Posted on 11/01/2005 6:27:26 PM PST by Tailgunner Joe
A president who consults religious lunatics about who should be on the Supreme Court... Judges who want prayer in school and the "ten commandments" in the courtroom… Born-Again fanatics who bomb abortion clinics… bible thumpers who condemn homosexuality as "sin"... and all the other Christian fascists who want a U.S. theocracy….
This is the force behind the assault on evolution going on right now in a courtroom in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
Last year, the Dover city school board instituted a policy that requires high school biology teachers to read a statement to students that says Darwin's theory of evolution is "not a fact" and then notes that intelligent design offers an alternative theory for the origin and evolution of life--namely, that life in all of its complexity could not have arisen without the help of an "intelligent hand." Some teachers refused to read the statement, citing the Pennsylvania teacher code of ethics, which says, "I will never knowingly present false information to a student." Eleven parents who brought this case to court contend that the directive amounted to an attempt to inject religion into the curriculum in violation of the First Amendment. Their case has been joined by the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
The school board is being defended pro bono by the Thomas More Law Center, a Christian law firm in Ann Arbor, Mich. The case is being heard without a jury in Harrisburg by U.S. District Judge John Jones III, whom George W. Bush appointed to the bench in 2002.
In 1987, the Supreme Court ruled that public schools could not teach the biblical account of creation instead of evolution, because doing so would violate the constitutional ban on establishment of an official religion. Since then Intelligent Design has been promoted by Christian fundamentalists as the way to get the Bible and creationism into the schools.
"This clever tactical repackaging of creationism does not merit consideration," Witold Walczak, legal director of the Pennsylvania American Civil Liberties Union and a lawyer for the parents, told U.S. District Judge John E. Jones in opening arguments. "Intelligent design admits that it is not science unless science is redefined to include the supernatural." This is, he added, "a 21st-century version of creationism."
This is the first time a federal court has been asked to rule on the question of whether Intelligent Design is religion or science. Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, which opposes challenges to the standard model of teaching evolution in the schools, said the Pennsylvania case "is probably the most important legal situation of creation and evolution in the last 18 years," and that "it will have quite a significant impact on what happens in American public school education."
Proponents of Intelligent Design don’t say in the courtroom that they want to replace science with religion. But their strategy papers, speeches, and discussions with each other make it clear this is their agenda.
Intelligent Design (ID) is basically a re-packaged version of creationism--the view that the world can be explained, not by science, but by a strict, literal reading of the Bible. ID doesn’t bring up ridiculous biblical claims like the earth is only a few thousand years old or that the world was created in seven days. Instead it claims to be scientific--it acknowledges the complexity and diversity of life, but then says this all comes from some "intelligent" force. ID advocates don’t always openly argue this "intelligent force" is GOD--they even say it could be some alien from outer space! But Christian fundamentalists are the driving force behind the whole Intelligent Design movement and it’s clear… these people aren’t praying every night to little green men from another planet.
Phillip Johnson, considered the father and guiding light behind Intelligent Design, is the architect of the "wedge strategy" which focuses on attacking evolution and promoting intelligent design to ultimately, as Johnson says, "affirm the reality of God." Johnson has made it clear that the whole point of "shifting the debate from creationism vs. evolution to the existence of God vs. the non-existence of God" is to get people "introduced to the truth of the Bible," then "the question of sin" and finally "introduced to Jesus."
Intelligent Design and its theocratic program has been openly endorsed by George W. Bush. Earlier this year W stated that Intelligent Design should be taught in the schools. When he was governor of Texas, Bush said students should be exposed to both creationism and evolution. And he has made the incredibly unscientific, untrue statement that "the jury is still out" on evolution.
For the Christian fascists, the fight around evolution and teaching Intelligent Design is part of a whole agenda that encompasses reconfiguring all kinds of cultural, social, and political "norms" in society. This is a movement that is fueled by a religious vision which varies among its members but is predicated on the shared conviction that the United States is in need of drastic changes--which can only be accomplished by instituting religion as its cultural foundation.
The Christian fascists really do want--and are working for--a society where everything is run according to the Bible. They have been working for decades to infiltrate school boards to be in a position to mandate things like school prayer. Now, in the schools, they might not be able to impose a literal reading of the Bible’s explanation for how the universe was created. But Intelligent Design, thinly disguised as some kind of "science," is getting a lot more than just a foot in the door.
The strategy for promoting intelligent design includes an aggressive and systematic agenda of promoting the whole religious worldview that is the basis for ID. And this assault on evolution is linked up with other questions in how society should be run.
Marc Looy of the creationist group Answers in Genesis has said that evolution being taught in the schools,
"creates a sense of purposelessness and hopelessness, which I think leads to things like pain, murder, and suicide."
Ken Cumming, dean of the Institute for Creation Research's (ICR) graduate school, who believes the earth is only thousands of years old, attacked a PBS special seven-part series on evolution, suggesting that the series had "much in common" with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks against the United States. He said,
"[W]hile the public now understands from President Bush that 'we're at war' with religious fanatics around the world, they don't have a clue that America is being attacked from within through its public schools by a militant religious movement called Darwinists...."
After the 1999 school shooting in Littleton, Colorado, Tom DeLay, Christian fascist representative from Texas, gave a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives, blaming the incident in part on the teaching of evolution. He said,
"Our school systems teach the children that they are nothing but glorified apes who are evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud."
The ID movement attacks the very notion of science itself and the philosophical concept of materialism--the very idea that there is a material world that human beings can examine, learn about, and change.
Johnson says in his "The Wedge Strategy" paper,
"The social consequences of materialism have been devastating…we are convinced that in order to defeat materialism, we must cut it off at its source. Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist world view, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions."
Dr. Eugenie C. Scott, the Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education, points out:
"Evolution is a concept that applies to all sciences, from astronomy to chemistry to geology to biology to anthropology. Attacking evolution means attacking much of what we know of the natural world, that we have amassed through the application of scientific principles and methods. Second, creationist attacks on evolution are attacks on science itself, because the creationist approach does violence to how we conduct science: science as a way of knowing."
The Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (another Christian think tank) says that it "seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies."
Teaching Intelligent Design in the schools is part of a whole Christian Fascist movement in the United States that has power and prominence in the government, from the Bush regime on down. And if anyone isn’t clear about what "cultural legacies" the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture wants to overthrow--take a look at the larger Christian fascist agenda that the intelligent design movement is part of: asserting patriarchy in the home, condemning homosexuality, taking away the right to abortion, banning sex education, enforcing the death penalty with the biblical vengeance of an "eye for an eye," and launching a war because "God told me [Bush] to invade Iraq."
And thank you, cornelis, for the precious poem! What a vision!
Thank you for your response..
Maybe there is such a thing as two dimensional intellect (not recognizing the painter) and three dimensional intellect (recognizing the painter).. i.e. born again vs not born again.. or some other metaphorical instrument..
At any rate if this Universe is a three dimensional "drama", "painting", "creation", "work of the Godly art".. the earth mystery drama might be the first act with the audience trying to deduce the plot... i.e. science, religion, philosophy.. Basically an awareness test.. of some sort..
Reading some of the famous philosophers its amazing the clap trap that a human can come up with.. All proven with great swelling words of course.. Joseph Campbells search for sentience through myth comes to mind.. Anyway this term the Universal Canvas resonated within me today reading one of Boops posts.. Not being "shy" I stood up.. it is still echoing through my gourd.. LoL..
"[L]osing [those] parts of reality" is an entirely good thing, IMHO.
It's no a deficiency of the "immanent" (real) that if fails to conform to the "transcendent" (ideal). Indeed the opposite is the case. It's entirely a deficiency of the ideal when and to the extent that it fails to capture the full reality of what actually exists.
This understanding should be second nature to conservatives, cognizant as we are of the vast and deadly nihilism that invariably manifests when the "transcendent" is given priority over the "immanent" in the realm of political and social theory. (E.g. real social justice that has been achieved at great historic cost is deemed as hopelessly flawed in comparison to the ideal and therefore must be swept away and replaced by a more ideal form.)
The proper priority wrt to natural science should be more, not less, clear than wrt to social and political theory.
Civilization and Its Enemies : The Next Stage of History by Lee Harris
Good morning, Stultis! It seems to me there are many transcendent things that are also quite real: Any universal would qualify as such. Unless you think the laws of physics are not real.
Very curious indeed, and hasty, I think. Anybody who knows the history of platonism knows that the price paid was extremely high: the Plato we all know who finds intelligibility at all cost, and can find it only at the price of losing such parts of reality as do not fit the pattern of ideal thought. Just blame it on Socrates.
But we need not pit the one against the other if we can recognize the distinctions that arise from their writing. Without making them a mush, we might agree that one can't be a good empiricist at all without the other.
betty boop: It seems to me there are many transcendent things that are also quite real: Any universal would qualify as such. Unless you think the laws of physics are not real.
IMHO, the tautology that cornelis raised is the risk of Stultis' worldview for it demands that A is real, non-A is ideal and provisional at that.
Conversely, the Plato view declares non-A as real and also A as real.
Notwithstanding the history of the Aristotle v Plato paradigm (and Socrates as raised by cornelis) - physics would suggest that the view of reality as "matter in all its motion" is in peril (the nature of mass, non-locality, superposition, etc.)
This brings me back to a comment about Derbyshire up above. He mixes means and ends in the list of foolish politics: peace is a good end, and generosity is a virtue. Perhaps he should distinguish the end from the means. Immanentizing the eschaton is a bad means. Rejecting the eschaton is losing parts.
In American politics, the end is left to the people. Sadly, this is no guarantee that in making the foundation of law an popular ideal against bad means.
And so it seems to many realists as well. For instance Karl Popper argued for the reality (the real existence) of ideas.
The problem is where we assert, construct or discover a correspondence between an abstract idea and a real object, and then give the former precedence over the latter. The real must always be the test of the ideal, not the other way around. Furthermore, even if both object and idea are real, the correspondence between idea and object is not real (as Plato argues) but only incidental and instrumental. The correspondence is a kind of "theory" subject to testing and to refutation.
Sadly, this is no guarantee that in making the popular ideal the foundation of law that we are free of bad means.
We can't follow this advice until we distinguish between the conceptual and the actual ideal.
Back in post 493, Cornelis wrote: "... it is a dangerous game to assume that the scope of our knowledge is identical with the object of our knowledge." This is well put, but the meaning is a bit sticky to me. So: it is dangerous to assume that what we know (scope) is identical with what we want to know (object)? Since the word "danger" was brought in, I will play devil's advocate and ask, "Dangerous how?" A danger that we will find ourselves in error? Or is the danger that our little logical error will lead to greater and even real life error? Is the danger that, as Weaver put it, "ideas have consequences?" And what if we put this in theological terms: is it dangerous to assume that our knowledge of God (insofar as we may assume we have such knowledge - from the bible or other holy books, from religious experiences, etc.) is identical with God? And is there a way of knowing God without having experience of God? I'm not necessarily interested in answers to these questions, but I would contend that all knowledge is limited - even the knowledge of direct experience. For me there is no intellectually satisfying escape from knowing, simply, what I know.
knowledge of an event that we obtain through sense perception is and is not the same thing. Otherwise that tree you see is growing in your head. And then everything is in everything and the game is over. There is nothing more to say.
How do we obtain knowledge of an event except through "sense perception"? The tree you "see" may also be felt, smelled, tasted, and - if the wind is right - heard. Insofar as one's senses exist only in one's head, then perhaps the tree only exists there, too, but this has always seemed to me rather beside the point. Since elsewhere Plato's cave has been dragged in: why should the one who recognizes the shadows on the wall for what they are not also question the reality of the light that casts them? Recognizing one appearance as mere appearance, why not all appearances? It may simply be something we as human beings must resign ourselves to: that our experience of life does not exceed our experience of life, and that the logic of our consciousness may not always manage to access the logic of reality (if we are still determined to separate the two).
But back now to the tautology and the "riddle" of unity.
If we are to speak of knowledge, and let's say in particular scientific knowledge, then we must distinguish between what we are able to know and how we are able to know it. This was the point, I think, that inspired cornelis' post 493. If I am able to know, for example, that the mathematical sentence 2 + 2 = 4 is true, I am able to know this only by having prior knowledge (perhaps only assumed knowledge) of the grammar of that sentence: I know what "2" and "4" mean, I know what operation is defined by the "+" symbol, and I know what conclusion the "=" sign denotes. Now the question arises, how can I distinguish between what I know (the relationships described by the equation) and what I want to know (whether the equation is true)? It seems simple enough when the equation is 2 + 2 = 4, but quickly becomes more complicated with 2 + 2 = 8 - 4 or 2 + 2 = (3(2 + 1) - 1) + (2(1-3)), where we see that the equation is itself a tautology: 4 = 4. And yet, in order to know one thing that I know (that 4 = 4), I may need some other knowledge to be able to recognize it when I see it (the mathematical operations and their order of calculation). Here it seems to me that the scope of my knowledge is indeed intimately bound to its object. It does not follow, however, that acquisition of knowledge is tautological. It is, rather, syllogistic: I know what "2" means, I know what "+" means, therefore I know what "2 + 2" means. The natural sciences work in the same way, depending on prior knowledge to extrapolate further knowledge. In Newton's famous words: "If I have seen further... it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants." In that sense, our ability to know depends very much upon what we already know.
As to the question of whether "what is outside of (the tautology)" exists or not, I'm not sure there is really a problem here. Clearly, as A-G has noted, mathematics does not deny the existence of biology, nor does biology deny the existence of mathematics. But let's be careful with terms here: biology is not life, it is the study of life; mathematics, for its part, is a language of numerical and operational relationships: neither exist corporeally, in the sense that a rock or a dog or a flower or you or I exist. I understand some are concerned that the natural sciences, in limiting themselves to the material, are somehow denying the existence of what is non-material, but this, to me, is a misunderstanding. Natural science does not deny the existence of the non-material; it simply is not equipped to deal with what is non-material (except in cases where the "non" is itself in question - e.g. the problem of human consciousness). Perhaps part of the fear comes from the (relatively) recent, science-driven expansion of the so-called material world to include phenomena previously considered strictly non-material. The fear, I would argue, is unfounded. Either what is material is material, or it is not material; the "discovery" of new material (of what, that is, was previously unknown to be or was unrecognizable as material) can in no way diminish the existence of the non-material. An increase in "A" by no means demands a decrease in "non-A".
As for Niels Bohr, I haven't read much of the man's work, but along with Alamo-Girl I endorse his "cut." I would only add that the cut, cuts both ways.
Now it looks like I have some reading to do, to catch up with recent developments...
Yes, but real as ideas. Their status of reality as ideas makes no demands whatsoever on either if, or how, corresponding objects are instantiated.
What distinction? What are "actual" ideals? How do they exist and why are they privileged over ideas that are (and as they are) actually conceived? Shouldn't those ideas that are (or where) actually conceived be deemed the "actual" ideals?
Properties of objects that are immaterial, extra-mental, and in some way causally related to material existence (e.g. Plato's intelligible ideas, Aristotelian intelligible form, the Stoic World Soul, the Christian God, etc.).
Since our intelligence is limited by the possibility of error, what we conceive may not actually exist and is illusory, although admittedly it does exist as an illusory thought.
you: Yes, but real as ideas. Their status of reality as ideas makes no demands whatsoever on either if, or how, corresponding objects are instantiated.
Moreover, your "real" may be an illusion, albeit a very persistent one (to quote Einstein).
For instance, the fact that we can measure mass does not mean that we "know" and have evidenced what mass "is". In fact we have not. It may very well be a shadow of something else. It may even be multiply imaged.
Yet your "real" requires that mass exists in space/time, doesn't it?
This is why I aver that the Platonist view (in physics and math) is more substantive than the Aristotlean view. It recognizes both the A and the non-A as "real".
I'll need to swallow a cow before I can believe that Aristotle doesn't.
Thus when they speak of the Aristotle v Plato paradigm in cosmology, for instance, the frog (Aristotle) does not see the bird (Plato) - but the bird sees the frog.
To the frog a particle is moving at fixed trajectory, to the bird it is a strand of uncooked spaghetti. The frog sees two orbiting particles, the bird sees two cooked strands of spaghetti in a double helix. The bird looks at the frog and sees a thick bundle of pasta.
The frog not only does not see spaghetti but he denies the bird exists.
It’s when they do deny the existence of non-A that they are at risk of living in a “second reality”.
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