Barry Arrington, owner of the pro-ID blog, Uncommon Descent is alleged to have written the following in an email to a contributor:
We are in a war. That is not a metaphor. We are fighting a war for the soul of Western Civilization, and we are losing, badly. In the summer of 2015 we find ourselves in a positon very similar to Great Britain’s position 75 years ago in the summer of 1940 – alone, demoralized, and besieged on all sides by a great darkness that constitutes an existential threat to freedom, justice and even rationality itself.
In this thread I don’t want to discuss the rights and wrongs of the email itself, nor of whether or not TSZ constitutes a “great darkness”. Barry is entitled to decide who posts at UD and who does not; it’s his blog.
What interests me is the perception itself, which I suspect is quite widely shared.
Indeed it’s my perception that a lot of people are truly frightened by much that the modern world seems to represent – evolutionary biology, social and economic liberalism, atheism, the decline of religious observance, multi-culturalism, abortion, LGBT issues, the welfare state – and feel that they are somehow part of a coordinated, or at least related attack on values held very dear. Indeed, that was made explicit in the Wedge Strategy document:
The proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built. Its influence can be detected in most, if not all, of the West’s greatest achievements, including representative democracy, human rights, free enterprise, and progress in the arts and sciences.
Yet a little over a century ago, this cardinal idea came under wholesale attack by intellectuals drawing on the discoveries of modern science. Debunking the traditional conceptions of both God and man, thinkers such as Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud portrayed humans not as moral and spiritual beings, but as animals or machines who inhabited a universe ruled by purely impersonal forces and whose behavior and very thoughts were dictated by the unbending forces of biology, chemistry, and environment. This materialistic conception of reality eventually infected virtually every area of our culture, from politics and economics to literature and art
The cultural consequences of this triumph of materialism were devastating. Materialists denied the existence of objective moral standards, claiming that environment dictates our behavior and beliefs. Such moral relativism was uncritically adopted by much of the social sciences, and it still undergirds much of modern economics, political science, psychology and sociology.
Materialists also undermined personal responsibility by asserting that human thoughts and behaviors are dictated by our biology and environment. The results can be seen in modern approaches to criminal justice, product liability, and welfare. In the materialist scheme of things, everyone is a victim and no one can be held accountable for his or her actions.
Finally, materialism spawned a virulent strain of utopianism. Thinking they could engineer the perfect society through the application of scientific knowledge, materialist reformers advocated coercive government programs that falsely promised to create heaven on earth.
Discovery Institute’s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies.
Barry clearly believes (or did back in the summer) that the War is being lost (“and lost badly”). Here are the reasons why I think he should Stop Worrying And Learn To Love The Bomb Materialists.
- We are no threat to freedom. Those of us who call ourselves “atheists” for the most part do not hold the belief that there is no God (or gods), we simply do not hold the belief that there is. We have no problem if you do. Indeed, many of us are glad that there are people who find themselves inspired by their beliefs to do much good in the world. Most of us believe that a pluralistic multicultural society is something to be proud of, and those cultures include yours.
- We are no threat to justice. Even the most ardent materialist utilitarian is unlikely to have any problem with the idea that people must be held accountable for their actions, and that the role of social and legal justice systems is to ensure that people treat each other fairly. The fact that some of us do not think that wrongdoers will be punished in the next life does not prevent us from thinking that it is a very good idea to provide major disincentives in this.
- We are no threat to rationality. I think this fear arises from the sense that scientists frequently demonstrate that what seems obvious (aka “self-evident”) ain’t necessarily so. Turns out the earth isn’t flat. Turns out that “down” points in all kinds of different directions depending on where you are standing. Turns out there is a speed limit for information. Turns out that time is relative. Turns out that reality at quantum level is simply weird. All this, in the past, theists have taken in their stride, albeit with a bit of a lurch. What I suspect the real threat is that science – neuroscience! – is, in places, appears to be claiming that our powerful sense that in each of us there is a soul-y thing, a homunculus, who is the “I behind the eyes” – isn’t what we think it is. That some of us are, in effect, denying that we – I – exist, except as “a bag of chemicals”. That A is not-A. That I is not-I. My response is that this fear too, is unfounded. Even if some of us think that there is no immortal (or otherwise) homunculus in the brain directing operations, but rather that the brain is an organ of the body consisting of a vastly complex distributed decision-making system that acts recursively thus generating as a property of the decider the capacity recognise herself as an intentional agent, by analogy to the other similar intentional agents she observse and interacts with, that does not amount to a denial that “I am”. It is merely an attempt to account for why there should be an I that can say “I am”.
So sleep easy, Barry! We are not Nazi Germany, nor yet a Great Darkness. Our ideas are not billowing blackly from Mount Doom. They are transparent, humane, pluralistic, and provisional. There is nothing to fear but fear itself.
I wouldn’t expect the existence of a god to be testable. I wouldn’t even regard an entity whose existence was testable as divine – why wouldn’t we just regard such a putative entity as just another odd kind of denizen of our present universe?
But we could test whether some putative god, if s/he DID exist had the properties claimed. But then we run not the problem you mention of coherence. You can’t really test for contradictory properties, and most gods proposed have either contradictory properties or falsifiable (and falsified) properties.
I think there are some god-concepts that are neither testable nor incoherent. But a lot of people don’t regard them as proper gods.
When mom was a little girl, Catholic nuns in the Philippines used to slap my mother around and scream at her when she didn’t say her Hail Mary’s loud enough. Mom’s still a Catholic, but she doesn’t have a high opinion of most nuns.
Why am I saying this? Is theism some sort of cure-all to human nature?
I mentioned atheist TJ Rodgers. I sided with him when he lambasted a catholic nun.
http://www.cypress.com/documentation/ceo-articles/cypress-ceo-responds-nuns-urging-politically-correct-board-make
Framing the issues in terms of theism is good and atheism I bad is not productive.
There are a lot of atheists who wouldn’t have treated mom the way Catholic nuns treated her. I don’t have quite the same love of church culture that some IDists have. I’m a Christian despite the garbage I and my family suffered in various congregations. I’m grateful for the congregations I’m a part of today, not so happy with some of the past experiences.
Hence I don’t look at this with quite the same lens the militant anti-materialists do. I’m a dualist, I’m not an anti-materialist. I was an engineer by training after all, and working with the material universe is a main focus of engineers.
Elizabeth,
The most recent 990 I could find for Uncommon Descent Inc. is for 2011. For that year their revenue was $8,175. Unless Barry has really upped his game, it doesn’t look like ad revenue does much more than keep the lights on.
Do any accountants here know when the 2014 data has to be made public?
I’ve done some work in ad tech. Most people do not have ad blockers, although a larger percentage of people under 30 do.
But he is damned entertaining. I especially like seeing him melt down when someone questions his sermons. That thread is especially fun because there have been three or four that have disagreed and suffered the wrath of KF.
I do appreciate SC bringing that thread up. What a GREAT thread! Re-reading it was great. I particularly loved collecting the following quotes from EL:
‘
SC said:
There’s room for all sorts of tactics in a war, which you seem to agree is actually going on. We can use them all, and let others use those which they prefer and think are effective, without subverting the entire effort from the inside. IOW, you can profess “law of large numbers” as an effective ID argument without attempting to undermine other ID arguments at the same time.
It seems more important to you to advertise your own “intellectual honesty” by attacking the arguments and tactics of other IDists than it is to win the war, as if you actually believe that you can gain the anti-theists/materialists trust/confidence by sacrificing other IDists and arguments You trot this out time and again by pointing to where you disagreed with IDists to your own detriment.
Do you think that by doing so, at some point someone here will say to themselves, “Hey, SC has thrown other IDists under the bus, maybe I should listen more closely to his arguments because he’s so darn intellectually honest!”??? Do you think that what you have done will ever amount to anything more than providing rhetoric-value quotes to the opposition? “Even Sal Cordova admits ….”
Well, even if we lose the war, at least you can cling to how intellectually honest you were, right?
I don’t mind a little bit of the war thesis if it is modestly light-hearted like a sporting event being framed that way.
Where this is highly counter productive for IDists and creationists is in the effect it has in them matriculating through schools.
Consider that creationist Kurt Wise was the student of Stephen J. Gould. Marcus Ross, Paul Nelson, Bill Dembski, Guillermo Gonzalez, probably Stephen Meyer were mentored, advised and supervised by Darwinists.
My most beloved professor James Trefil campaigns against ID. He is a physicist that is involved in Origin of Life research. But he gladly pointed me out to the audience at one of his anti-ID talks as one of his star creationist students. No need to make the difference of opinion a Jihad as Barry does. I had a professor (not named) that is good friends with Dawkins. I wouldn’t have gotten through school if that professor hadn’t helped me along and encouraged me and spent time teaching me.
Being so integrated in society with atheists, agnostics and Darwinists, a war would be like a civil war where no one wins. IDists and every one can benefit from cooperation.
A fellow student of mine in physics knew Christian Darwinist Charles Townes, nobel Prize winner and inventor of the lazer. She went on and on about what a wonderful human being he was and how he would greet her on the campus of Berkeley. One should be honored to know and interact and cooperate with such a person without fear of being labeled a Nazi Collaborator.
What is the point of this collection of out-of-context posts, William?
That people use the word “Darwinism” to mean different, often unspecified, things?
In which case, I agree.
I am thrilled to be a better class of garbage than Barry.
For the record you weren’t the one I was thinking of. You’re all right. 🙂
From the thread from which you took my quotes (all denuded of context):
There are several big and inter-related issues at stake here, so here are a few thoughts about each of them.
One of the major schisms in the cultural politics of the present moment is between the heirs of John Stuart Mill and the heirs of Carl Schmitt. Mill, in his On Liberty, argued that there should be no restrictions on what views are put forth for consideration of public policy, because free and open debate will sift the good ideas from the bad ones. Politics is essentially a cooperative venture.
Schmitt, on the other hand hand, thought that politics was essentially a kind of warfare. He once wrote that the political essentially involves the distinction between the friend and the enemy. Clausewitz is famous for having said that “war is politics by other means”, but Schmitt turns out around; it would be more accurate to say that, for Schmitt, politics is war by other means.
In those terms, TSZ is Millian and UD is Schmittian.
More generally, liberals and moderates are more or less the heirs of Mill, and extremists of various kinds are the heirs of Schmitt — including not just cultural traditionalists (as we find at UD) but also reactionaries of various kinds (white supremacist, misogynist, etc.), religious fundamentalists, and also socialists and other leftists of various kinds.
Whether you think of yourself as fighting a war against pluralism and tolerance or a war against capitalism, you’re still inhabiting a political universe of friends and enemies, and that’s very different from the “come, let us reason together” ethos of Mill.
The other major issue, more strictly philosophical than political, is about the coherence and plausibility of a fully naturalized humanism. Are the norms and ideals of humanism — equality, freedom, justice, human rights, and so on — compatible with the naturalistic thesis that human beings are differ only in degree, and not in kind, from other animals?
As often expressed by WJM and phoodoo here at TSZ, the worry is that our widely shared beliefs about norms, values, and ideals are empty (if not indeed incoherent) if we accept metaphysical naturalism (“materialism”). For one might that core pillars of Western ethical and political discourse are built on the idea that human beings are created in the image of God, and without that foundation, the whole rest of the edifice must collapse.
Showing that this is not the case — that humanism can be successfully and fully naturalized — is the central theme of my work.
It would be interesting to see what his revenue was before and after his “amnesty”. I have long suspected that revenue was the motivator for that, not an attempt to open the dialogue.
good 🙂
KN,
I’m a Millian, obviously Barry is not. I posted on Mill at UD because of my association with Allen MacNeil. I got banned at UD by DaveScot partly for forming such friendly relations with Millians. Clive Hayden reinstated me after Barry canned DaveScot because DaveScot called Barry on the problems with self-evident morality.
The Discovery Institute has a mix of Millians and Schmittians.
Discovery Institute fellow John Angus Campbell is a Millian, and can quote Mill from memory. He did so when I met him in person. The authors of the Wedge Document are obviously more akin to Schmitt.
stcordova,
I’m sure a lot of Nazis were really nice guys and beloved teachers, too. I’m also sure a lot of Allies were nasty, back-stabbing MFers. So?
Whether or not there is a war is really dependent on your perspective. When people advocate for gay rights and same sex marriage, most of them are doing it out of a belief that it is the right thing to do. People like Barry and KF (and many, many others) see this as an attack on Christianity.
When people pressured for laws to make it illegal for a public business to deny services to people based on race, religion or culture, they did it because they thought it was the right thing to do. Amongst those who thought it was a good thing were a vast majority of Christians. But when this protection was extended to sexual orientation, Many Christians saw this as at attack on Christians.
When creationists attempted to have creationism (IDism) taught on an equal footing with evolution in the science classes, they were doing it because they thought it was the right thing to do. Many others, however, saw it as an attack on science and education.
EL said:
The point is obvious, even to you, as evidenced by your attempt to save face in your very next post. 🙂
Barry might give some thought to the possibility that his brand of theism is considerably outnumbered in the world.
“Abortion & Euthanasia: Why I’m All For Both
Posted on July 11, 2015 by William J. Murray
Simply put, liberals/progressives are the ones who, IMO, are going to utilize these services the most. So, yeah, the fewer babies they get to raise, and the earlier we can stop them from voting, the better. On the conservative side we have the Duggars and highly religious people breeding like crazy and clinging to life for every breath they can take – which puts and keeps more conservatives in the voting pool longer.
So, as a pragmatic political matter, I say let ’em abort their young and kill themselves off to their heart’s content.”
Is that what war looks like?
Outnumbering your opposition is pretty important in any war.
William J. Murray,
I think you should read this: http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2015/12/the-war-before.html#comment-347424
Richardthughes,
Read it. Why should I have read it?
Kantian Naturalist,
I disagree. As Orwell put it, “The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.” There are plenty of authoritarians on both the left and right, without even considering the extremes.
William J. Murray,
Because you’re not in a war, silly.
Richardthughes said:
From the definition of war, Merriam-Webster:
I see. Well, how do you feel about Barry’s email, William?
What are you, my therapist?
Well, I take it from the thread from which he quotemined me, that William is in complete agreement with Barry.
I’ve wondered the same thing. It’s clearly a jab at the site name, but I don’t know what it means.
Probably “The Atheist Materialist Skeptical Zone?
‘cos we’re only skeptical about Atheist Materialism…
It’s like “The Atheist [something] Zone.” Can’t remember what the “M” stands for, it’s just something Gregory thinks is important.
Unimpressive name-calling is what it amounts to.
Glen Davidson
Sad, but unsurprising.
I don’t think the “M” is for “materialism.” That’s a UD taboo/accusation.
Possible, but I doubt it.
Glen Davidson
Why was my post sent to Guano, EL?
Moved a post (one of mine) to guano.
It takes both sides to turn up and have a fight.
A tacit admission that her own post was as guano-able as mine, while the moderators here immediately guanoed my post, then supported each others and provided rationalizations for their bias in not guano-ing hers.
The fact is, neither post should be guanoed by the rules of this site, simply because they are about the content of posts; neither are about the posters. I have often and regularly argued that the specific content of EL’s posts are not logically coherent. I have stated outright that some of her posts are not logical. She has said the same thing about many of mine. So, making a general comment about the nature of most of someone’s posts is off-limits?
Hmm. I wonder how many times people have said that I or 5MM do nothing here but make empty assertions without specifically addressing any particular issue or making a case?
You see, this isn’t moral outrage – because I’m not outraged. I’m taking this opportunity to point out the hypocrisy and bias in full display.
That’s good. I’d hate to think you were creating the world’s worst diversion from Barry’s email/
No
Elizabeth,
Johnny B? A poster at UD?
I will now make my point, in a manner in which I consider to be the within rules of this site:
In the UD thread that William is referring to, William, in an OP, effectively made the same point as Barry did in his email to Sal, namely that “we are in a war”.
In that thread, William posted a list of propaganda “memes” that he seemed to think would be useful in waging that war:
All of which I believe to be slanderous. While I must assume that William does not believe that these “memes” are untruths, I will note that in a later post on that thread, he wrote:
Box later photoshopped one of William’s “memes” on to a photograph of Daniel Dennett receiving an award from a humanist organisation. The text of the citation had been altered to make it look as the Dennett had been commended for refusing to condemn rape, and Box linked to it in a post apparently meant to be taken factually:
THAT is what I thought was despicable about the thread – William’s untruth’s, posted as overt propanda “memes”, Box’s attempt to use them to mislead people, and the utter refusal of any UD regular to express any unease whatsoever at the proposed tactics.
Note that my comments here are directed at the content, not the “perceived motivations” of any member here. I do not profess to understand the motivations of either Box nor William. But the tactic they propose I most certainly regard as immoral.
Yes. I asked him if he would be willing, and he very kindly agreed, although said he was short of time right now.
Anyway, reading that thread of Williams, and his quotemines of me have made me feel a bit warlike, so I’ll butt out for a bit until I feel more irenic again.
“Follow the evidence wherever it leads” doesn’t have much traction at UD.
Loyalty and propaganda, rather more.
Glen Davidson
Elizabeth,
That list of what ATHEISM means and THEISTS have done is hilarious! Shows what can happen when you make up your own reality. And get away with, given the lack of demurral over yonder.
I never knew I was in a culture war. What (I wonder) will happen to atheists who find themselves still unable to sincerely believe?
KN, “the “come, let us reason together” ethos of Mill” that you refer to comes from Isaiah 1: 18. Do you know much Scripture and read it alongside of the ‘philosophy’ that is your professional work? This is something I constantly critique in what I call your ‘philosophistry’; there’s no depth or breadth to it without some identification with a wisdom tradition, which is what you seem to avoid (or just hypothesise into a postmodern truthy ‘smorgasbord’).
And though I agree that Schmitt is important to many political philosophers nowadays, I’d go back further to Machiavelli’s duplicitous ruler. Likewise, once one elevates the ‘polity’ as a kind of ‘secular god’ above the people, the rest of the ‘secularist/anti-religious’ circus/tragedy/comedy follows from that.
Well, that’s more an ‘evolutionary’ thesis, than strictly a ‘naturalistic’ one, cf. Plantinga’s EAAN. Darwin’s ‘species egalitarism’, as some call it vs. ‘human exceptionalism’. This is where Steve Fuller is such a burr in the side of liberals and ‘leftists’, since he regularly returns to its importance in the Darwinian dehumanisation of much ‘modern’ intellectual thought.
Of course, religious humanists differ from KN’s secular humanism. But recently KN insisted here that he actually *IS* religious (which, in his language means “considers himself to be, but might not actually be”, y’know, the assertoric/disclosive thingy! 😉 ), specifically, that he is a ‘Reform Jew.’ That rather complicates his irreligious appeals to naturalism: “that humanism can be successfully and fully naturalized — is the central theme of my work.” Yeah, that’s a problem for your supposedly (real) religious Judaism, isn’t it?
Yes, that is correct. That would be one of those ‘spiritual interpretations’ that require ‘spiritual commitment,’ which KN does not appear to have or any longer consider even possible in his ‘Reformed’ Kantian naturalist-empiricist-humanist mindset. Erik pointed this out in the Varieties of Religious Language thread, and though KN asked questions, he didn’t actually address what a ‘spiritual interpretation’ of Scripture amounts to.
Just sticking this here, looks relevant to me somehow:
Kiel, Germany; Chanukah 1931
I thought I could get the image uploaded but … look over there 🙁
Barry’s e-mail, as a thesis of the state of Western Civilization, is getting far to much of hearing considering its just elaborate window dressing for an insult directed at me.
What Barry really is saying, “Hey Sal, I’m calling you a Quisling. Let me explain what a Quisling is so you can really appreciate how I’m insulting you and what I really think of you, you Quisling…”
That’s not it at all. They were right on some points. They spoke the truth.
I support truth even if the truth hurts. It hurts to say a UD author and celebrity is on the wrong path on the 2nd law. It hurts to admit no one seems capable of making CSI calculations, and no one can agree how much CSI is represented by 2000 coins ordered by a robot. It hurts to admit CSI version 2 is so difficult to apply compared to simpler avenues. It hurts to admit UD is getting involved in non-ID topics like the principles of right reason and self-evident morality when principles of right reason are highly dubious in light of modern math. I hurts when VJTorely after I hinted to him repeatedly starts contesting stuff about population genetics and has to issue a retraction and Branko Koszulic gets hung out to dry as a result. I could go on and on.
We either embrace truth even if it costs our reputations or we just go on pretending we never make mistakes or pretend we understand something or know something when we don’t — all in the name of putting on a public face on an advocacy blog.
I teach students of all ages in the churches ID and creation, and TSZ has helped improve the quality of what is being presented.
Example 1, I engaged TSZ on the law of large numbers, an angle no other ID proponent had really tried to use (they were stuck in the mud of information theory). They helped clean up my materials.
Example 2: TSZ opponents gave me good training in statistical mechanics and thermodynamics beyond my graduate studies on the topic. How is that an act of war? The physics professors here could have just said, “take a hike”. They didn’t. They may hate my views, they may hate me, but there was a degree of chivalry and charity there.
Example 3: TSZ’s Joe Felsenstein who disagrees with my views has been so very gracious to help me learn population genetics. That doesn’t strike me as an act of war but as a very collegial exchange. The equations represented in Felsenstein’s works are the basis of important creationist theories. Where better to learn, short of enrolling in schools, will I have access to a world class if not historic population geneticist?
stcordova,
So what if you don’t think it is a war of ideas, and Barry does? Its another thing the two of you disagree on.
Perhaps he also disagrees with you that guns are great for society, and that the problems in Greece were because of socialism, consider that Greece isn’t even close to the top of socialist countries like Scandinavia, Germany, Belgium, Finland…you know the countries with the best economies and standards of living that you hate? You have a lot of ideas worth disagreeing with.
Apparently a lot of atheists here and elsewhere do think there is a war of ideas, so its another thing a lot of people disagree with you about.