A post at UD, insidiously tagged with “academic freedom”, promotes charity. Contributor johnnyb highlights a piece on NPR’s website which calls for recognition that
other people’s religious and scientific commitments can be as deeply felt and deeply reasoned as our own.
Sure, ID proponents are passionate about the tenets of their faith, and indeed the theist keeps on digging when the soil runs out. As Kierkegaard noted, there is always an unbridgeable emptiness for the theist, the “leap of faith.” So no matter how much reason one applies to religion, religious belief is at heart irrational. Those who attempt to trowel reason over the gap are foolish, and cowardly in their attempts to divert from the irrationality of their belief.
We already understand why people believe in ID. It is because they belong to sects which cannot accept that an upgraded Canaanite storm god did not create beasts and birds and plants fully formed, in many cases a few hours after finishing the planet. In the twenty-first century, this is a ridiculous idea, utterly contrary to the firmly established science based upon mountains of evidence. Furthermore, to preserve the fiction that ID is science, its supporters must fall back on a conspiracy theory which grants inordinate power to an atheist minority despised and marginalized in much of the world, especially the United States.
This is not all. We know that prominent figures associated with ID, and particularly the intelligent design advocacy organization, the Discovery Institute, have a theocratic, anti-science agenda. They do not balk at lies. This is all well documented.
The public face of ID is political. The politics are those of the American Christian right. Those of us who value reality, science, progressiveness, inclusiveness, social justice, and opportunity for all make a grave mistake by being charitable to proponents of ID. The American Christian right deserve no more charity than any other would be totalitarians. If the odd nice, deluded, and ignorant but honest creationist is offended by a lack of charity, that is tough as far as I am concerned. Obliviousness is no excuse for assisting the enemies of humanity.
[libertarian rant]The purpose of sitting in a science class is to learn science. As scientists understand it. Not as a thousands-year-old mythology understands it.
The creationists have a point when they say they are both required to take science and the science challenges the beliefs they are entitled to. My preferred solution has always been to allow the creationists to opt out. Just let them opt out of all science. No cherry picking. Give it all up or shut up and study.
I can already hear the complaints from the left wing authoritarians. But we need all our children to be competent at science. Modern society just can’t work with a huge portion of it filling the role of neo-luddite. Well it is time for us to live up to our supposedly superior godless morals. Kant’s CI. No human being should be a means to an end for any other human being. That goes for society as well. No one should be looked at as a means to society’s ends. Let the creationists go. That is my charity towards the willfully ignorant.
Then we demand our reciprocity. They must leave us be. That is the condition. If they want their freedom from the polluting influence of science they must be willing to grant our freedom from the corrupting influence of religion.[/libertarian rant]
The could, like the Amish, simply drop out of school after eighth grade.
I’m not clear as to why biology is required. Why not substitute chemistry or physics?
But if biology is taught it needs to be science.
No fraud deserves charity. ID is nothing but a fraud, dissembling its apologetic purposes, attempting to distort how science is done, and attacking science falsely ad homina to poison the well of knowledge.
There is plenty to be said for charity to the gulls. But the intensity of belief that demands a lack of decency toward honest science and honest scientists deserves no charity per se, nor do the principal figures who work strenuously to distort science to their ends and to inculcate an anti-science attitude in their followers.
Glen Davidson
Aardvark,
Children should suffer for the views of their parents?
I don’t think less public understanding of science is the way to go.
Of course, what you propose is no solution as far as right wing creationists are concerned. They want power, and in America at least they already have a measure of it. Why would they relinquish it?
Biology is likely taught because we’re biologic. Probably also because it can be made relatively easy and still be relevant, while it’s questionable of how meaningful “easy chemistry” is. I think that some physics should always be taught, and it is relevant at virtually all levels of difficulty when done right.
It really appears to me that trying to get people to understand their own bodies, health, and surrounding life is about as essential as any general science course could be. Evolution needn’t be heavy in all cases, but why animal tests matter to human health seems to be knowledge all should be offered–yes, it was known that animals were models for humans prior to evolutionary theory, but the why and how certainly enhanced this understanding.
Good knowledge of biology is a bulwark against all sorts of frauds perpetrated upon the public, from ID to anti-vax nonsense.
Glen Davidson
Yes, I am all for charity.
In a recent post at UD, partly as a reaction to events at Ball State, vjtorley implies that Jerry Coyne’s book is religion.
I think we should be at least as charitable as was vjtorley. But that’s a very low standard.
I don’t see johnnyb as really asking for charity. I see him as asking for undeserved special privilege.
I think this sums up everything about my skepticism of JohnnyB’s OP:
So much for that supposed “charitable ground”…
Strange how “those details” reside solely on a low traffic blog with 0 impact in the real world.
Dr Liddle’s claims appear to me to be based on sound science.
Upright Biped’s claims are just that. Claims. They’ve yet to become sound science.
Perhaps they will. Perhaps they won’t. But repeating the same thing to all-comers as come kind of challenge on a low-rent backwater blog is hardly going to set the scientific world alight.
I don’t know that either and I don’t know it as a fact but I have no doubt that every single public HS in the country has biology as a graduation requirement. (Not that people actually graduating know any biology beyond basic rutting but that is another problem.)
There is that absolutism Murray was complaining about. Who appointed you the arbiter of suffering.
I think I predicted that. Authoritarians deciding for other people what their children should be required to do.
You nailed it. This is the big stumbling block. They are not creationists because they want the freedom to believe as they wish. They want the power to inflict their religion on all.
Yes, suffer, Aardvark. Suffer from lack of opportunity to learn science.
This is really dishonest. Lizzie has bent over backwards to emphasize that science hasn’t (and probably can’t) disprove ID.
What science does is look for regularity and natural causes. It can’t disprove the occurrence of intervention, particularly if the intervention is spaced out over time so as to look exactly like natural cause.
I’ve seen Upright BiPed run away with his tail between his legs in at least two venues when his “semiotic argument” was soundly trashed. I’ve also seen him squirm furiously as he attempted to avoid providing clear operational definitions and ended up blaming Lizzie somehow for his lack of integrity.
I have never, in any venue, seen Lizzie act in anything resembling bad faith. In my opinion, she grants the intelligent design creationists far more benefit of the doubt than they have earned.
Returning to Lombrozo’s article — which occasioned the piece at Uncommon Descent — I can’t imagine that she would say that “charity” goes “all the way down,” so to speak, to include empirical matters of fact. When it comes to empirical matters of fact, including the highly generic statements of well-confirmed empirical theory, there is not much room for charity. About empirical matters of fact one can be wrong (as creationists are) or not even wrong (as ID proponents are).
However, when it comes to considerably more metaphysical statements and principles — such as naturalism and theism — we are dealing with notions only tangentially connected (at best) with empirical matters of fact, and in that domain, charity is clearly the best policy.
The much murkier cases, between the obviously empirical and the obviously metaphysical, are in the ethical and political domains. For example, think about folks who have religious objections to alternatives to abstinence-only sex education. It’s not really clear how the interests of public health are best balanced against the right to freedom from state interference in one’s private life. But at least some charity towards one’s opponents, and not demonizing the other side, would go a long way.
Pseudoscience deserves no charity. Willful pushers of pseudoscience deserve no charity. The schemers who wrote the Wedge Document deserve no charity. The leaders of the ID/creationist movement all know it is a sectarian political war on secular society; full of stealth attacks and deception. They all know why they are doing this; and they know it springs from their hatred of all things secular.
The problem comes down to how to treat the gullible followers of this movement. Most of them are pawns and don’t know it. They are sent out as point men to be slaughtered in battle while the Lieutenant Fuzzes of ID sit in their plush offices and evaluate the effects of their debating points. Note that I said debating points and not research proposals.
The routine, vicious attacks on Elizabeth by the UD crowd tell the story of what is really in their psyches. They don’t care enough about science to bother learning any of it; but they are sure to repeatedly abuse Elizabeth’s hospitality when they show up here.
Do any of them deserve charity? Elizabeth seems to treat them that way; but they always bite back no matter how hard she tries.
Where I live, kids can be exempt from sex-ed and other programs based on religious objection. This is not new.
Sixty years ago I observed kids in my elementary school class being excused from prayers and pledges and from Christmas activities. It was done quietly and without fuss.
Prayers and pledges are pretty much gone, but I can’t imagine how you can teach science to flat-earthers without offending them.
KN,
I don’t see any reason to be charitable to theism. There’s nothing murky about it. The leap of faith is always beyond any warrant. Also, most religious sects make empirically testable claims.
Regarding the supernatural, if something interacts it is empirically testable. If it doesn’t interact, it has no effect on us.
Life-after-death claims, for example, are not some “murky” ground. They are myths and stories at odds with our knowledge.
For me, it is very clear what to do about abstinence-only sex education. As a public health menace it should never be taught in schools. I wrote to my MP when some loony opposition MP proposed it. Just another terrible idea that deserves no respect. There is a duty to inform children of the facts about sex. What they do with those facts is another matter. No-one should have the right to be ignorant of public health matters.
In general, theists deserve charity. Their bad ideas do not. In the case of the ID movement and the rest of the American Christian Right, they have demonized themselves with their opposition to truth, science, freedom of and from religion, and equal rights.
davehooke,
I think this is a fair point, and one made by Pope Francis today, but in reverse.
Is “there” Twitter?
Do ID proponents deserve charity?
Based upon the way they are treated here at TSZ, the answer is a clear NO.
From the OP:
This statement quite nicely illustrates your self-imposed ignorance and exposes your lack of qualification to rationally discuss the matter.
Yet another feather in the cap of “skepticism.” Huzzah!
OMagain:
And you’ve read every single one of her claims posted at UD?
And did she stand silently by while those who opposed her silliness over at UD were banned? I guess she was just being charitable.
Fixed it for you Mung.
Oh, all those questions about Meyer’s Cambrian claims you cut and ran from say “hi”. They haven’t seen you in a week.
petrushka:
More revisionist history. More faux skepticism.
Elizabeth has generated a number of threads on the supposed refutation of ID. Why does she bother, if it can’t be disproven?
For example:
A CSI challenge
And let’s not forget this clunker of a thread:
Creating CSI with NS
Those weren’t about refuting ID Mung. Those were about refuting the IDiot magic mantra “CSI” and claims it can’t be produced without intelligent purposeful guidance.
She succeeded admirably too.
Mike Elzinga trumpets: ” Pseudoscience deserves no charity.”
By the same token, science deserves no charity when it claims to be a desirable alternative to religion and philosophy.
People desire most a modicum of meaning in their lives, something science does not and cannot offer. It offers a measure of increased health (I say measure because its advances in treating disease is blunted by the advent of new diseases), its performance in laying the groundwork for ipads, FB, etc, it commendable.
Yet science lacks the ability to provide meaning. And what’s outrageous IMO are the likes of Coyne, Myers, Dawkin’s preaching that this is what is wrong with society – seeking meaning. They would rather we turn off our impulses for meaning .
Can Mike Elzinga or any other poster on this board live life without seeking meaning? No, of course you can’t. Meaning is what drives our lives.
Religion has its place. Its abuses by power hungry ‘sectarians’ (as Mike Elzinga like to drone on about) is not reason to seek the obliteration of religion. People use all sorts of methods to seek control; religion is just one of many.
Religion is not the problem. People are. But we cant eliminate people. Stalin, Mao, and Pot tried that out based on the notion that killing people would kill ideas.
Ideas are independent of people. Just like information is independent of matter and energy.
So yeah, ID has something to offer. It riffs off the most basic understanding of what we are actually are.
Ideas.
But folks like Elzinga just can’t / won’t wrap their brains around this most basic understanding of life.
Yet they have the audacity to lecture us about how life is about physics and chemistry and nothing else. As I’ve said before, if it was all that easy, we’d have life figured out by now.
You have to stay up with the latest research Steve. Hoffman shows in “Life’s Ratchet” how it’s all just physics and chemistry, Mike Elzinga sez so.
Science works on the basis of evidence, not charity.
My life is far more meaningful than it would be without science. Yours probably is too.
More or less.
I mean, the fact you don’t simply repeat a claim that has given you concern is very telling. Why don’t you prove me wrong by quoting a claim Lizzie has made not based on sound science? From the way you talk it sounds trivial, yet here we are and all we have are your unsubstantiated accusations.
Child.
Leaving aside the question of whether attempting dialogue with UD regulars is silly or not, I’m curious about people being banned at UD for “opposing [Lizzie’s] silliness”, guessing that could be disagreeing with Lizzie or gratuitously insulting her. I don’t recall any unexplained disappearances of pro-ID commenters that you might be alluding to. If you ever find time to respond to queries, I’d be interested in more detail.
Mung, I don’t know if you are really misunderstanding my position or what, but let me make this absolutely clear:
I do not think that the proposition that “the world/life/whatever was designed by an Intelligent Designer” can be refuted. It could well be true. For half a century I believed it was. I still find it conceivable.
I do think that the claims that an Intelligent Designer of life is indicated by the patterns we observe in biological data are invalid.
I do not think that it would be impossible infer a designer from biological data.
I do think that to do so would require developing a specific hypothesis that made specific predictions and testing those predictions against the data.
I also think that to do so would require suspending the assumption that the putative designer was an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent deity.
You daily demonstrate an inability to understand clear English. It is quite possible to demonstrate that ID is not science, that ID has no testable hypotheses, that ID has not demonstrated tha biological design is even possible without evolution, that ID is not even wrong, and ID has not contributed anything to biology.
But all this fails to demonstrate or even claim that we can disprove that invisible undetectable entities poofed something somewhere, leaving no evidence of time, place, motive or means. Such a negative can’t be proved.
Mung. Everybody knows. I’m not telling people anything. At best I am reminding them.
You are a Christian creationist. Your fellows at UD are Christian creationists. Oh, JoeG says he is a Muslim.
We know what the Disco Tute are. We know what they want.
For the Canaanite origins of YHWH/El, and the identification as a storm god, you could read The Early History of God: Yahweh and Other Deities in Ancient Israel by Mark S Smith.
You are outraged by things those three never said, and never would say. I challenge you to produce a quote from any of them saying that people should not seek meaning. I know you cannot do it.
Steve,
It begins with a most basic misunderstanding of what we actually are, and continues in denial.
This is important. Some people seem to think that believing that the universe was not intentionally created for some purpose implies that nothing has any meaning or purpose.
This is clearly false. We are human organisms capable of meaning things and conceiving and fulfilling our purposes.
To do this does not require the belief that we are created to fulfill someone else’s.
Nor does seeking to understand how the universe works require the prior assumption that it was intended to work that way.
Lizzie,
Yes, though there are certain kinds of people utterly incapable of seeing things this way.
I’m with Alan on this – who exactly was banned at UD for opposing Lizzie’s “silliness”? I seem to have missed this.
I agree with the last claim there — that many religious sects and organizations make empirically testable claims that are, for the most part, shown to be false.
However, I don’t think that making such claims is essential to religion or even the point of spiritual practice — nor do I think that “atheism” or “naturalism” is in a better position, epistemologically speaking, than theism. It’s a leap of faith in either direction, and from what I can tell, either leap can be justified in William James’ “will to believe” sense.
Proving that CSI can be generated by evolutionary processes only proves it can’t be used to detect design. It doesn’t prove design didn’t happen.
We are beginning to design using evolution. The pharmaceutical industry depends on trial and error processes. We are learning to industrialize evolution.
So finding CSI to be an irrelevant measure doesn’t disprove design. It just makes ID’s Dowsing rod irrelevant.
I don’t follow the argument that we can’t have meaning unless someone else tells us so.
Atheists tend to be agnostic atheists. Technically agnostic, and atheists in the sense that everyone is with respect to belief in unicorns and the like.
A theist takes a leap of faith towards a particular god, the chances of that god existing being infinitesimal. Besides which, nothing bears the stamp of men, and I mean men, more obviously than religion. Furthermore, we can consider Christianity debunked, except for ivory tower versions of it that Paul would not recognise.
The “it only becomes evident when you believe it” gambit should not be taken seriously by civilized people. Which religion to believe? Why, all of them. And all the woo. It is the same psychology as those stupid chain emails that get offices in a tizzy.
Philosophy is not much use where it is indistinguishable from gullibility.
I have been hearing that old mantra that life is meaningless without a deity nearly my entire life. It originates primarily in fundamentalist churches in the US. It comes from the pulpits of these churches and from their Sunday schools.
The fact that it is a common accusation made by ID/creationists is another clue that ID/creationism is really fundamentalist religion.
“Evolutionists”, “Darwinists”, atheists, scientists are all caricatured as having no reason for living. Letters to the editors of local newspapers frequently assert that teaching evolution destroys hope, takes away meaning in life, leads to depression, and results in sin, degradation, and suicide. I have heard these things in their churches and I have examples of such letters in my files.
So I am not surprised when the ID/creationists who show up here spout this stuff; they have been immersed in these caricatures most of their lives. They are projections of their own fears and loathing. The demonizing and caricaturing of others is a form of self righteousness that allows them to imagine they have found the TRUE meaning of life.
I suspect it is hard for them to imagine that learning things, including science, enriches life. There is some weird notion among many of these ID/creationists that their religion is the only source of enrichment and enlightenment, and anyone who knows anything about science has “obviously” starved themselves of humanity and dignity and has a dark, depressing life. But nothing could be farther from the truth.
This is also the Internet, with trolls showing up everywhere. So drive-by muggings by the likes of Steve Proulx are common. And we all know what Mung’s shtick is.
UD, on the other hand, appears to be a place where like-minded fundamentalists hang out and nurse their grudges. The world is an evil place and “soulless evilutionists” are to blame.
Funny coincidence; I just heard that exact same thing yesterday, with the addition of ‘purpose’ and ‘afterlife’ from a senior Japanese scholar, as we spoke on the way back from Auschwitz-Birkenau. Please let that sink in because ‘meaningless’ and ‘meaningful’ wrt ‘life’ take on quite different ‘meanings,’ I can assure you, after one has just visited that place.
Iow, ‘meaningful’ wrt God/Allah/Yahweh certainly doesn’t “originate primarily,” as the physicist Mike Elzinga broad brushes it, in America or even with religious ‘fundamentalists’ there. Mike is exaggerating his knowledge of this topic, as usual. Indeed, it is a condition of almost all world religions that “life is meaningful,” while after life is ‘meaningless’ in the worldview of atheists.
To the perpendicular point of the thread: Was Auschwitz-Birkenau [lowercase id] ‘intelligently designed?’ Yes it was, as the ‘successful’ results show. = ((((( * 6 million. IDists nevertheless *should* be treated charitably as human beings; fallible, imperfect and destined to be gone one day.
I have met quite a few IDists and though I disagree quite strongly with their scientistic ‘theory’, I do not wish harm on any of them. Several people at TSZ even sent wishes to one of their UD opponents recently who was (perhaps still is) going through a family health crisis. Such goodwill should be commended and uplifted, rather than ill will spread between ‘players.’
Mike, have you ever lived outside of the USA, outside of the midwest USA in your life? You say so many things that to my ears are so insular, myopic and angrily insensitive that I can’t imagine you’ve actually lived around the world and seen how people other than your imaginary American ‘fundamentalist’ neighbours think and believe. There is much more love and encouragment in the world that is possible instead of simply dismissed by flaunting some kind of privileged physical scientific knowledge at the ‘lower peoples’.
My new Japanese friend was humble, gracious and even full of hope, focussed on repentance, while at the same time weighed down by the heavy reality of death by ‘scientific certainty’ that we had all just witnessed as ‘tourists’; that what was being done to those supposedly ‘meaningless’ lives was morally right; that they deserved no charity, no love.
Look at the context of this discussion. It’s about ID/creationism; a sectarian political movement originating in the 1970s, officially beginning with the formation of the Institute for Creation Research by Henry Morris. I know its history well; you quite obviously don’t.
Furthermore you have absolutely no clue about my life and experiences; I have a far broader range of travel and experiences than you can possibly imagine, but I will not share them with the likes of people who behave as you do. So stop probing; they are none of your damned business. You are an abuser of information and privilege.
We have all witnessed first hand your unethical and unprofessional behavior on this site.
You lose.
I don’t think this thread was ever about whether or not we might have charity, empathy, or the like, with ID proponents, including those with the most fraudulent “arguments.”
We may have some feeling for Bill Dembski as a father, especially as the father of an autistic son, but that simply wasn’t the question. Especially since the article refers to a UD post suggesting “charitable ground” upon which “both sides” could meet, clearly the point is about “charity” toward the fraud that ID is.
Granted, pity is about the most that could be expected for ideas pathetic as ID is, it doesn’t even deserve that so long as it attempts to subvert sound epistemology in order to allow apologetic nonsense to pretend to be science.
Glen Davidson
This is a lie of such breathtaking audacity that I had to read it again to make sure I had not imagined Gregory saying it․ Imaginary, the hell they are․
Gregory, you owe Mike a sincere apology for telling a lie about his experience with fundamentalists (and mine, too, in many different states where I’ve lived and worked)․
You of course have the right to express disagreement with our assessment of the dangers those fundies represent to our planet and the whole human race․
You have absolutely no right to tell a lie that those fundies are “imaginary”, that Mike (and I) are merely imagining them․
If you don’t have the decency to apologize for and retract your falsehood, then you should remove yourself from this site․
It was those imaginary fundies that tried to put an ID textbook in classrooms, and it is imaginary fundies that are trying to geld biology textbooks in Texas (and by extension, the country)
I’s suggest that someone who isn’t from the United States and who doesn’t live here and send kids to school here might not be aware of the political activism surrounding biological evolution.
He isn’t bothering me in any way; it’s just a pompous display by a pseudo-intellectual with a seriously bloated case of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
It’s even a bit funny in a pathetic sort of way; quite a bandwidth-consuming gas bag. 🙂