Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

At National Review: There is no “Party of Science”

Share
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Flipboard
Print
Email

Of course not. But legacy media don’t have to think hard if they can just treat science stories that way:

In asserting themselves as people of rationality and objective facts (as opposed to people of “blind” faith), secular progressives intend to seal away their ideological opponents. That strategy arguably peaked with the so-called New Atheism movement, which now feels every bit as distant and irrelevant as the mid-20th-century fundamentalism it so often mimicked. Once a darling of the anti-Bush Left, Sam Harris now finds himself a lead character in the “intellectual dark web,” a vaguely libertarian, right-leaning coalition of free-speech advocates and critics of political correctness. It turns out that when you make a lot of money from telling people that Christianity is a plague on civilization, they might come to agree with you and then reach for as strong an anti-Christian repellant as they can find (namely, authoritarianism).

Atheists since Hume have insisted that society does not need transcendence in order to be moral and rational. An evidence-based, materialist account of the universe should be perfectly sufficient for reasonable people. But what shall we infer from the fact that university campuses, the intellectual environments most shaped by scientism, are also the ones producing the most-zealous crusaders for social justice, including causes that put them at clear odds with norms of scientific inquiry?

Samuel James, “There Is No ‘Party of Science’” at National Review


Now that James mentions it, the war on math and the war on science both got started at universities and the Sokal hoaxes are perpetrated on academic journals, not popular media outlets.

It’s a good question whether, today, being the “party of science” is even likely to be a selling point.

See also: Which side will atheists choose in the war on science? They need to re-evaluate their alliance with progressivism, which is doing science no favours.

Comments
When asked to back up the "evolution is a fact" statement, evolutionists of various stripes will revert to something like microevolution of cichlid fish, moth colours and finch beaks, or else point to the fossil record as proof of "change over time". This sort of bait-and-switch approach runs the opposite way when evolution is taught in schools or promoted to the public: point to the fossil record, then give some clear examples of microevolution in action, before extrapolating five orders of magnitude to macroevolution and (probably) the origin of life on Earth.Fasteddious
February 17, 2020
February
02
Feb
17
17
2020
01:20 PM
1
01
20
PM
PDT
Jawa @ 1 Darwinists don't need any evidence. Macro evolution is a fact and no one can question the theory. It does not matter that the last three steps of the Scientific Method have never been done by anyone, nor does it matter that a scientific theory cannot be fact. Darwinists do not care about such things, since it is a fact and they can use all the circular reasoning in the world to justify everything they believe.BobRyan
February 16, 2020
February
02
Feb
16
16
2020
11:19 PM
11
11
19
PM
PDT
Man made climate change and macro evolution are both fictitious. Neither theory holds up to scrutiny. We have been recording temperatures since about 10 years after the Little Ice Age ended in 1860. Did man cause the Little Ice Age to come to an end? There have been numerous ice ages and warming periods throughout history, most of which occurred before man entered the scene. The climate always changes over long periods of time and has nothing to do with man.BobRyan
February 16, 2020
February
02
Feb
16
16
2020
10:56 PM
10
10
56
PM
PDT
In the third paragraph the author wrote: "These facts are every bit as solid and universally attested as climate change or macroevolution." Huh? macroevolution is solid and universally attested? really? Did he mean microevolution? Or did I miss the winking tongue-in-cheek sarcasm?jawa
February 16, 2020
February
02
Feb
16
16
2020
07:34 PM
7
07
34
PM
PDT

Leave a Reply