Posted on 11/06/2002 9:25:58 PM PST by general_re
Apologies to anyone I've omitted or included against their wishes - I don't maintain a formal ping list, so this is unlikely to be repeated in this form, either way...
Funny but the "Darwinists" don't think so.
On first blush, the article seemed to overreach the statements actually made by Vatican concerning evolution, so I checked and confirmed that is the case: Message to Pontifical Academy of Sciences October 22, 1996
Good points. The neo-Creationists and their twins, the Post-Modern-Deconstructionists continue to comment on science without checking with a few scientists first. Sokal's "Social Text" caper is a good example.
Yes - that part explains exactly, IMO, why creationist leaders so willingly blind their followers to the plain evidence. They're deathly afraid that if anything makes people start doubting in the existence of a Supreme Authority Figure person, society will collapse and it'll be Mad Max time. Because they think there really IS no right & wrong, so even if God doesn't exist we have to invent Him.
Which is wrong, wrong, wrong! Right & wrong are objectively true or false, and there's a wide range of moral Truths that are true for everybody. It's because individual rights & responsibility flow naturally from the basic facts of human nature. That's why capitalism & the open society are taking over the world. It's not American hegemony, per se. It's just that America is for the most part free & open & prosperous, and that keeps being too plainly true for people in other civilizations to wish away.
But the creationists just don't see that. What's funny is, this is where the real debate should be happening. When we debate the actual science, we're really arguing past each other.
Since you base this on something objective, this requires a rigorous proof.
Kristol and his colleagues may worry that once this one thread is pulled from the fabric of religious belief, perhaps the whole will become unraveled, with grave social consequences. Without the strictures and traditions imposed by a religion that promises to punish sinners, the moral controls that moderate our base desires will lose their validity, leading ultimately to moral chaos.Sounds like they should be panicked about the solar system too.
Thus, to preserve society, wise people must publicly support the traditions and myths that sustain the political order and that encourage ordinary people to obey the laws and live justly. People will do so only if they believe that moral rules are divinely decreed or were set up by men who were inspired by the Divine.Oh yeah, that's getting close to the question of whether evolution is good science.
What is the hidden truth known to philosophers? That there is no God and there is no ultimate foundation for morality. As [Irving] Kristol suggests, it is necessary to keep this truth from the vulgar because such knowledge would only engender despair in them and lead to social breakdown.
The flaw is that this is argument by assumption and attribution of motive and it falls on that basis alone. Nor is Irving Kristol a conservative icon. He is a reformed liberal, and not sufficiently reformed in my humble view. On the other hand his wife, Gertrude Himmelfarb, wrote an utterly devastating book on Darwinism in 1959, which the article references, in which Darwin emerges a scientific non-entity. Himmelfarb and Bork are more of like mind as to the underlying issues and realities and they are very good friends (FWIW).
Speculation, yes; unfounded, no. And Bailey says as much - after concluding that scientific attacks on Darwinism have failed, which they generally have, he then seeks to understand why otherwise intelligent people continue to attack it, and proposes that it is essentially a form of our old friend, the fallacy of the argument from the consequences. And Bork, Johnson, Kristol, et cetera, make this an exceedingly easy case to make by their attacks on Darwinism as simply being a masquerade for atheistic humanism, and decrying the presumed effects of said athiestic humanism upon society.
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