<i>Spiked</i> on liberal creationism

"Question authority" was once a popular liberal sentiment ... one that I think we could certainly use more of today ... rather than the unquestioning worship and obedience of supposed authoritative sources -- e.g. government, media, religion, etc.

Oh, yeah? And why should we question authority? Just on your say-so?

:-)

In the hope of maintaining balance and truth I want to ask those who are interested in what Timothy calls 'tradition fundamentalism' to read what R. J. Rushdoony actually teaches.

http://www.forerunner.com/revolution/rush.html

Even so, he is not well known among Christian fundamentals and therefore we can hardly call his work traditional.

When we deliberately misrepresent a large segment of society and what they stand for, it always brings our motives into question.

I'm not sure what The Messenger is referring to about misrepresentations of fundamentalism. Unless you can find some other way of parsing fundamentalist statements, they pretty much speak for themselves. Never mind Rushdoony, virtually any of Falwell's infamous statements about gays, liberals, et al are enough to set the record straight on fundamentalist Christianity.

There's no questioning of motives here. Fundamentalism, whether Islamic or Christian, finds modernity in all its various forms (science, literature, freedom of choice, free speech, free association, democratic principles, equality, etc.) as a threat to its singular vision of the world.

Unlike evangelicals, fundamentalists rarely equivocate in their presentation of self. One rarely comes away from an encounter with a fundamentalist wondering where they stand on any given issue. Their forthrightness and honesty is unmatched and that's why they're so alarming. Misrepresenting fundamentalism is a rather difficult thing to do.

I think Tim has a valid point here. I have been thinking along similar lines for some time-basically that PoMo arguments and ID/Creationist arguments are very similar in some fundamental respects. During a recent argument with a conservative colleague about ID, it turned out that he kept (quite ironically I thought) repeating some standard PoMo arguments about testability being passe and trying to justify this by reference to Lakatos and Laudan (a clear misunderstanding or miscitation of the two philosophers of Science).

But if you read Phillipp Johnson you get very much the same argument: that Darwinism is metaphysics imposed on the evidence and there really isn't any clear empirical basis to argue for evolution. Interestingly, there has been almost no testing of ID propositions and it is not even clear what the major propositions are.

But the argument is the same:
1) Testability, falsifiability, objectivity are really not practiced or practicable;
2) One's point of view is paradigm dependent;
3) Darwinism is a metaphysical paradigm;
4) The scientific establishment is oppressing those with different points of view;
5) the critics of science cannot really be expected to follow normal scientific rules, because normal scientific rules are discriminatory.

I keep seeing these arguments made. But now it seems that ID proponents are borrowing another page from the PoMo Book: accuse Darwinists of being associated with Social Darwinism. The irony here is immense given the Discovery Institute's support for laissez faire policies of the sort Social Darwinists supported-or are rumored to have supported anyway.

A good, short summary of some of the problems associated with a lot of what passes for theories of culture is provided by Marvin Harris in Theories of Culture in Post-Modern Times. IT's a good, quick read, and Harris was always entertaining even if he tended to overstate things a bit.

Anyway, that's enough ranting for now.

Denyse O'Leary will set you straight.

Yours authoritatively,

Nutty

Whether Rushdoony is widely know among Fundamentalists or not, Christian Reconstruction (or Dominion theology) constitutes a significant subset of the Christian Right. That they aim to replace American democracy with some sort of Bible-based, theocratic rule seems fairly evident in view of their writings (primarily Rushdoony's, along with others like Gary North and the Rutherford Institute's John Whitehead). With respect to ID, Howard Ahmanson is a principal backer of the DI, and I believe Philip Johnson dedicated one of his books to Ahmanson and his wife. Ahmanson is a former board member of Rushdoony's Chalcedon Foundation, the foremost Christian Reconstruction organization in the U.S.

Connecting the dots here isn't exactly rocket science.

Whether Rushdoony is widely known among Fundamentalists or not, Christian Reconstruction (or Dominion theology) constitutes a significant subset of the Christian Right. That they aim to replace American democracy with some sort of Bible-based, theocratic rule seems fairly evident in view of their writings (primarily Rushdoony's, along with others like Gary North and the Rutherford Institute's John Whitehead). With respect to ID, Howard Ahmanson is a principal backer of the DI, and I believe Philip Johnson dedicated one of his books to Ahmanson and his wife. Ahmanson is a former board member of Rushdoony's Chalcedon Foundation, the foremost Christian Reconstruction organization in the U.S.

Connecting the dots here isn't exactly rocket science.

You know, when I was much younger, the science establishment was telling me that civilization as we knew it would collapse with this many people on the planet. The so-called population explosion.

Oops.

When I was younger, the science establishment was telling me that the ozone layer was disappearing and land animals would all go extinct as they fried in fatal levels of ultraviolet radiation.

Oops.

And now science is wondering why people don't trust the science establishment.

Duh.

Just the facts, please, science. Thanks in advance.

My rant:

I don't think the problem is with authority per se but with the increasing lack of accessibility to scientific knowledge. The problem is in the way contemporary science makes its findings available to the general public. For non-experts, which constitutes the vast majority of people, the technical language that scientists use to speak about their findings is too often beyond the reach of the average or above average Joe.

Specialization is the name of the game these days, and it is very difficult to find someone gifted enough to disentangle the morass of technical jargon that feeds this proprietary use of language and provide a meaningful synthesis. We no longer have the public intellectuals of the past, and those who do act as legitimate mediators between science and the public more often than not speak to a subset of specialists in other fields. We've created a sort of incestuous environment as a result.

I'm not advocating a dumbing down of science for the sake of popular consumption. It simply wouldn't work. But this leaves us with a paradox of sorts. As science advances, the need for specialization increases in order to keep up with the latest developments, which results in less (meaningful) accessibility to scientific knowledge, which in turn increases the role of authority as a way of either acknowledging or refuting the science itself. The general public is ill-equipped to deal with the raw findings of science on their own and scientists are not rewarded for publications that target popular audiences. So, we are ultimately left with a intellectual void for which charlatans are more than willing to fill.

With that, I'm heading off to bed. Sweet dreams.

Buridan

What do you think of Ward Churchill?

The far left is as disruptive as the far right. Most people are centrists. Unfortunately (but deservedly) the science establishment employed in academia has been associated with the Churchill types. When people see him they don't think he's unusual for an academic. They think he's honest for an academic.

Rather than run around whining about the "Christian fundamentalists" if I were you I'd be worrying about my own image in the public's eye. I'm here to tell you it is in far worse shape than Jerry Falwell's flock.

For non-experts, which constitutes the vast majority of people, the technical language that scientists use to speak about their findings is too often beyond the reach of the average or above average Joe.

— Buridan

Unfortunately (but deservedly) the science establishment employed in academia has been associated with the Churchill types.

— DaveScot

I was much younger, the science establishment was telling me that civilization as we knew it would collapse with this many people on the planet

— DaveScot

he science establishment was telling me that the ozone layer was disappearing and land animals would all go extinct as they fried in fatal levels of ultraviolet radiation.

— DaveScot

I'm breaking my own rule by feeding the troll but what the hell.

Dave, please reread my post again but this time without your knee-jerk expectations. If anything, I'm more critical of the scientific community in this respect than with average Joes like yourself. There's no need for you to be defensive. It's a structural problem within the academy that feeds into the public and then back into the academy. But then this is really a domestic dispute among academics, so I don't expect you to understand.

Now do you mind if I get back to sleep! :)

Good point... PoMo crap is really as dangerous as the fundamentalist one.
I think, that highlighting similarities between various strains of deprecation of human reasoning faculties is a good way to de-camouflage their real, abominable nature...

The Royal Academy's motto, 'nullius in verba' is perhaps slightly less radical than 'on the words of no one' suggests. I can only find a dead link for the phrase on the Royal Society website; but it must come from Horace, epistles 1, 1, 14 'nullius addictus iurare in verba magistri'. Loosely paraphrased: (if you ask what philosophical school I belong to) I am not bound (like a slave) to swear to the words of any teacher / master'.

I predict that as this anti science rant continues, someone (quite possibly DS) will say 'and scientists in the 70s were worried about global cooling.'

As has already been pointed out, hard core fundies do not usually postmodern memes for their arguments, but there are two important parallels as far as I can tell:
- the selling of anti-darwinism and other far right ideas to the moderately conservative public relies heavily on framing science, academia and moderate/left parts of media and politics as a self-serving elite.
- both pomo and formalized fundamentalism are reactions to modernism (modern sociology and modern theology respectively), so they are both anti-logic and anti-evidence at heart.

The far left is as disruptive as the far right. Most people are centrists. Unfortunately (but deservedly) the science establishment employed in academia has been associated with the Churchill types.

I don't know about the population figures, although I suspect this has a lot to do with the fact that technology has so far kept up with population growth and will continue doing so till oil runs out. However, I do know that the ozone hole is shrinking exactly because past alarmism about ozone depletion has led to decreasing use of CFCs.

The roots of fundamentalist anti-intellectualism don't have much to do with postmodernism. Evidentially, in Europe there is hardly any fundamentalist anti-intellectualism, even in France and Germany, the cradles of post-modernism. On the contrary, French and German cultures are very technocratic. In Germany there is some Christian fundamentalism, mostly in Bavaria, but it's Catholic rather than Protestant, which means that among other things it accepts evolution. In France people trust the government's nutritionists to tell their children what to eat.

However, most of the third world, especially its Muslim parts, displays all the characteristics of American Protestant fundamentalism, complete with hatred of everything that smacks of Western imperialism, although post-modernism has never reached it. The reason this happens in the USA and Islam but not in Europe can't be drafting post-modernism to serve religious conservatism. A likelier reason is strong public support for religion coupled with conservatives being unable to keep up with rapid social change and feeling threatened by liberal values.

Another possible reason is that American culture is historically anti-intellectual due to the frontier societies, whereas Europe is not; the Islamic intellectual tradition is different from the Western one in that in its medieval heyday it was never in conflict with religion, but rather viewed itself as part of Islamic knowledge.

I read a very good point yesterday on the talk.origins usenet group yesterday that sums up my opinion on science/scientists v. the other blustering groups out there.

I tend to believe the scientists, not because I believe that they are always correct...because they surely are not. I tend to believe the scientists because the non-scientists are always proven incorrect on every point that can be put to a test.

I agree with Buridan when he wrote " . . . the technical language that scientists use to speak about their findings is too often beyond the reach of the average or above average Joe." I have long argued that Science should heed German mathematician David Hilbert's maxim (which he credited to an unnamed French mathematician) that "A mathematical theory is not to be considered complete until you have made it so clear that you can explain it to the first man whom you meet on the street," but changing "mathematical" to "scientific."

All too often the lessons of science are couched in esoteric language with which the average person, even many college graduates, is simply not conversant. Science needs popularizers, not to pitch it like a product with a political slant (the path the ID promoters have chosen) but to explain it clearly and carefully with one dollar words in ten word sentences. Scientists too often talk to each other and not to the public. I think science, more so than almost any other academic field, has a teaching obligation that extends beyond the lecture hall and lab student to John and Jane Public. Most of all, science needs to take the mystery out of science, especially in those areas of the discipline that should inform public policy. Too often when such efforts are made, they degenerate into farce like the Peter Jennings' program on UFOs on ABC last week that had nothing to do with science, but was probably perceived by most viewers as science. I know hokum like that sells, which is why ABC produced it, but when we have an administration (or school boards or state legislatures) making decisions that ignore the facts or are rationalized on bogus science, this nation (and the world) has a real problem. The scientific community has to be out in front, demanding visibility in the press and on terms the public can understand.

re Ozone http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050228/full/050228-12.html

Certain scientists have a habit of sensationalizing things. The latest debacle is global warming. Keep in mind the story of the boy who cried wolf.

Speaking of Germany, did you know that unemployment there just hit a 30-year record high? France, and indeed Europe, has a horrible growing problem with Muslum fundamentalists. I always get a chuckle out of people holding up progressive secular Europe as a positive example.

I also get a chuckle out of people saying American culture is anti-intellectual. Who landed a man on the moon? Who put up the global positioning system? What nationality is Bill Gates? Where did Intel start? Cisco? The internet? The Hubble space telescope? I could go on and on.

I would also point out that the countries in the world today that enjoy the highest standards of living are those where the Protestant Reformation took hold. Far from being the boogeyman atheists think of Christianity, and if they're not blind and acknowledge the success say it is in spite of Christian culture not a result, they're wrong. The Protestant Work Ethic is what led to all this success.

Protestants didn't invent capitalism but they did make a religion out of it.

Write that down.

To DaveScot,

You seem to be confusing science with technology. The European Middle Ages had a great deal of technology, too... but centuries of being steeped in superstition didn't exactly move the ball of science very far forward.

Tomorrow, I'm getting on a plane bound for Japan. My personal experience is that the standard of living there is at least as high as anything I've experienced living in the U.S., and in some ways, it seems even higher (life expectancy in Japan is significantly higher than it is in the U.S., for example). So far as I'm aware, the Protestant Reformation has yet to "take hold" in that country.

Oh, yeah? And why should we question authority? Just on your say-so?

Whether Rushdoony is widely know among Fundamentalists or not, Christian Reconstruction (or Dominion theology) constitutes a significant subset of the Christian Right. That they aim to replace American democracy with some sort of Bible-based, theocratic rule seems fairly evident in view of their writings ...

Keanus

Evolution isn't couched in language that's not understandable until you try to portray mutation/selection as the mechanism that accounts for all diversity. It's easy for anyone to understand that mutation/selection has never been observed to do anything other than modify extant forms without changing the forms... big dogs and little dogs are still dogs. Mutated drosophila are still flies. Antibiotic-resistent bacteria are still bacteria. Dark moths and light moths are still moths. Finches with big beaks and finches with little beaks are still finches.

What's so hard to understand about that?

It isn't hard to understand that DNA doesn't fossilize so any genetic relationships between extant species is between extant species. Ancient DNA cannot be observed as it's long destroyed. All extant species are related in some fundamental way but as it has been pointed out many times this could be a common designer as well as a common ancestor so it really proves nothing.

The bottom line is that mutation/selection as the driving force behind all of evolution is gigantic extrapolation of contemporary observations.

Tell the man on the street it's an extrapolation and he has no problem understanding THAT. And that's the problem. It's easy to understand that mutation/selection is a hypothesis with big problems like failing to account for the Cambrian explosion and failing to explain irreducible complexity. Both of those were problems Darwin said could devastate his theory. In an honest world absent atheist agendas it would have devastated his theory. The man on the street understands that.

I also get a chuckle out of people saying American culture is anti-intellectual. Who landed a man on the moon? Who put up the global positioning system? What nationality is Bill Gates? Where did Intel start? Cisco? The internet? The Hubble space telescope? I could go on and on.

— DaveScot

Posted by DaveScot on March 2, 2005 11:08 PM You know, when I was much younger, the science establishment was telling me that civilization as we knew it would collapse with this many people on the planet. The so-called population explosion. Oops. When I was younger, the science establishment was telling me that the ozone layer was disappearing and land animals would all go extinct as they fried in fatal levels of ultraviolet radiation. Oops. And now science is wondering why people don't trust the science establishment. Duh.

Shakleton

"non-scientists are always proven incorrect on every point that can be put to a test"

I nominate that for the 2005 Unbelievably Stupid Hubris Award.

One's own misunderstanding of what is written by scientists does not make science in error.

Scientists did not predict "the collapse of civilization" due to population increases that strain the planet's resources. They predicted wars, famines caused by politics, famines caused by overburdening of resources, and diminishing quality of the environment we depend on for our survival. DaveScot may pretend Africa doesn't exist, but if he's rational, he knows all of those predictions came true, and they are still problems to worry about.

Scientists were surprised to find a hole in the ozone at the South Pole. They accurately predicted that it would increase UV radiation and that such an increase would pose problems. They diagnosed a key cause as free chloride radicals and took steps to convince policy makers to change policies to reduce the chemicals that created the ozone hole, offering hope that it may start shrinking and eventually cease to be a problem. In the meantime, people, and plants and animals, ARE suffering from increased UV. The environment pays a huge price. The environment extracts that price from our economies. The predictions of "frying" UV radiation depended on no policy changes.

True to Mr. Sandefur's note, DS adopts a PoMo "nothing works right, so why bother" attitude, with little regard for what is actually going on.

Cartright

Should I be surprised that scientists don't associate themselves with the Churchill type?

I was referring to a large number of others. Like the 51% of the population that voted for GW.

It isn't Fundamentalist on the right and Post-modern philosophy on the left...The Fundamentalist ARE Post-modern.

" . . . by which science is exploitative, inherently racist, and part of an intellectual scheme to oppress the proletariat and deprive them of their health insurance coverage."

can be easily changed to . . .

"...by which science is manipulative, inherently liberal, and part of an intellectual scheme to oppress those of faith and foster immorality."

The bottom line is in both cases rhetoric or doctrine, trumps facts.

It is ironic that these self described advocates of the "truth" are employ the same moral relativism as those on the "left" they so vilify.

Wayne Francis

Here's a good example of the population explosion scare;

the 1968 bestseller "The Population Bomb" by Paul Erlich from Stanford.

It was all the rage in those days. By that time the scare from nuclear armageddon was wearing thin and the rubes were ready for a new global catastophe scenario to keep them occupied and willing fund research to avoid it.

Please, don't feed the troll.

Rather, the problem (other than simple ignorance) is hostility to reason and objective science. That hostility takes the form of both traditional fundamentalism (by which reason and science subvert the unquestioning faith demanded of us by God and society) and newfangled Pomo tergiversation (by which science is exploitative, inherently racist, and part of an intellectual scheme to oppress the proletariat and deprive them of their health insurance coverage).

— Tim Sandefur

It isn't that they have an answer for everything, it's more that there are no questions.

A couple of points here:

Firstly, let me qualify my remarks from last night about the right wing fundie/left post modern axis. It's a bit more complicated. Tim (and the article he cited) were fair minded enough to point out that many leftists find PoMo's at least as annoying (or close anyway)as fundies.

But there is a libertarian-PoMo connection that Tim ignores. Hayek's critique of scientism and excessive mathemetization of economics (though insightful in many respects) argued against the application of scientific methods to economics (or any social sciences). So the argument for Hayekian free market economics is suspicion of knowledge. One prominent economist who draws this connection is Deirdre (ne Donald) McCloskey. McCloskey's done more than any one person I can think of to try and shift economics to analysis of discourse and free market economics.

There's a longer, deeper connection here that goes back to Von Mises, Weber, Schumpeter and the whole Austrian tradition not just of economics but of philosophy. It is a tradition rooted in subjectivity.

And then there is the tradition (of which Von Mises was also part) but Rothbard did a good deal to popularize, of radical a priorism which is about as anti-Popperian as one can get.

So, don't tie the whole PoMo subjectivity critique of science to the "left". Even Focault at the very end said go read Hayek. Though, ironically, it has been the "left" in academia that has been the main proponent of PoMo.

A second point, this unrelated to the first in general response to remarks made repeatedly by Dave Scot. We are nowhere near out of the wood wrt the population bomb. Malthusian population dynamics will apply to any species. The trick with humans is that they can move the bar for outbreak-crash scenarios. Some of the early ecologists made Malthus' mistake of ignoring technological innovation. That said, higher levels of technological innovation allow greater energy capture and thus move the bar. That is why some of the radical expectations of the population bomb did not occur-yet.

It is still an open question what the end result will be. Remember, when we test things we have to be careful to see if we are really testing predictions or testing ceterus paribus clauses. That we sometimes make mistakes and test ceterus paribus clauses when we want to test predictions is no reason to throw away testability.

Here's a good example of the population explosion scare; the 1968 bestseller "The Population Bomb" by Paul Erlich from Stanford. It was all the rage in those days.  By that time the scare from nuclear armageddon was wearing thin and the rubes were ready for a new global catastophe scenario to keep them occupied and willing fund research to avoid it.

— DaveScot

This sort of slight-of-hand can be used to prove anything, and makes it impossible to have productive dialogue.

However, most of the third world, especially its Muslim parts, displays all the characteristics of American Protestant fundamentalism, complete with hatred of everything that smacks of Western imperialism, although post-modernism has never reached it.

— Alon Levy

You know, when I was much younger, the science establishment was telling me that civilization as we knew it would collapse with this many people on the planet. The so-called population explosion.

When I was younger, the science establishment was telling me that the ozone layer was disappearing and land animals would all go extinct as they fried in fatal levels of ultraviolet radiation.

And now science is wondering why people don't trust the science establishment.

All of which illustrates a core feature of the religious mindset I've been pointing out repeatedly: The religious avenue to knowledge is definitional. Something becomes true because they SAY it's true, and because they WISH it to be true. It's absolute truth because absolute truths are so comfortable. If tomorrow they wish the opposite to be absolutely true, they simply SAY it's true tomorrow, and POOF it becomes True. When two people disagree about a religious truth, there is no effective mechanism of settling the issue, since that would require facts and evidence and definitions are not based on facts and evidence, but on preferences. So historically, the cure has generally been a schism. The Christian faith has atomized into thousands of sects as a result.

What creationists simply can't grasp about science is that science makes errors (whereas definitions are right by definition), admits error (which is impossible if you have Absolute Truth), and corrects error (which religion cannot do since religion doesn't MAKE any errors). It's this constant state of error that makes science such a foolish faith.

As science advances, the need for specialization increases in order to keep up with the latest developments, which results in less (meaningful) accessibility to scientific knowledge, which in turn increases the role of authority as a way of either acknowledging or refuting the science itself. The general public is ill-equipped to deal with the raw findings of science on their own and scientists are not rewarded for publications that target popular audiences. So, we are ultimately left with a intellectual void for which charlatans are more than willing to fill.

— buridan

Concerning the ozone/CFC issue...

I find it mildly amusing that contrarians were poo-poohing the entire scientific basis in the early and mid 90s, until solid evidence came up (i.e., we SAW the molecules up there, we eliminated every other alternative sources for the molecules, etc.). Now, once measures have been taken and have been effective in reducing the problem, they've gone back to poo-poohing the science....

All without ever taking the time to understand the science itself....

In the hope of maintaining balance and truth I want to ask those who are interested in what Timothy calls 'tradition fundamentalism' to read what R. J. Rushdoony actually teaches.

http://www.forerunner.com/revolution/rush.html . . .

--------------------------------

Indeed, I encourage EVERYONE to read up on "Christian Reconstructionism", "Dominion Theology", and all the other fancy names the uber-fundies have for plain old-fashioned "theocracy".

From my website:

The most militant of the Ayatollah-wanna-be's are the members of the "Reconstructionist" movement. The Reconstructionists were founded by Rouas J. Rushdoony, a militant fundamentalist who was instrumental in getting Henry Morris's book The Genesis Flood published in 1961. According to Rushdoony's view, the United States should be directly transformed into a theocracy in which the fundamentalists would rule directly according to the will of God. "There can be no separation of Church and State," Rushdoony declares. (cited in Marty and Appleby 1991, p. 51) "Christians," a Reconstructionist pamphlet declares, "are called upon by God to exercise dominion." (cited in Marty and Appleby 1991, p. 50) The Reconstructionists propose doing away with the US Constitution and laws, and instead ruling directly according to the laws of God as set out in the Bible---they advocate a return to judicial punishment for religious crimes such as blasphemy or violating the Sabbath, as well as a return to such Biblically-approved punishments as stoning.

According to Rushdoony, the Second Coming of Christ can only happen after the "Godly" have taken over the earth and constructed the Kingdom of Heaven here: "The dominion that Adam first received and then lost by his Fall will be restored to redeemed Man. God's People will then have a long reign over the entire earth, after which, when all enemies have been put under Christ's feet, the end shall come." (cited in Diamond, 1989, p. 139) "Christian Reconstructionism," another pamphlet says, "is a call to the Church to awaken to its Biblical responsibility to subdue the earth for the glory of God . . . Christian Reconstructionism therefore looks for and works for the rebuilding of the institutions of society according to a Biblical blueprint." (cited in Diamond 1989, p. 136) In the Reconstructionist view, evolution is one of the "enemies" which must be "put under Christ's feet" if the godly are to subdue the earth for the glory of God.

In effect, the Reconstructionists are the "Christian" equivilent of the Taliban.

While some members of both the fundamentalist and creationist movements view the Reconstructionists as somewhat kooky, many of them have had nice things to say about Rushdoony and his followers. ICR has had close ties with Reconstructionists. Rushdoony was one of the financial backers for Henry Morris's first book, "The Genesis Flood", and Morris's son John was a co-signer of several documents produced by the Coalition On Revival, a reconstructionist coalition founded in 1984. ICR star debater Duane Gish was a member of COR's Steering Committee, as was Richard Bliss, who served as ICR's "curriculum director" until his death. Gish and Bliss were both co-signers of the COR documents "A Manifesto for the Christian Church" (COR, July 1986), and the "Forty-Two Articles of the Essentials of a Christian Worldview" (COR,1989), which declares, "We affirm that the laws of man must be based upon the laws of God. We deny that the laws of man have any inherent authority of their own or that their ultimate authority is rightly derived from or created by man." ("Forty-Two Essentials, 1989, p. 8). P>The Discovery Institute, the chief cheerleader for "intelligent design theory", is particularly cozy with the Reconstructionists. The single biggest source of money for the Discovery Institute is Howard Ahmanson, a California savings-and-loan bigwig. Ahmanson's gift of $1.5 million was the original seed money to organize the Center for Renewal of Science and Culture, the arm of the Discovery Institute which focuses on promoting "intelligent design theory" (other branches of Discovery Institute are focused on areas like urban transportation, Social Security "reform", and (anti) environmentalist organizing).

Ahmanson is a Christian Reconstructionist who was long associated with Rushdooney, and who sat with him on the board of directors of the Chalcedon Foundation -- a major Reconstructionist think-tank -- for over 20 years. Just as Rushdooney was a prime moving force behind Morris's first book, "The Genesis Flood", intelligent design "theorist" Phillip Johnson dedicated his book "Defeating Darwinism" to "Howard and Roberta" -- Ahmanson and his wife.

Ahmanson has given several million dollars over the past few years to anti-evolution groups (including Discovery Institute), as well as anti-gay groups, "Christian" political candidates, and funding efforts to split the Episcopalian Church over its willingness to ordain gay ministers and to other groups which oppose the minimum wage. He was also a major funder of the recent "recall" effort in California which led to the election of Terminator Arnie. Ahmanson is also a major funder of the effort for computerized voting, and he and several other prominent Reconstructionists have close ties with Diebold, the company that would manufacture the computerized voting machines if they were used. There has been some criticism of Diebold because it refuses to make the source code of its voting machine software available for scrutiny, and its software does not allow anyone to track voting after it is done (no way to confirm accuracy of the machine). This ease of possible "vote-fixing" may or may not be connected to the belief of Diebold's Reconstructionist backers that only "Christians" should be allowed to vote.

Some of Ahmanson's donations are channeled through the Fieldstead Foundation, which is a subspecies of the Ahmanson foundation "Fieldstead" is Ahmanson's middle name). The Fieldstead Foundation funds many of the travelling and speaking expenses of the DI's shining stars.

...And once science and culture are "renewed" (democracy dispensed with and replaced by "biblical law"), I understand the next stage is to sort out all those niggling sectarian differences. I believe Dembski himself has alluded to the need for "winnowing" the Body of Christ, bringing it into conformity with his "information theory=Logos theology of John" (or was it vice versa?) um... er... "science."

. . . And once science and culture are "renewed" (democracy dispensed with and replaced by "biblical law"), I understand the next stage is to sort out all those niggling sectarian differences. I believe Dembski himself has alluded to the need for "winnowing" the Body of Christ, bringing it into conformity with his "information theory=Logos theology of John" (or was it vice versa?) um . . . er . . . "science."

Predictions tend to affect the events predicted. That's the whole point of making and publicising the prediction. When predictions were made that the ozone hole would spread, incidentally causing extinctions among species especially vulnerable to UV, it wasn't a Cassandran prediction that this was going to happen no matter what. It was an "If this goes on..." type of prediction. If the ozone hole is less of a problem now than predicted, it's because of people taking notice of the prediction and doing something about it.

Something similar has occured with regard to the population explosion. The Chinese and Indian governments both implemented policies designed to slow down population growth, because they could see that not managing growth would have been a sure route to catastrophe. (BTW, the preceding should not be taken as any form of approval for any aspect of either country's population policies. I merely note that they exist and that they have an effect.)

If your dentist tells you to give up the penny chews or else your teeth will rot away, and you take his advice and after several years your teeth haven't rotted away, do you rage against dentistry for making a bum prediction? Of course not. If scientists say that unless something is done, something bad will happen, is the prediction invalidated because action is taken?

Speaking of Diebold, their voting machines and their source code, you should read Christopher Hitchens article in the March issue of Vanity Fair on voting day last November in Ohio. It's a bit scary.

Something similar has occured with regard to the population explosion.

Funny, I just wrote about this a couple of days ago:

http://sciencepolitics.blogspot.com/2005/02/postmodern-conservatism.html

What creationists simply can't grasp about science is that science makes errors (whereas definitions are right by definition), admits error (which is impossible if you have Absolute Truth), and corrects error (which religion cannot do since religion doesn't MAKE any errors). It's this constant state of error that makes science such a foolish faith.

— Flint

Dave, the question posed in Ehrlich's popular book, The Population Bomb, was: How can the population bomb be defused?

I suspect you didn't read it.

At the time we used another of his and his wife's books as a text in population biology courses. Ehrlich is (I think he's still around) an entomologist, a grasshopper specialist, as I recall. Population booms and busts were his specialty. As they pointed out in all their books, including the more technical texts, humans have the capacity to recognize a boom and defuse a bust.

Jared Diamond's latest book, Collapse, suggests that, through history and prehistory both, humans have been particularly and bizarrely myopic about pending population disasters, or incredibly dysfunctional in denying the facts.

That is, if we act like creationists, we are doomed.

Of course, my experience is that most creationists never read Malthus, and the closest they ever came to thinking about population was reading Swift's "A Modest Proposal," which they failed to recognize as the satire it was.

Speaking of Germany, did you know that unemployment there just hit a 30-year record high? France, and indeed Europe, has a horrible growing problem with Muslum fundamentalists.

So what? That's not my point. My point is that French and German cultures are more intellectual than American culture, regardless of their employment levels (and, FYI, before reunification Germany's unemployment rate was consistently lower than the USA's; if the South had won the Civil War and been reunited with the rest of the country only in 1990, you'd see 10% unemployment in the USA, too). The fact that many Americans invented things doesn't mean anything, because invention does not always mean intellectualism. It helps, but when every Russian who did well in high school knows Eugene Onegin by heart whereas there is nothing approaching that in the USA, you know which culture is more intellectual. Name me one great idea in basic science created by a non-Jewish American in the 20th century. Not in industry, where Americans excel, but in science or the humanities, where you have to have book knowledge rather than frontier-style common sense.

By the way, in addition to being completely untrue, your point about the Protestant work ethic is irrelevant.

Where did... The internet [start]?

At CERN, which is several thousands of kilometers east of the USA.

Oh yeah, I forgot that the IDC’ers don’t believe in the scientific orthodoxy that HIV causes AIDS, either. What farsighted folks.

Maybe they want to solve the population explosion problem without resorting to birth control.

BTW, the preceding should not be taken as any form of approval for any aspect of either country’s population policies. I merely note that they exist and that they have an effect.

That's only true for China. India is unable to reduce its population growth, policies or no policies; its government is just too ineffective.

Many cultures have been quite adept at importing Western ideas (such as communism, socialism, and facism). It’s quite untrue that post-modernism has not reached, e.g., the Middle East. Bin Laden and other Islamic radicals are masters at using the West’s post-modern ideas and rhetoric against it.

Well, Bin Laden does abuse words like freedom and independence all the time, but I don't think he actually thinks in these terms the way Westerners do, and even if he does, most Muslims don't. The third world has absorbed the Western idea of nationalism very well, but not any refinement made to it since World War Two. The entire complex philosophy of discourse and the effect of language thereon certainly didn't reach the Islamic world; it did not even penetrate every Western country. And as for communism and fascism, their third world applications have always taken local characteristics. With fascism it's obvious, as fascism is a nationalistic and hence local ideology, but even communism, which is supposedly international, took on agrarian characteristics in the third world even though Marx's and Lenin's philosophies were industrial.

Re "Predictions tend to affect the events predicted. That's the whole point of making and publicising the prediction."

Like the Y2K thing, for another example of that same principle.

Henry

Name me one great idea in basic science created by a non-Jewish American in the 20th century.

Not that I’m interested in helping out DaveScot, but does James Watson count for his 1/2 of the double helix breakthrough?

Yeah, he does. I was thinking about other fields, though - physics, economics, computer science, linguistics, and philosophy.

Joe Kaplinsky's observations in the article were quite incisive. I suspect that many creationists use some of the rhetorical tactics of postmodernism simply because they think they've worked - they're a handy tool to push their creationism, which is unsustainable on its own merits.

But I think he missed the more fundamental connection between creationists & postmodernists; their underlying motivation for brazenly spewing so many bogus theories: They are, at heart, moral subjectivists. They both believe that the real world gives us no objective guidance in helping us judge one moral code or decision over another.

Postmodernists seem to be willing to live with this. Their prescription is to always side with the "oppressed" or "least-powerful" side in any debate, in order to sustain some kind of truce between the competing interests. At least this tense standoff between equals prevents one side from totally crushing the other in Hobbes' "war of all against all".

Creationists, OTOH, at least have the good sense to find this situation unacceptable. Creationists at least WANT there to be some semblance of objective truth. Preferably whatever moral system they happen to prefer. But they don't believe that the real world provides any objective truth that they can point to to ground their preferences in, so they want everyone to believe in this supernatural Authority Figure who can impose his idea of truth on us. Strictly speaking, it could be a totally arbitrary standard on His part. As long as enough people are impressed or intimidated into believing that it's as good as truly objective, it serves its purpose of preventing the Hobbesian war.

(Oh, you say the SAF that Americans tend to believe in happens to prefer a moral code that the creationists themselves also prefer? What a nice coincidence! :-)

As a Randian conservative, I'm more surprised that this conservative subculture has been able to get away with this abandonment of the idea of objectivity than anything else. I'm glad to see others beginning to point out these embarrassing connections with postmodernist nihilism. I hope they keep it up. IMO it's the only way to truly destroy this generation's creation movement, since it goes directly to their motives and WEDGES them away from all us other conservatives.

Very well said.

A very great many folks who tout moral objectivity are actually pragmatists. Arguments in favor of the intrinsic rationality of moral positions are mighty scarce in right-wing publications, but one finds many comments to the effect that belief in absolute morality is necessary or desirable for the maintenance of social peace.

The Fundamentalists and their allies are aware that they are retailing their own version of relativism. Which is why they mostly maintain the irrationalist position that acts are good because it is God's will---they seem to think that the only thing that keeps us from murdering each other is divine sanction, not only because absent divine sanction we wouldn't know any better or be able to restrain ourselves, but because murder wouldn't be wrong in the first place.

The difference between a (strawman) Postmodernist and a (strawman) Fundie on this issue is that the former thinks that man is the measure of all things while the later thinks that God is the measure of all things. Of course since it's pretty obvious that there is no legislating God, the second position turns out to be a varient of the first. The serious alternative to both of them is a philosophy that reasons about morality instead of substituting bluster for argument. You can't make morality objective simply by insisting that it would be nice if it were.

A very great many folks who tout moral objectivity are actually pragmatists. Arguments in favor of the intrinsic rationality of moral positions are mighty scarce in right-wing publications, but one finds many comments to the effect that belief in absolute morality is necessary or desirable for the maintenance of social peace.

Erlich is (I think he's still around) an entomologist, a grasshopper specialist, as I recall.  Population booms and busts were his specialty. 

Name me one great idea in basic science created by a non-Jewish American in the 20th century. ... I was thinking about other fields, though - physics, economics, computer science, linguistics, and philosophy.

Please don't make me babysit you all.

Here's the kind of sentiment I was talking about that's brewing in America:

Colorado Rocky Mountain News - by Mike Rosen

Thank you Ward Churchill! As the poster child for so much of what's wrong with higher education today, you moved this issue from the back burner to the front burner of public policy. Whether you stay or go is merely another battle. This is about the war of ideas.

...

Whatever the outcome for Churchill, the battle lines have formed and are hardening. Here's what many of us, I hope most, would like to see: substantive change, a revolution even, at the University of Colorado. It must start with electing regents who have a commitment to restoring real, intellectual diversity and an evenhanded exchange of ideas. That means hiring conservative professors to balance the now left-lopsided scales.

Lots more at article.

Here's something you boys need to add to your rules of thumb:Follow the money

What I mean by that is to remember where the money comes from that pays the operating expenses of universities and their research programs. They ultimately drive the decision making process. If they don't like what's going on they can change it.

Darn link didn't work...

http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/news_columnists/article/0,1299,DRMN_86_3592594,00.html

if that don't do it try this

http://tinyurl.com/4obgk

How did Ward Churchill get into this discussion? How is it relevant?

Timothy quoted this in his article

[qoute]It is suspicion of all groups who claim authority rather than excessive respect for religion that drives hostility to science....[T]he theme of anti-intellectualism on the American right has drawn vigour from the critique of expertise developed since the 1960s by their opponents in the culture wars. It was radicals who pioneered the idea that children should educate the teachers, that doctors were no more expert than their patients, and that claims to expertise generally were little more than an excuse to assert power by marginalising the voice of the victim. In this picture scientists are not disinterested investigators of the truth so much as spin doctors for their paymasters in business or government. It is the coming together of these two strands from left and right that represents the real danger for science.

Ward Churchill represents everything that anti-intellectualists hate. He's beginning to represent the stereotype of academics that average Americans hold. Not altogether undeservedly either.

How many of you here that are tenured professors think United States foreign policy invited 9/11 and that it was a matter of the U.S. getting what it had coming to it? And how many of you think lashing out unilaterally with wrath and vengence against terrorist supporting nations was the wrong thing to do? Be honest now.

Top 10 ways you can tell you are not talking about science....

10) The other guy starts by saying how ignorant you are as opposed to where your argument is wrong in his view.

9) Your ideas are all invalid in some massively agreed upon manner than s/he can't quite remember or put their finger on.

8) Your opponent is comfortable with a theory that changes often when faced with new tests or measurements.

7) The theory claims to tell you WHY but is incapable of telling a detailed account of WHAT or HOW.

6) The theory is totally dependant on another unproven theory that they refuse to talk about. For example if you accept there is a omnipresent God and the bible is his literal word then 7 day creation is very logical. Likewise if you disbelieve evolutionary biogenesis then evolutionary biodiversity becomes untenuable.

5) Your opponent talks about Phd. degrees or even worse starts to name which school the Phd came from. If you have it you have it. If you don't have it you will talk about where you went to school and who hired you etc etc etc.

4) Your opponent makes claims based on large numbers without any details on the mechanics of HOW. For example, there are an infinite set of numbers between 0 and 1 but none of them are greater than 2. Yet most people would believe that if I picked an infinite number of numbers without ever picking the same one twice that one of those numbers would be above 2.

3) Your opponent believes that the absence of a valid argument AGAINST their theory is the same as evidence FOR their theory. To prove a theory TRUE you provide support for that theory, if that theory claims it is the only possible explaination then you have to prove all other explainations impossible not just claim yours is more likely. If person A knows the truth and lies to person B who doesn't know the truth who is then instructed to lie to person C who also doesn't know the truth but knows person B is lying. Person C is instructed to lie, does he then tell the truth or a lie? Yet person C may even be able to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that person B is lying...does that make what he says the truth?

2) Your opponents Theory does not use numbers. Numbers are inheriently scientific as you claim 1 reject 9 and are very specific regarding how many times you do this by stating significant figures.

1) Your opponents theory does not predict future events. If you learn only one thing here it is that science predicts things that can be proven false or it isn't science.

I think the purpose of PT is to discuss the pros and cons of intelligent design, not to delve into debates about U.S. foreign policy. There are many places on the web to do that.

How many of you here that are tenured professors think United States foreign policy invited 9/11 and that it was a matter of the U.S. getting what it had coming to it?

Most of them, but it's the general population that is getting it wrong, not them. When everybody hates you, it's because of you, not because of them. It doesn't have to be your fault - for example, it could be because you belong to a different ethnicity from everyone around - but it's ultimately because of you. If you want, you can argue that 9/11 is a reaction against the USA's spreading freedom in the world. That's more or less how Pearl Harbor happened: Roosevelt declared an embargo on Japan in order to cut off its raw materials and force it to stop conquering Chinese territory, so Japan retaliated by bombing Pearl Harbor.

Whatever the outcome for Churchill, the battle lines have formed and are hardening. Here’s what many of us, I hope most, would like to see: substantive change, a revolution even, at the University of Colorado. It must start with electing regents who have a commitment to restoring real, intellectual diversity and an evenhanded exchange of ideas. That means hiring conservative professors to balance the now left-lopsided scales.

Conservative scholars are welcome to publish research in peer-reviewed journals. Instead, they flock to think tanks where evenhanded exchange is a farce and intellectual diversity is the enemy. If you have serious research that shows humans were intelligently designed or there is systematic bias against conservatives in the academia or the world is flat, it'll pass peer review.

Don’t be stupid. That’s what the creationists are here for.

Why is that stupid? In physics the USA wasn't even on the intellectual map till Hitler drove the German intelligentsia to it. The greatest physicists of the 20th century ar all European. In economics, the two greatest figures of the previous century were British John Maynard Keynes and Jewish Milton Friedman. In computer science, Americans created infrastructure but not the idea, which was created by British Alan Turing. In linguistics, the most important person is of course Noam Chomsky, who is Jewish.

I'll give you one example from biology, Alan. Charlie Wagner created Nelson's Law. Singlehandedly overturned 150 years of biology. That's not a great idea in the sciences by a non-Jew?

Levy

The hate is inspired by envy. It's what we're doing right, not wrong, that is the cause.

Now you know.

"I'll give you one example from biology, Alan. Charlie Wagner created Nelson's Law. Singlehandedly overturned 150 years of biology. That's not a great idea in the sciences by a non-Jew?"

No one should claim that creationists lack a sense of humor.

Well, I think this discussion has pretty much run dry. Folks wishing to blame America for September 11 may do so on the Bathroom Wall.