Posted on 03/17/2015 2:25:43 PM PDT by lifeofgrace
The Left has its own Da Vinci Code, a secret woven into the fabric of its power, shrouded by layers of intrigue, and defended to the death by secret societies pledged to its eternal preservation.
Here it is, exposed:
Science = Truth
Philosophy = Opinion And it’s as wrong today as it was in Plato’s day.
If the fictional Robert Langdon stumbled onto the Church’s hidden legend in Dan Brown’s novel, then all-too-real associate professor of philosophy Justin McBrayer, has vitiated the Left’s Necronomicon in his New York Times piece, “Why Our Children Don’t Think There Are Moral Facts.”
As a philosopher, I already knew that many college-aged students don’t believe in moral facts. While there are no national surveys quantifying this phenomenon, philosophy professors with whom I have spoken suggest that the overwhelming majority of college freshmen in their classrooms view moral claims as mere opinions that are not true or are true only relative to a culture.Given that McBrayer is also a philosophy professor, I can use him as primary source: college kids tend to be moral relativists. “That’s true for you” is a phrase I’ve heard many times after hiring newly minted college grads, when discussing any topic involving value judgments.
God? That’s your truth. If people don’t believe, why force your view on them?
Capitalism? That only benefits you [the Man], what about the poor?
Racial tension? Micro aggressions are real because the oppressed races believe in them. It doesn’t matter if you [the Man] do.
Gender? Whatever people identify, that’s true to them. I, like most conservatives, tended to believe that the liberal takeover on college campuses was to blame; that philosophy itself had been irredeemably corrupted. But McBrayer looked a bit deeper, and found a frightening truth.
A few weeks ago, I learned that students are exposed to this sort of thinking well before crossing the threshold of higher education. When I went to visit my son’s second grade open house, I found a troubling pair of signs hanging over the bulletin board. They read:From the earliest lessons, young children are being taught that facts must be provable and testable. When I learned the scientific method in school, we were taught to begin with a hypothesis, devise a test, and from the test, determine if the hypothesis could be proven. We were never taught that a hypothesis became a fact because the test supported it.Fact: Something that is true about a subject and can be tested or proven.
Opinion: What someone thinks, feels, or believes.
Hoping that this set of definitions was a one-off mistake, I went home and Googled “fact vs. opinion.” The definitions I found online were substantially the same as the one in my son’s classroom. As it turns out, the Common Core standards used by a majority of K-12 programs in the country require that students be able to “distinguish among fact, opinion, and reasoned judgment in a text.” And the Common Core institute provides a helpful page full of links to definitions, lesson plans and quizzes to ensure that students can tell the difference between facts and opinions.
Scientific method produces theses, theories, and suppositions, supported by proof (both mathematical and empirical). Philosophy produces truth claims, supported by logic and deduction. The two disciplines interact to form a coherent world. Science never produces truth claims—that’s simply not in its realm.
Liberal thought pits these two disciplines against each other, and incorrectly attributes truth claims to science, while relegating all philosophical truth claims to mere opinion. This is known (in science and philosophy) as a category error.
McBrayer cracked the code: the Left has built its entire educational foundation on an enormous category error. They’ve pitted science and the scientific method against philosophy and the logical deduction of truth.
This explains a lot, if not everything. When a study in Cognitive Science is touted by the Left as proof of religious children having more difficulty “discerning reality”, they’re really relying on their definition of reality as “provable facts”, and lumping children who don’t buy the lie into their own presupposed definition of “religious.”
Here’s what they did: get a bunch of five- and six-year-olds and tell them stories from the Bible, which the church-going kids already know, exactly as the Bible tells it, then change the stories to swap out God with some fairy-tale magic elements, and then swap out God for a scientific, rational explanation. For some reason, they expected kids who have some Biblical knowledge to claim that the Bible version is pretend. One atheist blogger on wrote on Patheos: “When the kids heard the religious stories, they should have said the character was pretend.”
The Left is teaching children that only scientifically testable, provable notions are fact, and everything else is pretend. This is the generation they’re raising. Far from wanting kids to question everything and apply deductive reasoning, logic, along with scientific method, they want kids to simply believe theories like macro-evolution and cosmological origins as fact because of science, and reject moral truths like the sanctity of life, because they’re philosophy.
Lest you doubt, McBrayer provides proof:
Kids are asked to sort facts from opinions and, without fail, every value claim is labeled as an opinion. Here’s a little test devised from questions available on fact vs. opinion worksheets online: are the following facts or opinions?To the Left, Common Core was never about improving STEM eduction, it was instead about promoting the category error at the heart of its own dark pursuits: there is no moral truth, man is the measure of all things, God’s laws are merely opinion, and religion is fantasy by definition.— Copying homework assignments is wrong.
— Cursing in school is inappropriate behavior.
— All men are created equal.
— It is worth sacrificing some personal liberties to protect our country from terrorism.
— It is wrong for people under the age of 21 to drink alcohol.
— Vegetarians are healthier than people who eat meat.
— Drug dealers belong in prison.
The answer? In each case, the worksheets categorize these claims as opinions. The explanation on offer is that each of these claims is a value claim and value claims are not facts. This is repeated ad nauseum: any claim with good, right, wrong, etc. is not a fact.
In summary, our public schools teach students that all claims are either facts or opinions and that all value and moral claims fall into the latter camp. The punchline: there are no moral facts. And if there are no moral facts, then there are no moral truths.
Liberals accuse conservatives of being anti-science, but it’s really the liberals who are anti-science, and anti-logic, and anti-philosophy. Their goal is no less than the death of values themselves. For this alone, if for no other reason, Common Core must be dismantled.
(crossposted from RedState.com)
Sorry, but 2+2 does equal 5.
(For large values of 2, as two approaches 2.5)
And so goes the “logic” of liberals.
Let us all remember that Dorkbama and his minions would flunk the most simple of real MIT courses, where real is defined as those courses in STEM.
Philosphy is derived from experience and the wisdom learned from making the wrong mistakes. The left doesnt want to be held accountable ero they don’t value wisdom or pasrt experience because it deprives of them of the things they want now. It’s all about selfish needs and wants to satisfy their own carnal nature...
Philosphy is derived from experience and the wisdom learned from making the wrong mistakes. The left doesnt want to be held accountable ergo they don’t value wisdom or past experience because of the correction that comes from it because that would deprive them of the things they want right NOW.. It’s all about selfish needs and wants to satisfy their own carnal nature for them...
Sorry, but 2+2 does equal 5.
Yes it does.
It can equal 5, 6 or any other number.
When either “2” represents something that is ever changing.
It’s the teaching of “Uncertainty”.
To the Left, Common Core was never about improving STEM education, it was instead about promoting the category error at the heart of its own dark pursuits
The reason why I helped write the standards and the reason why I am here today is that as a white male in society I am given a lot of privilege that I didn’t earn[.]
Dr. Pook went on to say all kids deserve an “equal opportunity to learn how to read” and the same advantages he had. However, according to Campus Reform, the Derryfield School where Pook works considers the CCSS inferior and does not use the Common Core State Standards, not to mention that the school has a student body that is 91 percent white. In addition, Campus Reform notes that the “Standards” have been especially hard on black and Hispanic students, who have seen their test scores plummet since the introduction of Common Core.
According to Dr. Pook, not all children have equal opportunity to learn to read. He never stated what advantages he, as a white male, had over other students. What specifically is prohibiting children from having equal opportunities to learn? What has changed over the past 50 years? Perhaps the real problem with public education is caused by liberalism.
Precisely. Liberalism is a religious cult founded on the will of the strongest leader. It is Machiavellian and, ultimately, Manichean.
Liberalism holds as absolute truth those positions that give it its greatest power. When the power shifts, as, for example, with the demise of “global warming” a new truth is sculpted from the old one that is more readily dogmatized. As, for example, “environmental degradation.”
Dogmatic liberals hold to the view that there are no absolutes except those in their own pantheon. Thus the world is divided into the truth of progressivism and the fantasy of everything else, thus, its Manicheanism.
At its heart the progressive movement is demonic. It seeks to destroy the foundational structures of tradition, of thought, and of culture.
Get YOUR children out of the government indoctrination centers - NOW!
I was stunned to hear how a young girl who had just graduated from high school defined propaganda. When I was in high school, propaganda was defined as tactics of deception. Her definition was any type of persuasion - be it the gospel, capitalism - was propaganda. She had been taught that in high school.
This is funny, because leftists don’t say very much that is consistent with observable fact.
Global warming? No.
Keynesian economics? No.
White privilege? No.
Racism against blacks? No (except for Democrats).
Anything the Clintons say? No.
Anything Obama says? No.
Islam is a peaceful religion? No.
I could go on, but you get the point.
Conservatives ought to be calling Democrats on their lack of facts constantly, and humiliating them a la Saul Alinsky.
The Left has its own Da Vinci Code, a secret woven into the fabric of its power....
(((
Don’t know anything about this author, but I cannot read further after he uses the term “Da Vinci Code” as if it referred to something in reality rather than a novelist’s conceit.
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Sorry, but the Common Coreites and Langdon are both confused.
They both class all statements about the world as being necessarily sortable into two groups: facts and opinions.
A fact is something that is demonstrable, like a mathematical theorem.
But there are many categories of truths that are not facts.
To take perhaps the most obvious example: “We hold these truths to be self-evident..”
Note the Founders did not say “these facts.” They recognized that their statement referred to something that was partway between an opinion and a fact. Which was why they recognized they’d have to fight to make the moral truth they held effective. Nobody goes to war over 2+2.
The equality of people is metaphysical and moral. It cannot be demonstrated to be a fact, because at root it is outside the realm of science or facts.
There are moral truths, but there are no moral facts. Morality and facts inhabit different realms.
At the same time, moral truths are not just opinions.
The problem arises when Langdon accepts the Coreites assertion that all statements about the world must fall into one of two categories. This requires him to assert that moral facts exist.
Very good point. There are moral truths but there are no moral facts.
I always enjoy your posts, Sherman Logan.
Well, thanks.
I know what I want to say on this issue but don’t know how to word it.
It just seems to me that the confusion arises from insisting that only facts and opinions exist. This turns everything that cannot be demonstrated to be a fact into “just an opinion.”
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