Culture

What do we mean by the phrase: the fact/value split? It does not simply mean there is a difference between factual knowledge and moral knowledge. People have always known that. Rather, it is the claim that there is no such thing as moral knowledge at all—that morality and theology are reducible to non-cognitive feelings and personal preferences. Literally, whatever you happen to value.

This affects ID because any view that can be linked to religion is put in the “value” category—where it is reduced to private preferences and prejudices.

The way it works is a bit like the good cop/bad cop strategy. The New Atheists are a good example of the bad cop stance. They assert that science has disproved Christianity, and that those who are mature and courageous will discard the false comforts of religion. Christopher Hitchens has said, “I think religion should be treated with ridicule, hatred, and contempt.”

But when the public protests being treated with ridicule and contempt, then the good cops step forward. They assure everyone that there really is no conflict between science and religion, and that they respect everyone’s “cherished values” or “deeply held beliefs.”

But emotive language like that should be a red flag: It means theological views are being reduced to private feelings instead of objective truths.

Consider an example. Paul Kurtz, the founder of the Council for Secular Humanism, wrote an article in the Skeptical Inquirer denouncing religion as “fantasy and fiction.” Yet at the same time, he urged his fellow skeptics to soften the blow when talking to the public by assuring them that “religion and science are compatible.”

Depending, of course, on how you define religion. Read More ›

Postmodern thinkers reject the ideal of objectivity not only in art but also in science. The roots, once again, are in the philosophy of Hegel. If history was the progressive unfolding of the Absolute Mind, that implied that ideas themselves evolve—law, ethics, philosophy, theology.

Hegel taught that no idea is true in an absolute or timeless sense. What is regarded as true in one stage of history will give way to a “higher” truth at the next stage of the evolution of consciousness. This radical relativism is called historicism because it says there is nothing that stands outside the ever-changing historical process.

In order to make his claims, ironically, Hegel had to presume that he alone had the power to stand above history and see it objectively as it really is. In other words, he had to exempt his own views from the historicist categories that he applied to everyone else’s views—which renders his position self-contradictory.

Nevertheless, Hegel’s concept of cultural evolution—that each culture produces its own “truth”—had enormous influence. It is the origin of postmodernism. Postmodern thinkers decided that not even science uncovers timeless, universal truths. It is just another social construction.

As a result, to sustain the scientific enterprise today, we need to reach back in history ask how science arose in the first place. Most historians agree that the scientific outlook actually rests on fundamental concepts derived from a biblical view of nature.

Consider, for example, the idea of “laws” in nature. Read More ›

O’Leary: What, specifically, do you recommend that people do, to recover art from the fact/value split? We all know about it, but in my experience, one of the effects of such a split is to render such subjects undiscussable. There was a time when, for example, poetry was public to the point that technical or science ideas were advanced therein (cf Hesiod’s Works and Days or Dante’s Paradiso ). Today, it is a purely private affair and almost all evaluation of works of art, literature, or music is experienced as an exercise in prejudice. It must be experienced that way, of course, when all norms are rejected in principle.

For the arts, is there actually a way out of this mess?

Pearcey: The way out is to recognize where those ideas come from. The subjective view you describe so well arose from Romanticism. The key thinker was Hegel, who taught a kind of pantheism—an Absolute Spirit or Mind unfolding dialectically over history. What was important was not the outer realm of physical nature, but the inner realm of the spirit or consciousness. Art was redefined as the expression of the artist’s inner experience.

This was a historical novelty. Read More ›

Now, it wouldn’t surprise the Uncommon Descent news desk, but it certainly surprised Canadian blogging queen Five Feet of Fury when Yesterday he told Dennis Miller we need to “redistribute the wealth.” (FREE audio). But here, here, here, here, here, and here, anti-Expelled types have painted Stein as a conservative. Comments? (Note: Five Feet of (“I’m with the banned”) Fury, an unintimidated target of A Guy Named Sue and fearless opponent of politically correct anti-Semites, is not to all tastes – definitely not for PC consumption. But she doesn’t call a straight shot crooked.)

Nick Matzke is the famous former employee of the National Center for Selling Evolution (NCSE). For many years, he has been on the frontlines on the war on ID. His finest hour was at the Dover Trial where he provided a lot of technical support to the ACLU lawyers. Matzke’s attacks on ID are fundamentally based on misrepresentation, strawman arguments, equivocation, distortions, etc. Well, it seems his way of doing business has finally caught up with him. There is poetic justice in his public humiliation at the hands of fellow Darwinists. 🙂 [Matzke is] a nasty piece of work … Matzke has apparently made stuff up Jerry Coyne Another Tom Johnson Coyne refers to the words of Matzke and friends Read More ›

Recently, I observed a thread at a Christian apologetics site, CARM, “Francis *******g Beckwith”/”most snaky Christian theologian,” which really did not reflect well on the site’s goals.

jpark320, a thoughtful CARM volunteer, wrote to point out that

First the link to the “trolled’ CARM site is on their forums, not an official article that was posted from the staff.Second there is not enough manpower to keep watch over every single forum people can make. It is the double of sword of allowing people to freely express their thoughts (the side of the sword that hurts…)

So it should be easy to monitor “flame wars” and “trolling” here given the limited number of post and that only official UD people can make those posts.

I replied at 5:

jpark320, thanks for clarification. However, I am not sure that the service CARM is providing in hosting “FB/snaky” needs doing.

Anyone can start a blog at Blogger for free in five minutes and start trashing just about anyone from there, and get all their friends to do it too.

So why facilitate – and in some measure, take responsibility for – what happens anyway with no intervention?

Incidentally, one needn’t be “official UD people” to post here, just Read More ›

No, not here. Trolls are currently on the Ecosphere Critically Endangered list at UD –  and if you know of an inhabited cave, snitch. But look here: Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry offers this discussion forum: “The most snaky Christian theologian/philosopher I know of today is … ” is never mind who. Someone we’ve discussed here, as it happens. Yes, it’s just as bad when the ID guys are discussed and maybe worse. Hack journo asks (serious question): How do Christian sponsored apologetics sites (assuming this is actually one, and not a front) fall into the hands of “no intelligence required” trolls? Just askin’ is all.

Nicholas Dames asks “Why bother?” (N+1, April 13, 2001) with the humanities these days, offering, Last February, a professor of biology and Harvard PhD named Amy Bishop, having recently been denied tenure by the University of Alabama in Hunstville, released the contents of a nine-millimeter pistol on her colleagues during a departmental faculty meeting. She killed the department’s chair and two others. Three more were wounded. Startling as the homicides were, and though they ratcheted up the common, unglamorous tensions of the tenure process to something fit for a media spectacle, they were hard to read as an allegory for the Problems of Higher Education. Unless, that is, you were unfortunate enough to peruse the reader comments on the New York Read More ›

Howard Van Till was once one of the best-known Christian evolutionists, but since his “What good is stardust?” article in Christianity Today arguing that nature is “fully gifted” and thus God never intervenes, he has increasingly moved toward what some describe as process theology.

He acknowledges his change of views, and has this to say in The Nature of Nature: Read More ›

A fine tuning and multiverse advocate, Martin J. Rees, today won the 2011 Templeton Prize. The astrophysicist with no religion won the Prize originally “for Progress in Religion.”
The 2011 Templeton Prize was announced today.

LONDON, APRIL 6 – Martin J. Rees, a theoretical astrophysicist whose profound insights on the cosmos have provoked vital questions that speak to humanity’s highest hopes and worst fears, has won the 2011 Templeton Prize.
Rees, Master of Trinity College, one of Cambridge University’s top academic posts, and former president of the Royal Society, the highest leadership position within British science, has spent decades investigating the implications of the big bang, the nature of black holes, events during the so-called ‘dark age’ of the early universe, and the mysterious explosions from galaxy centers known as gamma ray bursters. Read More ›

THE NATURE OF NATURE is now finally out and widely available. If you haven’t bought it yet, let me suggest Amazon.com, which is selling it for $17.94, which is an incredible deal for a 7″x10″ 1000-page book with, for most of us, no tax and no shipping charge (it costs over $10 to ship this monster priority mail). This is a must-have book if you are interested at all in the ID debate. To get it from Amazon.com, click here. Below is the table of contents and some introductory matter.

(Other news coverage continues below)

———————————————

Seven years in the making, at 500,000 words, with three Nobel laureate contributors, this is the most thorough examination of naturalism to date.

<<<<<>>>>>

The Nature of Nature: Examining the Role of Naturalism in Science

Edited by Bruce L. Gordon

and William A. Dembski

ISI Books

Intercollegiate Studies Institute

Wilmington, DE 19807

Back Cover:

Read More ›

Amazing what people have tried to get out of it. In “Darwinism and the Quest to Cheat Death”(ABC Religion and Ethics | 28 Mar 2011), British pundit John Gray tells us Like so many others, then and later, Sidgwick looked to science for salvation from science. If science had brought about the disenchantment of the world, only science could re-enchant it.The result of scientific inquiry seemed to be that humankind was alone. Evolution would bring about the extinction of the species and eventually, as the sun cooled and the planet ceased to be habitable, life itself would die out. It was a desolate prospect, but one that could be accepted if science could also show that human personality would survive Read More ›

Here, we noted one recent effort to rid biology of language that implies design. A friend writes to say that Noam Chomsky, no friend to design in nature, wrote, with co-authors, in a 2002 article in Science, “The faculty of language: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?” “… All living things are designed on the basis of highly conserved developmental systems that read an (almost) universal language encoded in DNA base pairs.” (Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch, Science, 298, 2002) I wonder if that would get past the referee today? Today, it might be a game misconduct, not just five minutes in the penalty box. It’s interesting to reflect that evolutionary biology today exists mostly to Read More ›

And why not? It’s real. It’s actual. Paul Farhi tells us (March 16) The Washington Post suspended one of its most seasoned reporters Wednesday after editors determined that “substantial” parts of two recent news articles were taken without attribution from another newspaper. Oh, but wait. That implies purpose, a big no-no, if you go by Darwinist rules. Still, the guy was suspended. Does anyone other than me get sick of the hypocrisy? That incident the reporter was covering (Jared Loughner), by the way, led to a huge demand among our moral and intellectual superiors for control over private speech. I deal with the threat here. What keeps me going is a chance to serve coffee here.

Having seen what the Texas schools Darwin lobby had to say about self-organization (no, we can’t talk about that in class because students might confuse it with ID), I couldn’t help wondering what they will have to say about say about, oh, convergent evolution. Maybe it’s just because I gotta write about that today, and need to hear the good word from Brother Charlie again, to keep me on the straight and narrow. Or not. But all that got me thinking, who are these people? Well, I asked around, and whattan earful! Apparently, they are a set of people around a former Texas governor , who treat the school system as a private playground for rich people. Makes complete sense. Read More ›