September 25, 2005
GROAN AND BEAR IT (via Ali Choudhury):
Intelligent design theory + postmodernism = pure science fiction: When the religious Right adopts the epistemology of the multicultural Left -- that truth is relative -- there goes the Enlightenment (Noam Scheiber, 29aug05, The Australian)
IN 1993, journalist Jonathan Rauch published a book called Kindly Inquisitors, in which he catalogued contemporary threats to the Enlightenment tradition of seeking truth through logical or empirical discourse.One of Rauch's points was that, while this (classical) liberal system for amassing knowledge appeared to be under attack from both the religious Right and the multicultural Left, in fact the two groups were making a version of the same argument: mainstream science didn't accord their beliefs the respect they deserved, whether it was creation science on the one hand or feminist or Afro-centric science on the other.
Rauch's book has held up remarkably well in the 12 years since it was published.
This is particularly so in light of the debate in the US over intelligent design (ID) -- the idea, popular on the Right, that life is too complex to have resulted from random variation. Even US President George W. Bush has suggested, as the creation scientists (and multiculturalists) of the 1980s and 1990s did before him, that both sides of the supposed debate be treated as legitimate in public school curricula.
But there was one thing Rauch didn't anticipate. At the time, he suggested that even though creationists had adopted the tactics of the academic Left -- the demand for equal time -- they still believed in objective truths. They just didn't think all of these truths were discoverable by science.
By contrast, today's IDers have gone further and adopted the epistemology of the Left -- the idea that ostensibly scientific truths may be relative.
Intelligent Design is, of course, just as much nonsense as Darwinism. The central insight of Western philosophy is that Reason is completely dependent on Faith. But, rather than being fatal to either, this insight allows us to base our lives in faith and use reason as a tool. Of course, in the modern era this has really only been accepted in the Anglosphere. The Rationalist French and the continental Europeans could never grasp the implications. This was obvious early on in their rejection of Judeo-Christian faith and later on in their post-modernism, as they rejected reason when they finally figured out that it is anti-rational in and of itself.
Just because science is necessarily relativistic and merely metaphorical does not mean that there is no objective Truth about Creation, nor that it is unknown to us. It's just Revealed, rather than Rational.
Posted by Orrin Judd at September 25, 2005 9:47 AMMy visualized image of ID is that of a master painter who sits by doing nothing while the wind blows one pot of paint after another onto a canvas but rushes over once and a while to give brilliant little dabs that convert it into a Rembrandt.
Posted by: Peter B at September 25, 2005 12:05 PMOf course, the darwinist image is of trillions of pots falling over so many millions of years that eventually the laws of probability actually produce a Rembrandt.
Posted by: Peter B at September 25, 2005 12:10 PMOrrin:
Right. Not to mention pot and paint makers.
Genecis is looking better every day.
Posted by: Peter B at September 25, 2005 12:16 PMPeter:
That assumes an artwork results. They pretend to think it's all just splatters.
Posted by: oj at September 25, 2005 12:19 PMNot just splatters. Splatters built upon other splatters all the way back to the first mysterious splatter. The splatters that survived did so because humans thought they were beautiful. But that of course presumes something called beauty came out of a mess of genes scrambling to survive.
Posted by: Peter B at September 25, 2005 1:02 PMPeter:
I recommend a read of Bill Bryson's A Short History Of Nearly Everything.
Posted by: Ali Choudhury at September 25, 2005 3:12 PMI only mention this for discussion purposes, but Christopher Langan, whose IQ may be the highest ever recorded (it's at least 35 points higher than Einstein's), appears to largely agree with OJ's ideas regarding Darwinism.
(excerpt from his essay is linked in first bullet point)
Posted by: Matt Murphy at September 25, 2005 3:13 PMI researched this Christopher Langan guys, and while he seems to be an intelligent individual, I would not be quick to bow down before his mighty religious/philosophical vision because he claims to have an unbelievably high IQ. Natural selection still makes a lot more sense to me. But hey, I'm just a little fish.
Posted by: at September 25, 2005 4:37 PMOne could just as easily say that Faith depends upon reason. The fear that drives faith awakes when we ask reason (not Reason) the one question worth asking.
Posted by: joe shropshire at September 25, 2005 7:13 PMOne would be wrong.
Posted by: oj at September 25, 2005 7:28 PMOne would think, if one misremembers his own history. I remember mine very clearly.
Posted by: joe shropshire at September 25, 2005 7:30 PMThe one question worth asking Reason is why it's reasonable. After that it is shamefacedly silent.
Posted by: oj at September 25, 2005 7:44 PMThe one question worth asking reason, not Reason, is whether your own little life can be victorious; or whether you are dead and damned right now. Being an honest old man, reason says no and yes, as he has been saying for fifty thousand years or so now to every child born of man. Then, having nothing else to say, yes he does fall silent. Faith and Reason alike are efforts to fill that silence.
Posted by: joe shropshire at September 25, 2005 7:49 PMNo, that's all subjective and the subjective doesn't matter. The problem is that Reason is objectively irrational.
Posted by: oj at September 25, 2005 8:01 PMOf course subjective matters. If you could really be happy for your span of years on this earth you would neither know nor care about God. Do not flatter yourself so.
Posted by: joe shropshire at September 25, 2005 8:11 PMYes, that's what the subjectivist thinks. In fact, he can only be happy if he lives according to God's plan though, meaning he must judge his own life objectively.
Posted by: oj at September 25, 2005 10:33 PM