Casey Luskin, Program Officer in Public Policy and Legal Affairs for the Discovery Institute, has recently published an article entitled ZEAL FOR DARWIN’S HOUSE CONSUMES THEM:HOW SUPPORTERS OF EVOLUTION ENCOURAGE VIOLATIONS OF THE ESTABLISHMENT CLAUSE in the Liberty University Law Review. Luskin continues to be a favorite target of the anti-ID crowd over at The Panda’s Thumb, and this article is no exception. The task of misrepresenting Luskin fell to attorney Timothy Sandefur, who frequently contributes to the Panda’s Thumb blog site.
Luskin clearly lays out the intent of the article in the very first paragraph and writes:
The common stereotype in the controversy over teaching evolution holds that it is the opponents of evolution who are constantly trying to “sneak religious dogma back into science education.”1 While perhaps in some
instances this caricature is not entirely undeserved,2 the mainstream media and legal community pay scant attention to incidents where proponents of Darwinian evolution transgress the boundary between church and state erected by the Establishment Clause. By documenting ways that evolution advocates encourage violations of the Establishment Clause—in some instances, explicitly advocating state endorsement of pro-evolution religious viewpoints in the science classroom—this Article will show the impropriety of the common “Inherit the Wind stereotype.”3
Apparently this clear of a statement isn’t good enough for Sandefur who sniffs:
It will come as no surprise to anyone that Luskin’s argument is flimsy, his evidence illusory, his readings of the case law distorted, and the overall effect essentially a fun-house mirror version of First Amendment law.
A friend directed me to this fun little article from the Jewish World Review. I’m not a regular reader of JWR, so missed this wonderful little piece from Paul Greenberg, in which he recalls the Sokal Hoax of 1996. For those not familiar with it, the Sokal Hoax was an article written by Professor Alan Sokal, a professor of Physics at New York University and submitted to a not too widely followed academic journal called Social Text as part of a series on Science wars. The article was entitled Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,( Social Text, Spring/Summer 1996), and was, according to Greenberg, Read More ›
In response to Thomas Cudworth’s request, these are the five science-religion books that I would recommend, or at least has influenced me the most — and help to explain my distinctive take on ID. You’ll see that some of these are available free on-line. Since my explanations are long-ish. They are located below the fold.
I did an interview recently with the Sceptics’ Society of Birmingham (UK) on the relationship between science and religion, which may be of interest to people here. The interview was conducted over Skype, which explains some of the alien sounds, especially from my end, even though my interlocutor and I were separated by a mere 20 miles. What struck me most about this quite genial interview is the lack of scepticism that today’s self-avowed ‘sceptics’ have towards the scientific establishment. Indeed, they have a rhetorical strategy for deflecting this point. So, if you listen to the whole interview, you’ll hear that my interlocutor periodically draws a strange distinction between ‘intelligent’ and ‘rational’ — as in ‘I grant that anti-evolutionists are Read More ›
Some people who are impressed by the arguments of the intelligent design movement will finally admit that an intelligent designer may have created the universe. However, they simply refuse to believe that this designer could have been God. Although the question of the Designer’s identity goes beyond Intelligent Design theory, and belongs to the domain of metaphysics and theology, it may be worth considering why their position is fundamentally inconsistent. Read More ›
For those of you who don’t know, TED is a convention of (usually) world-class thinkers who each give a 15-minute talk about a subject. Many of the people in TED are thought leaders. Some of them, however, get in merely because they have written a popular or controversial book. In one of this year’s TED talks, Sam Harris demonstrated that he has no grasp on the basic concepts of either philosophy or ethics. Read More ›
Given the frequent criticisms against ID by some neo-Thomists it may be useful to consider here briefly the problem of compatibility between Thomism and ID (or at least what ID is in my view). To analyze some of the neo-Thomists’ critiques I will examine for example the recent article “Intelligent Design and Me”, part I/II, by Francis Beckwith at the Darwinist Biologos site (here and here). Read More ›
Richard Dawkins on Australian TV waxes lyrical on science and religion, morality, the cross of Christ and the afterlife.
SCIENCE AND RELIGION
RICHARD DAWKINS: The implication you make is that there’s something about religion which is personal and upon which evidence doesn’t have any bearing. Now, as I scientist I care passionately about the truth. I think that the existence of a supreme being – a supernatural supreme being – is a scientific issue. Either there is a God or there isn’t. Either there are gods or there are no gods. That is a scientific issue. Yes, it’s a supremely important scientific question. If the universe was created by an intelligence, then we are looking at an entirely different kind of scientific theory than if the universe came into existence by natural means. If God or gods had something to do with the creation of life, then we’re looking at a totally different kind of biology.
So I think you can’t just say religion and science have nothing to do with each other. Science can get on and you let people have their own religious – of course you let people believe whatever they like. But you cannot say that science and religion are completely separate because religion makes scientific claims. It certainly makes scientific claims about miracles, and you cannot reconcile an authentic approach to science with a belief in miracles or, I suspect, with a belief in supernatural creation. At least the very least you should say is that this is a scientific question. Read More ›
Premier Radio, one of the UK’s leading Christian radio stations, has been featuring several interviews/debates in recent weeks on matters related to ID, some of which have been flagged here and here. The most recent one bears the title of this post and was aired last weekend (6th Feb), in which I debated the question with the historian Thomas Dixon, who basically holds that while we may have needed God to do science, we don’t need the deity anymore. My own view is that if we mean by ‘science’ something more than simply the pursuit of instrumental knowledge, then that quest still doesn’t make much sense without the relevant (Abrahamic) theological backdrop. I continue this line of argument in a Read More ›
. By any accounts, Thomas Nagel has proven himself a more nimble philosopher than the hamfisted Brian Leiter. That’s perhaps why Leiter simply can’t get over that Nagel liked Stephen Meyer’s SIGNATURE IN THE CELL (reported at UD here). For Leiter, when scholars of Nagel’s stature endorse books coming out of the rogue Discovery Institute, that endorsement itself constitutes an attack on liberal democracy, cultured discourse, science, etc. Leiter simply can’t let this go. Here are the posts to date on his blog: leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/12/nagels-nonreply.html leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/12/more-comments-from-philosophers-on-thomas-nagels-shameful-stunt.html leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/12/thomas-nagel-jumps-the-shark.html leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2008/09/nagel-wins-ba-3.html
William Lane Craig is not only one of the world’s leading Christian apologists but he has actually made outstanding original contributions to philosophy. Yes, Craig publishes popular-level books. Unlike Dawkins, however, who in 20-years plus has been purely a popularizer (of Darwinian evolution, materialist science, and atheism), Craig continues to publish at the highest levels of the academy addressing scholars of the highest caliber (and gaining their respect). Dawkins, by contrast, increasingly appeals to the lowest common denominator. It’s in this light that Dawkins glib dismissal of Craig should be viewed:
It is almost axiomatic in our culture that the pronouncements of Science are synonymous with Truth. This received wisdom is so prevalent that whenever media reports begin with the words “Scientists have found that…[fill in the blank]”, whatever follows is widely believed by the public to be unassailable fact. So revered is Science and so respected its methods, that the mere suggestion that something might be amiss is considered ignorance or heresy. And so the statements of Science are defended vigorously while the critics are dismissed as quacks and uninformed idiots. The prevailing attitude seems to be (to slightly bend the well-known quote from Richard Dawkins) “It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in the findings of Science [emphasis and edit mine], that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).”
For those of us who have long been engaged in the ongoing Evolution/Intelligent Design debate, we know that Read More ›
In a previous UD discussion I started about incompleteness I made the following affirmation: intelligence and life are not computable. A commenter kindly asked me to provide justifications for my claim. Since at UD usually I try to separate different topics in different discussions, to be more focused and reader-friendly as possible, so here is my answer in a dedicated thread. My answer unavoidably implies to investigate first what intelligence is then what life is (given the latter is an effect and the former is its cause). Read More ›
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, known to Edge readers as a philosopher who has interesting things to say about Gödel and Spinoza, among others, enters into this conversation, taking on these and wider themes, and pushing the envelope by crossing over into the realm of fiction.
Goldstein isn’t the first novelist to appear on Edge, nor the first to discuss religion. In October 1989, the novelist Ken Kesey came to New York spoke to The Reality Club. “As I’ve often told Ginsberg,” he began, “you can’t blame the President for the state of the country, it’s always the poets’ fault. You can’t expect politicians to come up with a vision, they don’t have it in them. Poets have to come up with the vision and they have to turn it on so it sparks and catches hold.”
It’s in this spirit that Edge presents a brief excerpt from the first chapter, and the nonfiction appendix from 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein.
Max Horkheimer (1895-1973) in 1930, the year he assumed directorship of the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research).
There is a strange belief abroad that critics of Darwinism are found chiefly among right-wing, ultra-conservative reactionaries and their cadre of uneducated backwoods religious fundamentalists for whom, according to Philip Kitcher, Darwin “serves evangelical Christians as the bogeyman.”1 Keith M. Parsons, writing for Eugenie Scott’s National Center for Science Education (largely an organization devoted to fear-mongering against ID), praised James H. Fetzer in his Review: Render Unto Darwin for effectively tying “creationism to larger political and ideological forces that provide the impetus for creationism as a social movement and prompt wealthy sympathizers to bankroll its organizations.” Parsons further sensationalizes these “elements of the religious right” as “fascist.”
Of course it is easy enough (persistent conflations of creationism and ID aside) to discount such stereotyping as itself the product of ignorance and ideological prejudice. A recent Zogby poll, for example, showed that self-identified liberals supported the teaching of evidence both for and against Darwinian evolution by a significant percentage over self-identified conservatives. Quick and easy typecasting does not, it would appear on closer scrutiny, hold up. In fact, critics of Darwinian evolution can be found across the ideologicial spectrum, from the conservative right to the radical left, a fact worthy of further investigation.
Though seldom discussed or analyzed, the left has indeed directed some telling criticisms at Darwinism and none so interesting or instructive as that of Max Horkheimer (1895-1973). Although Horkheimer is hardly a household name, his assumption of the directorship of the Instutute for Social Research placed him within the center of leftist intellectual circles, and he would exert important influences over Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and Jürgen Habermas.
Horkheimer is most notably associated with the Frankfurt School, a group of neo-Marxist philosophers and social critics who championed “critical theory,” a leftist analytic with varying admixtures of Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, and Freud. Thus, on one level Horkheimer’s philosophy was an idiosyncratic blend that lent itself well to an overarching pessimism that ultimately wound up as an ineffectual nihilism. For all of Horkheimer’s flaws as a philosopher–and they were many–he refused to rubber-stamp the Communist regimes of the 20th century, accusing the “murderers in the Kremlin” of adopting the fascist tactics they had so recently defeated. Even as Horkheimer retreated from the strident and at times ebullient Marxism of his youth, his leftist transcendentalism offered a spiritualism without spirit, a scathing critique of the Englightenment and modernity with no clear enlightened replacement save for a vague demand for “otherness.”
None of this should suggest a sweeping dismissal of Horkheimer’s views, however. “To acknowledge the latent nihilism in Horkheimer’s thought as a whole . . .,” observes Brian J. Shaw, “is not to deny those real flashes of critical insight which illuminate even the most obscure and wrong-headed regions of his philosophy. That Horkheimer mistakenly poses the alternative to contemporary society in an uncompromising manner does not automatically disqualify the validity of each of his insights into its problematic nature. One does not have to possess the cure to an illness to recognize illness when one sees it.”2 One of the illnesses endemic to contemporary society Horkheimer identified as Darwinism.
