.
Oscar nails it.
Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard
Some do it with a bitter look
Some with a flattering word
The coward does it with a kiss
The brave man with a sword.
Poor old Hillsong is getting a pounding again. Their affiliated ministry, Mercy Ministries, received front-page attention in the Sydney Morning Herald this week for their abuse of young women who came to them seeking help for their psychiatric problems.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2008/03/16/1205602195048.html
Mercy Ministries advertises free professional help for young women with such problems as anorexia, drug addictions and suicidal tendencies, but in reality deprives them of proper medical assistance, substituting instead a “Christian” approach, where unqualified staff “treat” the young women through prolonged prayer, Bible study, exorcism of demons and speaking in tongues.
One woman was told that demons were causing her anorexia. Another woman with asthma had her ventolin taken from her. When she had an asthma attack, she was told to stop acting. She was punished by having to write an assignment on why God believes lying is wrong. These and other women have had to undergo years of intense psychological and psychiatric care to overcome their treatment at the ministry.
Mercy Ministries advertises on its website that applicants should be on Centrelink payments. These payments are then transferred to the ministry. The ministry also received carers’ allowances from Centrelink. Centrelink is now under investigation for its participation in this rort.
Mercy Ministries is sponsored by Gloria Jean’s coffeeshop chain. One of its founders, Nabi Saleh, sits on the Hillsong board. It’s other founder, Peter Irvine, quit on Tuesday after the news of Mercy’s cult activities broke.
Gloria Jean’s, like Hillsong, has close ties to the Liberal party. In 2005 Gloria Jean’s was named Franchisor of the Year. However, it will not grant franchises to members of the ALP.
What does a bird think of its shadow?
As the restoration of control in Tibet and the Tibetan regions of China continues,the Taiwanese are voting in their presidential election this Saturday. The outcome is still too hard to predict.
10 explains why I’ve seen a Boycott Gloria Jeans group pop up on Facebook.
Here’s another link:
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/national/gods-cure-for-gays-lost-in-sin/2008/03/18/1205602421321.html
Yeah, nevermind 150 million people being displaced within 50 years by rising sea levels in the Asia-Pacific - the main thing is to stop teh lesbianism!
Thanks Mercy Ministries.
Clowns!
FB now allows you to fill in your own political affiliation:
http://www.mushroomandrooster.net/article/show-your-true-political-colours-on-facebook
Comrades, we no longer have to be “Very Liberal”!
Also, really enjoyed 30 Days of Night - the Alaskan Vampire movie de soir:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/10/19/DD6QSS60E.DTL
Incidentally, parents and guardians: “Horton hears a who” is the best kid movie ever! While away two hours of school hols there, no problemo. Few side gags for the oldies too.
Black metal.. anyone?
“Gloria Jean’s, like Hillsong, has close ties to the Liberal party. In 2005 Gloria Jean’s was named Franchisor of the Year. However, it will not grant franchises to members of the ALP.”
And yet when we Balmain basket-weavers took to the streets in protest to keep out these foul grinders - manky 2nd-harvest beans, vulnerable young women, it’s all the same to Teh Evil Corporate Coffee Machine - oh, how the ‘free’ market hard-heads mocked.
Did you know McDonalds donated and installed the cryogenic deep-freezers at Roswell? Fact.
Wake up and smell the
alienbacon, people.We shall, we shall overcome…
Funniest thing this weekend, PZ Myers of Pharyngula fame, expelled from the IDiot movie “Expelled–Intelligence not Allowed”:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/03/a_late_night_quick_one.php
But Richard Dawkins was allowed in:
Notably the makers of the film interviewed both Dawkins and Myers under false pretences and incorporated/edited those clips in the film, unfairly it appears.
No surprises there from the IDiot brigade, no tactic too low or too dirty in the long term attempt to destroy the teaching of evolution in schools by appealing to the gullible illiterati.
So much for not bearing “false witness.”
“…no tactic too low or too dirty in the long term attempt to destroy the teaching of evolution in schools by appealing to the gullible illiterati…”
Right, let’s see if I’ve got this right, then:
1. ID is so manifestly absurd, so dishonest, so patently irrational and a-scientific, so obviously loony spivvery that…
2. …if we allow it the tiniest inch, the teeniest toe-hold, in a functioning modern world daily dominated in the vast majority of everyone’s workaday realms by rational empirical scientific parameters and analysis…
3. ……WE’LL ALL BE ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOONED!
Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…O, whither the lonely empirical scientist!? O, won’t SOMEBODY think of the poor helpless lonely empirical scientist!
*Exits in Easter huff, munching choccie, sweeping straw (too)*
Can you think of a good reason why we should allow the lies of ID to be taught, when there’s barely enough time to teach people any proper science anyway?
Actually 1) is true and is reason enough not to teach it as part of a science curriculum. I have no problem with it being taught as part of religious studies with the preface; “some people believe…”
I was long ago consigned to the dust-bin of irrationality for reading C20th French philosophy, so I find myself on the side of ID by default on this one. I’ll be in the corner reading Isabelle Stengers if you feel like denouncing (now deeply un-) fashionable nonsense all over again.
Read the wording, the verb and subject especially:
‘…to destroy the teaching of evolution…’
I happen to think ID is subjective hooey, too. I also happen to think that great swathes of command economics is subjective hooey. But that gets taught in ‘Economics’, if anywhere. Bits of Newtonian physics are hooey now, too. Lots - all? - of astrophysics are pure speculation, provisionally subjective hooey by a fancier name. Unless you think that teaching science is a matter of delivering swathes of received facts to kids rather than teaching-by-doing a series of process-principles - which you probably do if you don’t understand what limited and fundamentally humble claims ’science’ actually makes for its authority - then you will grasp that it is not, epistemologically at least, a ‘zero sum’ game, in the sense that if you teach X, you effectively ‘un-teach’ anti-X. When a scientist says gravity exists he’s not saying ‘gravity exists’, he’s saying ‘we haven’t proved gravity doesn’t exist yet’. In a way scientists ought to be damned glads ID is taught as ’science’ because then the ID-ers accept the rules of the science game and, like flat earth theory and the ether, can get blown away on those terms in ten seconds flat. Teach it as ‘religion’, su, and those kids who were going to swallow it anyway still will, and suddenly your scientist is punching in a ring by himself.
Unless as a scientist (say) you have an unbearably grim, hysterical (and, btw, beardy patrician) view of humans’ (in)capacity to parse/juggle/layer nuance and contradiction, plus a less-than-secure confidence in your own gig’s epistemological solidity and integrity, then you won’t feel remotely threatened by a couple of lectures of the Jesus-made-the-fossils-to-trick-us ilk. In fact - my real point - if you have a genuine confidence in your own scientific methodologies and epistemologies - as opposed to a hysterical, protest-too-much anxiety about them, perhaps? - then you’ll relax and let them expose their anti-science spivvery all by ‘emselves. Dept of Rope, Enough, Petards, Auto-Hoist, etc. Most kids aren’t stupid. ID - as ’science’ - is, manifestly so. Who d’ya think gunna win?
I take Z’s point that there is a milder kind of ‘zero sum’ element involved here, in the banal time element. But come on, we teach a lot of faddish tosh in schools, alway have. I hardly think any Western Enlightenment civilisation/free market economy, with its fundamentally outcome-and-technology driven utilitarian daily demands, is in danger of disappearing in a big bang of Unicorn Theory. Here at the dawn of the third millennium we’ve got our kids living, breathing, working, existing near 24-7 arse-up and head-down on a relentlessly scientific and rational treadmill. Even if we wildly strawman and exaggerate the threat (after Dawkins, et al), or even if we do consider those relatively few biddable sprogs of those relatively few ID-obsessed cults around…well, the next generation’s unavoidable and overwhelming lived/observed ‘daily proofing’ of the triumph of the scientific rational - no matter what their oldies may spray from the pulpit - is, IMHO, more than sufficient prophylactic against some new Dark Ages society-wide jettisoning of reason ever taking hold.
Dooming our kids to live out their four-score and
twentythirtyfortyfifty???? in an icky beige-n’-pastel, right-n-rational, 1+1=2 (and only 2) ‘health, wealth and happiness Dullzone - a pig, in a cage, on antibiotics - is revenge enough on our billies as it is. Why not let the poor kiddies dream of origami unicorns a little, now and then?I object only because it’s Easter and I’ve just snapped off the drill bit wot I was trying to drill out a self-tapper I snapped off yesterday in the head of the Tele I’m trying to coax into grunty splendour this w/end and I’m cranky with the utter useless fraud that is Empirical Science & Technological Methodology. And, as usual, us ‘in our own room’ believers got the collateral damage in this latest exchange b/w the zealots of either God Wars camp. (In this case for being, ‘holus-holus’, increasingly partial to lies, or something. News to me, dudes…).
Sorry, to clarify par 3:
“…you’ll relax and let
themthe ID ’scientists’ expose their anti-science spivvery all by ‘emselves…’Not trying to start a holy blue thread here, btw. Excuse length. I go now.
Was it “Intelligent Design” when God sent me down there to be nailed to a plank of wood?
Gee, thanks Dad.
That design is about as intelligent as Microsoft products.
And BTW, when you celebrate Easter you stir up a whole lot of unpleasant memories.
So thanks for nothing.
PS, why couldn’t I redeem the world somewhere nice, like Melbourne? I love the laneway culture there. And Jerusalem has always been and still is a shit-hole.
You seem to have mistaken my intent Jack R; I don’t want to prevent anyone from believing in ID, that is not why it should not be taught as part of a science curriculum. Unfalsifiable hypotheses are not part of science. It really is that simple. That doesn’t mean that there is no worth to them as ideas, it just means that they have no business in a system which is predicated upon building theory from testable hypotheses. Shall we now teach astrology and pagan theology in science, simply because it seems churlish not to admit them?
And if you think that science is beige then you need to consider the theoretical physicists and mathematicians who use both science and imagination to dream of solutions which are at once rational, falsifiable and poetic. Their unicorns are the most wondrous of all to me. They are no less beautiful just because I can reach out and touch them.
The annual Doncaster Passion Play urgently need to borrow an ass becasue their other one is being uncooperative, if anyone here can help out the best thing to do probably would be just bring your donkey to Ruffey Lake Park tonight just before sundown. (Via the Manningham Leader.)
Oh and by the way using your computer to communicate via the internet about the unbearable dreariness of rational thought = my dose of delightful irony for the weekend.
That bit of snark prompted by the gratuitous use of the word hysterical in your screed up there. “Beardy & patrician” I am still pondering on.
So what are all those telescopes doing, then?
What really gets up scientists nose is all this pontificating about what should be taught as science by people who have absolutely no idea what the facts are.
Did you know that astrophysical models of stellar fusion were so accurate that they forced the particle physicists to revise the Standard Model of particle physics (derived from particle accelerator measurements) and infer that neutrinos have mass? Thats the kind of confirmation that comes with a great deal more than “pure speculation”.
It’s already true that a large proportion of people in the US think the Earth is only a few thousand years old. It’s crazy. And it gets harder to teach people real science when its socially acceptable to reject it and unnacceptable to look at the details and find that scientists aren’t a bunch of wierdos theorising in advance of the data.
“Did you know McDonalds donated and installed the cryogenic deep-freezers at Roswell? Fact….
….Wake up and smell the alien bacon, people.”
Jack R, the poor little buggers are stored right here….da da da da..
http://images.google.com.au/imgres?imgurl=http://www.ufocrashsite.com/scripts/photoalbum/albums/roswell2005/thumb_03-mcdonalds-01.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.ufocrashsite.com/scripts/photoalbum/index.php&h=100&w=150&sz=5&hl=en&start=19&tbnid=_iboYb-oXf31EM:&tbnh=64&tbnw=96&prev=/images%3Fq%3D%2BMcDonalds%2Band%2BRoswell%2B%26gbv%3D2%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DG
“What really gets up scientists nose is all this pontificating about what should be taught as science by people who have absolutely no idea what the facts are. Did you know that astrophysical models of stellar fusion were so accurate that they forced the particle physicists to revise the Standard Model of particle physics (derived from particle accelerator measurements) and infer that neutrinos have mass? Thats the kind of confirmation that comes with a great deal more than “pure speculation”.
No, I didn’t know that, Zarquon. Couldn’t tell you what the state of play in AI, neurosurgery or rocket science is exactly, either. STFW? I’ll take at face value that your k-pow! refers to some experimental observation/analysis m-o-m-e-n-t in the scientific empirical methodology cycle when the accumulated weight of data from various collegiate sources/projects transformed, by way of general peer-reviewed consent and consensus, a certain originally purely (but progressively-diminishingly) speculative theory (AKA provisional subjective hooey) into the broadly-accepted scientific norm of the moment, ie our current astrophysics status quo. Please do look up ‘provisional’, Zakkles. And understand - as I am sure you do - that everything in science is ‘provisional hooey’. Then - presto! - you’ll see with dawning joy and fraternal delight that what I said actually supports, not preemptively attacks, what you rejoindered with. Ufkc me, you lot are chippy, ain’t ya. Seriously, Z, you over-react a tad, no entirel unlike some mildly-zealous religious coil, sprung to object to the tiniest perceived dogmatic gainsay.
You too, su, in your bit about ‘dreaming of solutions’. Again, read my ‘hooey’ bit closely without your shootin’ hand already on the pearl (just ‘cos one of the whores above the saloon is waving a crucifix from the winder and pointing wildly at me behind my back). The splendiferous abstract unicorn-designing of the theoretical poet-scientists whom you urge me to consider is exactly what I had in mind when I was making the unremarkable (and I thought obvious) point that in science today’s fancy-name ‘hooey’ can and has and does (and will go on) turning by way of plod-plod grind-grind empirical methodology into tomorrow’s ‘confirmed’ (sic, after Z) un-hooey. Come on, FFS, the pair of you, I shouldn’t need to plot out how science works. We’re on the same page - get the Dawkinite chips off your shoulders. But the thing is you - we, FFS - need to keep ruthless limiting control of your methodology, what it actually ‘confirms’, if you we are to hold exactly that rational ground you claim is under threat. Over-reacting to over-reaching faith-based blind certitude with over-reaching faith-based blind certitudes of
your own is what the over-reaching blindly faith-based want to do. Duh.So…what I can tell you about your astrophysicist chums, Z, is that whatever it was that was so ‘accurate’ about whatever experimental data/measurement that correlated with whichever model/era of astrophysical speculation about stellar fusion that you/they mean…it sure as shit wasn’t a ‘confirmation’ of anything, I’m afraid, save except for our scientists’ inability thus far to ‘unconfirm’ today’s scientific ‘provisional subjective hooey’. Fine. That could mean that a) indeed, the current state of astrophysics represents absolute ‘confirmed’ truth about the astrophysical world (in which case you better ring the press, and have a convincing soundbite as to how you know that for sure), or b) our astrophysicists simply need to invent more accurate instrumentation and devise more ruthlessly-stringent methodologies/experiments to ‘confirm’ that where they’re currently ‘at’ needs more work.
As for the ‘f***-you, rube’ arrogance of your suggestion that I - or anyone, frankly - might ‘…have no idea of what the facts are’ when it comes to epistemological discussions re: science like this, Zarquon…matey, take a look in the mirror if you ever want to know why - if it’s true, as your lot claim with increasing
hysteriaenthusiasm, but which I frankly doubt - more and more are inclined towards scepticism about science’s epistemological cocksurity.I have no idea whether or not you’re an astrophysicist and in any case a game of flash-your-willy is utterly moot. Anyone’s entitled to have a view on ’science’ (or any parts there-of) that is nor more or less legitimate than Albert Einstein’s, tosh. Me? OK, I have an undergraduate degree (Fac hons) in science, majoring in HPS and physics. I also flew helicopters for a decade with the Army if you think I’m some kind of more broad applied science technophobe. Fine, I’m years out of date in everything, no doubt, including the philosophy of science. But I reckon I know at least enough about both theoretical and practical science, its practise, its teaching, its limitations - and especially (like us all) how completely full of shit some scientists can sometimes be, no less so than priests and politicians - to politely sidestep condescending digs like yours.
Su, I also know enough about dictionaries to know that there’s not a single jot of ‘irony’, much less of the ‘delightful’ kind, to be extracted from my comments in the way you breezily assert. Only someone who doesn’t know what irony means could think otherwise. It’s on p. 965 of the New Oxford, middle column, three words down. Or p. 924 of the Mac.
See, su and Zarky (and Dawko, and Myers)? I can do it, too. Condescending disdain, I mean. Not very nice, is it. Sorry in advance.
Jesus @ #27, stop whining and suck it up. Without Easter overkill you’d be just another gobby kike with a persecution complex.
Well since the desire to thrust ID into the curriculum represents an attack upon the method of science rather than upon the current state of science knowledge I am still not sure what your point is? Allow untestable hypotheses in (and if you see no difference between ID and the scientific speculations of physicists then … well I don’t think you do I think you are being disingenuous) and they will just sit there; a dead and immovable weight.
I am still seeing the irony. You think willy-waving is so moot that you immediately have to get your physics/Raaf goolies out in the breeze. My brother was a physics/Raaf person at Point Cook c1975. Can I flash his goolies in my stead.
Without Easter I wouldn’t need a persecution complex.
Oy vay!
Oy vay!
Oy Vay, Maria…
I think people have to take ID a little more seriously. Not as science but as anti-science. If you can impose it on a science curricula (and this is what they’re trying to do) you then disentangle the basis of science: hypothesis, experiment etc. You move the field toward one which is subject to theocratic authority. Something similar happend in the early part of the second millenia in the Islamic world. The result was that a culture which had made susbstantial scientific progress ground to a halt in the field. The results went arguably beyond the cessation of technological progress, they ended up in theocratic autocracy.
Was it “Intelligent Design” when God sent me down there to be nailed to a plank of wood?
No you idiot. If I’d told you once I told you a thousand times. If you borrow the car, fill the fucking tank up before you bring it back. I’m sorry I had to do this but it’s the only way you’ll ever learn.
Well what I mean by confirmed is:
This is a stronger statement that “speculative hooey”. And it means that there is a great deal that can be taught as scientific fact, and how those facts were discovered, without any need for the IDiots to bring their garbage (which has been, by the same standard) disconfirmed over and over again.
“…well I don’t think you do I think you are being disingenuous…”
Moi? Never!
OK, su, possibly, slightly, but…if so, then only for strategy’s sake, viz. keeping my powder dry for the fights against those incursions of faith into non-faith areas that are genuinely threatening. Reproductive rights, seperation of state and faith and judiciary..I know all this is of a piece - but I for one, at least, would feel a lot less concerned if my son was being ‘taught’ ID by a science teacher than a priest…
I guess my overall ‘point’ is something to do with trying to keep the pristine process-realm of ’science’ as supple and as nimble as possible by eschewing ANY blanket exclusion of subject scope on ismic grounds. A suppleness which I think that the heat of ID (etc) is starting to erode in slightly counter-intuitive ways. The point science ought to make itself constantly aware of is the way that tomorrow’s unecpected ‘empirical data’ - a flying machine appearing overhead, aliens arriving, Jesus returning, a new planet spied, AIDS killing - can throw a lot of painstakingly accumulated ‘confirmations’ out the window in a short time. Sure, it’s less likely thse days, but thus, in that spirit of humility, doth an ‘open mind’ become not just a kind of organic epistemological safety net for the Project of Science, but also remains the SUPERTOOL of the MIGHTY REASONING MIND, ta-da!! Nothing is ‘fixed’. Nothing is ‘finished’. The song goes on. Never stop thinking, never stop questioning, never stop re-examining anything. Don’t get flat-footed.
Does that mean I think someone will someone dig up God’s undeniable signature tomorrow, somewhere in the Grampians (hence the need to teach kids ID, in prep for that joyous day)? So we know how to recognise that indisputable ‘I made this’ graffito some truckie unearths while taking a roadside piss outside Dubbo? I expect not. And granted, to the zealous tin-foil hatter our scientific ‘absence of proof isn’t proof of an absence’ invariably distorts into ‘no proof of an absence = proof of an Existence’. So point taken on the falsifiability angle, su - and Adrien. Happy to keep one clunky steel-capped lab boot-heel hard on the fuckers’ gabbing dog-collar’d throats, sure. But maybe we can let them have a wriggle, a breath and a free squeal from time to time, eh? In our language, even, on our terms?
Because if you step back and think about some of the advances in rational scientific speculation-to-(practical, even)-realisation that our generation has seen play out, it’s pretty clear that the notion even of ‘falsifiabiliity’ is itself often a quantity grounded as much in imaginative speculation as the ‘hooey’ speculated. Now, in this era of micro-macro, subatomic/quantum/universe Big Science, half the (imaginative) battle for the white coaters is that very falsifiability dilemma: devising projects that are of empirical use, on near-immeasurable scales at either end, in the way you say. That’s where the line between the ‘faith’ at the heart of godism and the ‘reason’ at the heart of sciencism becomes awfully blurred, IMHO. How do we ever ‘falsify’ speculative theories about time travel, parallel universes…again, I’m not up on the cuting edge, but it doesn’t take too much - if scientists are prepared to be a bit generous (and I think they should be amply so, from their position of near-unassailable epistemological dominance in the grand scheme of today) - to concede the faintly-diverging aesthetic, at least, impulses of religious and scientific poetry.
One of the reasons people are growing mistrustful of science is exactly because, unless we want to spend forty years becoming eeprts, we simply have to take the ‘hooey’ on trust. Men like Dawkins - if they didn’t have such gargantuan ego - might actually see their current role in society not as big-dicked Crusaders hacking their way like Indiano Jones through the barbarians roiling outside the gates of Jerusalem Uni; rather, as gentle humble teachers themselves, going out to embrace the mob and win them to their god with gentle self-effacing songs from the mount.
As to me flashing my willy…well, he said I had a little one, su. He said it was little. It’s not, I tell you. Little. Look. It’s big. I’ve got a big one. Nice and big one. It’s big, everyone, I tell you. LOOK, everyone, it’s big, god-dammmit…(Re: you bro…’75 was a bit before my time, but we would have been taught by the same chaps, no doubt. Did he go through as a pilot, nav or engo?)
But I’m not a naughty boy. I’m the Messiah.
But you ‘ave got a big nose. Where’re you from? Nose City?
I’ll have you know that my nose is proof of my divine status.
Dad (God) challenged me with a nose so big that even I couldn’t blow it.
But I was proved correct on both counts.
Jack R -
Seem in direct contradiction with this:
ID is a theological incursion into science. I remember Father Rock the Franciscan Boxing priest talking about Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. It was a theological story. We gleaned moral lessons from it (or not). He never mentioned irreducible complexity which is a
pseudoscientific concept. He wasn’t talking science. In science class the Bible wasn’t mentioned. I guess the Catholics having learnt you can’t beat ‘em decided to join ‘em. Or at least peacefully co-exist. They did after all invent doublethink.>
If ID is getting taught by a science teacher you have a theologically inspired bit of pseudo-scientific nonsense being taught as science. That is an incursion. There is no need to teach ID in science classes even to debunk them. Science has a method that debunks ID (as it stands, who know there may be real evidence for intelligent design in the future). One simply needs to teach the method and the theories as they stand.
>
Being someone who encountered creationist biology teachers at school I can tell you they are not teaching science. They leave science and enter into the realm of sophistry, like lawyers. They ‘taught’ evolution not as a theory but as an argument to be debunked. At this time they did so by showing us a map of biological meta-history and noting how the shifts from sets of species to others appear to happen rapidly contradicting the theory of evolution which says that they should happen slowly.
>
This might’ve even been honest skepticism had not Eldredge and Gould published their thesis re punctuated equilibrium almost two decades before. My creationist teachers were young enough to’ve been taught punctuated equilibrium at University. They couldn’t even use redundancy as as an excuse.
>
The ID movement is an attempt to curb scientific inquiry. To bring it back under theocratic control. It’s possible that many of those involved only want to combat the notion that we’re all monkeys. But this is where it leads. And the seperation of church and state and all else can collapse as a result. It has happened before.
Zarquo @ #38 (re: Gould’s elegant poem of emp. sci. meth.)
“This is a stronger statement that “speculative hooey”…speculative hooey…”
Indeed, but I actually said ‘provisionally speculative hooey’, Zacklarianista, which asymptotically approaches Gould’s ‘provisional assent’ effective-fact with mirror-esque precision and (inverse) proportion to the very same accumulating data/analysis. Yes, Gould’s epistle on epistemology is a real beauty, and indeed agreeably utilitarian and practical. But in a stoush with the God-floggers I’ll take my ‘technically-merely-not-yet-proven-untrue‘ over his ‘perverse-not-to-accept-as-provisionally-true‘ any day, lest I start to sound like my enemy in the heat of battle.
Still, touche, Zed. Gould’s is rather a large one.
(And no, Jesus, don’t let’s get started on yours. Anyone who goes around breezily snipping bits off the end as redundant is just skiting…).
But is it? Science seems quite open to the genuine exploration of spiritual matters judging by the esteem in which Templeton Prize winners like Paul Davies etc are held. I don’t think the attack by the the proponents of ID is motivated by a genuine desire for this kind of exploration.
For a moment there I thought you were a social constructivist. Damn I was getting all armoured up, pulling out my battle hymns etc…
My brother ended up doing survival training amongst other things, he’s in civvy street now. His ears were rooted by years of childhood ear infections so he couldn’t become a pilot.
Adrien, I don’t disagree with the concerns expressed and I certainly don;t doubt the tactics. We had a great looooong debate at Webdiary once, hosted/run by some guest ID-ers, and even though I was steeled to know what toi expect, even I was amazed at their clever deployment of tactical scientific skirmishing, semantics and pseudo jargon, the way you constantly had to step back and keep your eye on the big picture. But I have, in the end, confidence in the solidity and ‘natural intellectual law’ underpinning rationality. Equip kids with a certain set of empirical skills - exactly the same ones the ID-ers must-needs accept as the weapons du preference - and skullduggery will out! Those who believe God made fossils not in spite of but (they say) because of the current empirical data available are going to keep believing it even if God Himself saunters down and tells them to snap out of it.
I maintain that deploying rationality - and time, battle-energy, sympathy from the unradical God-fearin’ masses - rebutting ID is manifestly wasted effort. Let it kill itself, by its own sword.
It’s pretty hard to remain calm and rational in the face of this:
http://scienceblogs.com/strangerfruit/2008/03/expelled_and_reduction_ad_hitl.php
John Gray on “The Atheist Delusion”:
http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/politicsphilosophyandsociety/story/0,,2265446,00.html
Except Hitler wasn’t atheist. He was Christian. He saw the extermination of the Jews as part of his Christian mission.
Oh really? That wouldn’t account for his persecution of the churches. It’s typical (but depressing) that you go for a silly riposte rather than engage with what is quite a complex argument by Gray. Particularly since you’re on the so-called rationalist side of these questions.
It’s a pretty confused article. Early on Gray says
And yet he concludes:
“Secular faith”? “Apostles of unbelief”? Meaningless theo-babble.
You don’t have a belief system? A-theists in principle don’t need to care about religion as such. There’s no logical reason why they should be upset if others don’t agree that there is no God.
The Dawkinses of this world are the ones who are secular fundamentalists, blinding themselves to the complexity of religious belief and asserting it as some sort of Manichean evil regardless of its form. It’s theo-babble alright.
Speaking as a Christian who’s all in favour of secularism, I find it an offensive and ludicrously irrational stereotype.
Kim’s right, Silkworm. The Nazis saw themselves as Gottglaubiger - which basically meant ‘God believers’ who had broken with the Church, were not Christian, and rejected the idea of an afterlife.
That’s very selective quotation, Zarqon. His point is made in the rest of the paragraph which you ommitted:
I don’t necessarily agree with his analysis of desecularisation, and I don’t agree with his apparent welcoming of it, but I think it’s right that he’s put his finger on something in terms of the anti-religious hostility - knowing no discrimination or nuance - of which Dawkins and all the rest are symptomatic.
Yes, let’s squabble over who’s camp Hitler falls in. And if we’re going to do that, let’s bring in Stalin and Mao. Most discussions that go there end up achieving a great deal, in my experience.
ID has a specific genealogy: it is the same battle that was fought around the Scopes monkey trial, and it is out of that drawn out conflict, which has never really gone away in parts of the US, that ID emerges. I think it represents a major concession to science since it is trying to appropriate at a superficial level it’s language. It is the kind of strategy that comes out of near-defeat, a rear-guard or guerilla action. Also, it attacks the least materially important part of a scientific world-view.
For my part, I am a social constructionist: anybody who can’t see that scientific facts are constructed, in a social context, out of the raw material of reality, hasn’t spent time in a laboratory. The ID types don’t believe in social construction, neither do the science warriors, but scientists do by practicing it.
Dawkins doesn’t think releigion is evil. He thinks the kind of religion that leads to
the quote I provided above about Nazi Germany is so dishonest that it needs to be opposed by people of integrity arguing against it by writing books and giving lectures.
Righteo, Zarquon.
Check this out:
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=48252
“Religion” - as such - is just a construct of Western rationalism anyway - having the same roots as Dawkins’ own belief system. As he’d know if he ever bothered to engage with anthropological and historical writing on religion, as opposed to writing polemics.
Anyway, I don’t care about Dawkins that much. I think he’s an egotist who likes the attention. I just want to point out that not all of “religion” or everyone who’s religious is fundamentalist, believes in ID, is anti-science, etc. It would be nice if people took that into account.
Wing Nut Daily? You’ve got to be joking.
Oh, for fuck’s sake. I’m really sick of this. The quotes aren’t fabricated. I could find you hundreds of other links where Dawkins says the same. Shoot me for grabbing the first one I found via a google rank.
I’m trying to say - as a Christian - I’m not surprised but just a little disappointed that I have to put up with this shite from otherwise intelligent people. I await the next atheism-fest with reference to the pathologies of Judaism or whatever.
Here’s spiked on how Dawkins does damage to the humanist cause:
http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CAF1A.htm
I’m not trying to upset anyone, I think Dawkins is more understanding of religion than he is given credit for. After all, he (and I) had religious upbringings.
“Early on, many Catholic leaders criticized Nazism; after 1933, criticism turned to support and praise. Commonalities between Nazism and Catholics were anti-communism, anti-atheism, and anti-secularism. Catholic churches helped identify Jews for extermination. After the war, Catholic leaders helped former Nazis back into power.
Protestants were even more attracted to Nazism than Catholics; they, not Catholics, produced a movement (German Christians) dedicated to blending Nazi ideology and Christian doctrine.
Christian “resistance” was mostly against efforts to exert greater control over church activities. Christian churches were willing to tolerate widespread violence against Jews, military rearmament, invasions of foreign nations, banning labor unions, imprisonment of political dissenters, detention of people who had committed no crimes, etc. Why? Hitler was seen as someone restoring traditional Christian values and morality to Germany.”
http://atheism.about.com/od/isatheismdangerous/a/HitlerAtheist.htm
“My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross.”
- Adolf Hitler, 1922
“The fact that the Catholic Church has come to an agreement with Fascist Italy … proves beyond doubt that the Fascist world of ideas is closer to Christianity than those of Jewish liberalism or even atheistic Marxism…”
- Adolf Hitler in an article in the Völkischer Beobachter, February 29, 1929
“I believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty Creator. By warding off the Jews I am fighting for the Lord’s work.”
- Adolf Hitler, Speech, Reichstag, 1936
“I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so.”
- Adolf Hitler, to General Gerhard Engel, 1941
“We were convinced that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.”
-Adolf Hitler, unknown date
“We demand freedom for all religious confessions in the state, insofar as they do not endanger its existence or conflict with the customs and moral sentiments of the Germanic race. The party as such represents the standpoint of a positive Christianity, without owing itself to a particular confession….”
- NSDAP Party Program
Why is the comments box like mud? I’m not sober enough to cope.
How bizarre. Silkworm assumes Hitler never told a lie. Poor innocent little petal.
What a waste of time.
Fair enough, Zarquon. I was more targetting what I said at silkworm. And I was angry. Apologies.
What makes you think Hitler was lying?
Hahahaha!
I suppose you thought John Howard always told the truth? Hitler was appealling to different audiences at different times.
Go off and do some serious reading of history. I’m not going to bother with your naive cut and paste methodology anyway.
And as Klaus K said, how enlightening is all this anyway?
Ah yes. I see it all now. Hitler was an atheist pretending to be a Catholic. How fiendishly clever!
I thought this was a discussion of ID and science rather than atheism and religion or Dawkins’ book and for my part I certainly don’t lump all believers in with the ID proponents. Gray is right about one thing; religion is here to stay, but the status of science and basic academic freedom in the face of fundamentalist hostility is much less sure. I am deeply troubled that otherwise intelligent people like Klaus K find themselves “with ID by default”. I am wondering why that is?
Gray uses the words atheist, scientist and secularist almost interchangeably throughout this article, or at least in ways that obscure the complexity of the relations between them. I think he completely mischaracterizes science by saying it serves the need for prediction and control. Is he hinting that science is inherently authoritarian? If so that is no less vulgar than Dawkins characterizing religion as the source of violence. Science serves a need for understanding, prediction is just a handy way of testing that the understanding reflects what we construe to be reality. How quickly he goes from this to modern thought consisting of coopted religious narratives. The whole article suffers from these elisions.
I don’t think that one scientist, two past-it writers and a children’s book author constitute a world wide evangelical atheist movement but put me down as a non-evangelical atheist.
Boomerangs in Spaaaace
Hitler and religious belief - Hitler was certainly baptised Catholic and claimed to be so. But the study I’ve done of Nazi spiritual belief systems seems to indicate they were some kind of crazy pseudo-occultists.Years ago there was a wonderful book published on this that embraced things like hollow earth theory and various other irrational non-scientific beliefs, but for the moment its title escapes me, though I’d recognise it if I saw it.
The problem I have with ID (which I freely admit is only believed in by a relatively small though influential groups of Xtan fundies and certainly not by all Xtans)is that if you take its premises to their illogical conclusion, one has to accept that a Supreme Being has designed the course of human and natural history, ie Providence. Now I have several problems with this - a lot of people, including some Xtan varieties, and all non-Xtan varieties, are left “unsaved.” Secondly, the Supreme Being, (whose existence I will temporarily accept for the sake of argument) either willingly permits evil regimes to flourish, including secular regimes that don’t believe in him/her, or actively condones the flourishing of evil, because s/he’s still around smewhere inteliigently designing. Which creates all sorts of moral questions about the nature of said Supreme Being, none of which are complimentary.