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I think Mr. Derbyshire is being way too harsh(I am a big Ben Stein fan) but yeah, what he said.

The target is atheistic Darwinism. You could not overstate the case against this. Followers of that ideology currently want to combine human and animal DNA to form chimeras like the Humanzee.

To not be able to separate atheistic Darwinism from Western civilization as a whole (which includes Christianity) is a serious mistake and intellectual error.

These atheists are behind the eugenics of Planned Parenthood, abortion on demand, embryonic stem cell research, Frankenfoods, and the animal-human hybrid experiments. These are crimes against humanity.

Atheistic Darwinism is not the essence of civilization. Civilization pre-dates the rise of scientific materialism.

Related thread

I haven’t seen “Expelled” either, only read about it, but I’m also disturbed by the implication of condemning a scientific theory based on its use as justification for atrocities by deranged nonscientists. Take this quote Derbyshire posted at the Corner from a Ben Stein interview with Trinity Broadcasting Network:

“When we just saw that man, I think it was Mr. Myers [i.e. biologist P.Z. Myers], talking about how great scientists were, I was thinking to myself the last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do they were telling them to go to the showers to get gassed … that was horrifying beyond words, and that’s where science — in my opinion, this is just an opinion — that’s where science leads you.”(http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NWRmOTU2YzZlN2RhMzhjNzEwNzQ3MzFiZDE2NjM3NWE=)

I’m sorry to say this, as someone who also used to like reading and watching Ben Stein, but arguing that science is to blame for the Holocaust and should therefore be rejected is completely nutty. Science and the fruits of science can, have and will continue to be misused by evil people, but that doesn’t make the science invalid or scientific inquiry respsonsible for those misuses.

Stein has gone around the bend.

“By their works ye shall know them”

Well, I think it is pretty clear what John Derbyshire is.

The subject is pretty well covered; all I could contribute was to add the Crime/Corruption tag (for the various thefts of copyrighted material).

I think Mr. Derbyshire is being way too harsh

If anything, he's too gentle. He does provide a good sigline (slightly edited to fit the allowed length).

Mr. Derbyshire has a good follow-up on the Corner:

Against the Fall of Dark [John Derbyshire]

No, David. "The world is truly revealed as upside-down and backward" when intelligent young Jews sign up to the anti-science crusade.

One of the best reasons to be a philosemite in our time is sheer gratitude at the disproportionate contribution Jews have made to the advance of Western civilization, and to our understanding of the world, this past two hundred years. The U.S.A. dominated the 20th century in culture and technology, to the great benefit of all mankind, in part because of the work done in math and science by the great tranche of pre-WW2 immigrant Jews from Europe.

Now you have joined up with people who want to trash the scientific enterprise and heap insults on one of the greatest names in intellectual history. For reasons unfathomable to me, you and Ben Stein want to sneer and scoff at our understandings, hard-won over centuries of arduous intellectual effort. Don't the two of you know, don't Jews of all people know, where this anti-intellectual agitation, this pandering to a superstitious mob, will lead at last? If you truly don't, I refer you to the fate of Hypatia, which you can read about in my last book (Chapter 3), or in Gibbon (Chapter XLVII). You new pals at the Discovery Institute no doubt think Hypatia got what she deserved.

Civilization is a thin veneer, David. Reason and science are bulwarks against the dark.

I am sure you know the fine speech that Robert Bolt put in the mouth of Sir Thomas More, but "people need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed":

More    … What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

Roper     I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

More     (Roused and excited)     Oh?    (Advances on Roper)     And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you — where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?     (He leaves him)     This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man's laws, not God's — and if you cut them down — and you're just the man to do it — d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?     (Quietly)     Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.

Bolt's More understood a thing you and Stein don't understand, the thing that Waugh credited Kipling with understanding in that quote I posted earlier in the week, and that Adolf Hitler (hey, you started the reductio ad Hitlerum), in his own way, and of course from the other side of the Wall, also understood.

You and Stein are playing a dangerous game, a game that Jews should be the very last to play. The ADL, for all its faults, at least understands that.

I really, seriously wonder how much of a future the U.S.A. has. We are sinking into a bog of mediocrity, frivolity, superstition, and ignorance. When even Jews join the parade of folly, it's hard to keep hoping.

Yesterday (thanks! to a generous friend who got me in) I had the colossal privilege of watching Kurt Masur conduct Anne-Sophie Mutter in rehearsal. While Tchaikovsky's wonderful music filled the hall I found myself thinking, as I always do: How long shall we have this? How long will it last? How long before it is all swallowed up in the great grinning, jeering maw of hip-hop, the worship of worthless "celebrities," reality TV, Oprahified politics, and "intelligent design" — junk religion meets junk science? How long have we got?

Our civilization is on the way out. I hope it at least outlives me, but I am less and less sure it will. I'll be damned if I won't go down fighting, though.

05/02 09:48 AM

Another follow-up from Mr. Derbyshire over at The Corner:

Wrong Target [John Derbyshire]

A reader:

John,

I think you and other conservative critics of Ben Stein's movie are overlooking a significant part of the damage this film is doing: it diverts attention away from the areas of the academy, such as English, Poli Sci, Sociology, gender studies, black studies, etc. that really have become real cesspools of leftist dogma and actually are dire need of reform.

Conservatives who care about higher education ought to be scrutinizing the pseudo-scholars in these disciplines and leaving the real scholars in the natural sciences alone. Ben Stein is diverting resources away from where they could actually be doing some good.

Worse, the fact that conservatives are attacking the natural sciences makes them less credible when they call for reform in the humanities and social sciences. Efforts to promote Intelligent Design are being used as an argument against the Academic Bill of Rights in Florida, for example.

The damage Ben Stein is doing to efforts to reform the academy is incalculable and perhaps the worst effect of his movie.

I agree. Part of the anger that I, and a lot of other science-literate conservatives, feel towards Stein arises from his joining in the creationists' attempts to breach an academic barrier we've put our faith in, perhaps complacently. While every kind of lunacy has run rampant through our Humanities departments this past couple of decades, we've taken consolation in the fact that science and math departments have been able to go quietly about their work without any of the lunacy really affecting them. You can have Gay Legal Studies or Latina History, but Feminist Differential Geometry is much harder to get started. Being firmly in touch with empirical reality, or in the case of math with rigorous proof procedures, the sciences can't easily be disturbed by politicized crackpottery.

Stein's movie is an open assault on that barrier, an attempt to bring over what Roger Kimball calls "experiments against reality" from the Humanities departments into the sciences. It is not a coincidence that the current strain of creationism exemplified by Expelled gives off a strong whiff of postmodernism: ruthless power-holders imposing their own version of reality, etc. "When the religious Right adopts the epistemology of the multicultural Left — that truth is relative — there goes the Enlightenment …" That's a surviving fragment from Noam Scheiber's piece on this in The Australian a couple of years ago, the piece itself apparently no longer available.

05/05 02:52 PM

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NjhlNzU1MWJlYWM2OWRhNGJmMzg0M2E1M2U2Yjg4Zjg=