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."
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.).
Well, I'd simply call those "abstract" ideas. I don't accept on Plato's (or anybody else's) assertion that there is a certain set of privileged ideas that are more "real" than others, or more "real" than their objective embodiments. In fact I don't accept that objects are embodiments of ideas. As I said I believe correspondence between ideas and objects is purely instrumental. Therefore I obviously don't accept that these ideas are "causally related" to objects.
We simply disagree.
Here’s an interesting question: Are there “events” of which we are aware that do not come to us via sense perception? It seems to me sense perception pertains only to material phenomena. But there are phenomena, or movements in consciousness, of which we are aware – our thought processes – completely independently of sensory experience. How do we know about such phenomena, if the only knowledge we can have is mediated by sense perception?
You wrote: “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?”
It seems to me that we recognize the shadows on the wall, and understand them as such, only because of the illuminating source that casts them. That is, the shadows are a fleeting image of a more substantial reality that only becomes visible to us by virtue of the Light. If we “question the reality of the Light that casts them,” and find it an illusion, then how could we know anything at all?
In other words, Plato associates the Light with the truth of reality; he maintains that truth is accessible to human reason, but not solely by means of sensuous experience. In short, it appears Plato thinks man knows a great deal about reality from purely “internal” resources. And this is especially so in cases, not so much of knowledge acquisition per se, where intentionalist consciousness/sense perception are the proper “tools”; but in cases regarding reflections of the great (we might say perennial) questions of human existence, the human condition, our place in the world, our history, our destiny, and so forth, luminous consciousness seems to be the proper method or “tool.” This seems to be a source of knowledge acquisition, too -- of "non-phenomenal" aspects of reality that truthfully bear on human existence, and what we call wisdom (in contradistinction to knowledge). Such experiences are "events" in consciousness only.
You wrote, “Recognizing one appearance as mere appearance, why not all appearances?” As Alamo-Girl has already suggested, perhaps everything we see is “appearance,” or as Einstein put it, an “illusion, albeit a persistent one.” This insight seems closely to fit Plato’s meaning in his great myth of “ascent” and “descent” – i.e., that of the Cave with its “shadow play” that the prisoners are bound to watch….
You wrote, “The natural sciences work … depending on prior knowledge to extrapolate further knowledge.” Oh, most definitely! We all must build on what we already know. But how do we know that what we think we know is truthful? Especially if what we think we know is based on appearances in this sense (i.e., on a “persistent illusion”)?
Anyhoot, clearly I have more questions than answers here!!! I’d be interested in your thoughts. Thank you so very much for writing. (And welcome to FR!)
So if I get your drift.. and I think that I do...
2 + 2 = 4 and if you come up with either 5 or 3 you are equally WRONG.. and any convoluted iterations of the error will be not any more WRONG than you started out.. or did I miss something.?.
How rant.
What you do not know is surpassed only by the ignorance of what you do know.
Speak to me, genius. Try to make sense of your vitriol. I think you must have a point somewhere. Try unfettering it from your coarse villification.
Whew. Went back a bit far. I'm glad we are through all of that.
Pardon the intrusion.
What the heck? Try laying off the crack before you post...
If it were only that simple. My apologies.
But Bohr would not say why "2+2=4 in base 10" should exist at all or what it means in the lofty structure of all that there is. That, he would suggest, is the domain of philosophy/theology.
betty boop: is this your understanding of how Bohr's cut would apply to hosepipe's example?
I am haunted by an issue we have covered that seems to bear reinforcement. As a theologian Newton believed that it was impossible to separate God from the study of nature. As a mathematician he recognized that intelligent design had to be assumed in order to do math.
Are not the very scientists who claim that ID is fallacious in fact assuming ID in order to do their science?
How is it possible for a scientist to apply intellectual rigor unless the system being studied is coherent with intellect? If nature has intelligent character then is not all science engaged in studying intelligent design?
Yes indeed, Alamo-Girl. Bohr apparently didn't think that "why?" questions are in the domain of science. I think he thought about such things "in his spare time," as it were. But you will not find them in his science. And indeed, I believe you are right to say that Bohr thought such questions properly belong to philosophy/theology.
Thanks so much for your kind words, A-G! The Light is not "phenomenal." I've recently been struck by how closely Einstein's remark regarding reality as we experience it -- i.e., it is a "persistent illusion" -- tracks with the meaning of Plato's Myth of the Cave.... In the past you've observed that Einstein really was a Platonist, an unconscious one perhaps, even though he took the "Aristotelian side of the argument" with his friend Godel. I'm pretty sure you are right about this! :^)
In Christianity, important thinkers have said sin is the inclination to non-being, and that idolatry occurs in the embrace of an illusion. This means illusion is instrinsic to thought, not reality.
And how might this compare to Kant who makes space a category belonging to rational intelligence and not to empirical phenomena?
when you say. . .
Me: How do we obtain knowledge of an event except through "sense perception"?
You: By revelation, by calculation, by inference, by other reasoning, by imagining etc. And then there's qualia - our intrinsic likes/dislikes, etc.
I don't see how these get around sense perception. How is a revelation perceived, if not sensorily? As for calculation, inference, imagining, etc., these depend on sensory input, without which they have no material with which to operate. They may help us obtain knowledge beyond what we perceive (we see a bullet hole in a wall and are able to infer that a gun has been fired) but that knowledge ultimately has its basis in perception. Same goes for qualia (essence may or may not precede existence - but our knowledge (or awareness) of essence in no case precedes our experience of it).
Returning to the A/non-A problem. Specifically, material/non-material:
When the investigator does not deny the existence of the non-material, there is no problem. Non-A exists.
The first sentence I agree to; there is no reason, even for a materialist, to deny the existence of the non-material. It is something else entirely, however, for a materialist to affirm the existence of the non-material, as in "non-A exists." This seems to me a bit like saying, "Since what I know exists, exists, then what I don't know exists, also exists." To me, the best one can say is, "That which I do not know exists, may exist." This is why we are able to consider atheism a religious position: because an atheist believes in the non-existence of gods. To me, this is a rational enough belief, but a belief just the same. I myself prefer a certain stoicism: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one should remain silent." Or a certain William Blake: "I know not, and I cannot know/I ponder, and I cannot ponder; yet I live and love."
It's when they do deny the existence of non-A that they are at risk of living in a “second reality”
You and BB have returned frequently in this thread to the idea of a "second reality" - which I agree represents a very real problem, and one I plan to return to more thoroughly than I am currently able - but I think it is a mistake to apply the term too broadly. It should not be conflated, I don't think, with the problem of Plato's cave. Even though for the purpose of his parable Plato associates (as BB rightly points out in post 562) the shadow-casting light with the Truth, it seems to me we still have reason to question that Truth (you seem to have agreed to as much), if only because, insofar as we know ourselves, we know how capable we are of Error. Knowing our capacity for Error, we must know that any perception we might have of the Truth (and for the sake of argument I will here include even any non-sensory perception to which we might somehow have access) is subject to our own deep and abiding fallibility. If there is a first Reality, then to some degree we all inhabit second realities; our access to the infinite (and I believe that at times, fleetingly, we do have access) is necessarily limited by our own finitude.
Very good observations.
This is why Aristotle resorts to a provisional (or practical) human ethic. Are people happy after they die? They might be, says Aristotle. Hard to tell and then goes on. In epistemology, anything is possible (an may be illusory).
Christianity's teaching of the resurrection holds that what was possible is real.
Seems to me the angst over intelligence stems from a refusal to accept that intelligence can cause anything to happen and/or a paranoia that accepting intelligent cause is tantamount to the establishment of religion.
I do have a tendency to look at the trees you know - and Plato was clearly a forest person. LOL!
Tin foil hat alert.
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