77 thoughts on “Liberal Creationist Idiocy”

1. “In response to which I’d just point out that many scientists think the scientific method is horseshit. Again, science education in the U.S. is terrible, like all other kinds of education. There’s a discussion to be had about that, but it has little if anything to do with creationism.”

   I don’t understand the logic or sentiment behind this at all and would appreciate it if you would expound.

2. Also, this debate is awfully wrapped up in the issue of separation of church and state, which should probably enter into the conversation somewhere here, no?

3. Scientists don’t tend to actually use the scientific method as it’s taught in schools. They don’t usually even think about it. There are various practical procedures which they perform in various ways, but the theory of the scientific method as taught in schools is just a thing they teach in schools; it doesn’t necessarily have a ton to do with how scientists do or don’t work.

   Science education sucks for the same reason all education in the us sucks where it sucks, usually having to do with minimal resource allocation, an obsession with evaluation, and a general contempt for children and learning.

4. funny you mentioned concern trolling.

5. Heh. Do as I say and not as I do and all that….

6. “In fact, the only real effect of creationism, as far as I can see, is to interfere with the teaching of evolution in some secondary schools.”

   That’s really myopic. Dismissing the theory of evolution, the fossil record, and the geological age of the earth means dismissing such a vast swathe of scientific opinion as to encourage dismissing the opinion of the scientific community on things like global warming. So, yes, it is actively and practically harmful.

   Let’s not forget the reason evolution is such a sore sticking point for creationists. It’s a model that explains the spontaneous development, complexity, and diversity of life without the NEED for a divine agent. Many believers have reconciled themselves to the theory of evolution, which is easy because you can place God behind anything, but it’s still a powerful challenge to a worldview in which God was needed to explain the phenomenon of life.

   Once a community of believers dismisses evolution and such a bedrock of scientific opinion they’re equally inclined to dismiss scientific opinion on practical matters of existential danger. And they do.

7. Noah wrote: “Some people believe that economists can forecast the economy.”

   This made me laugh out loud. Economists today, even with all of their computer models and truckloads of data, are about as reliable as TV weathermen from the 1960s were.

   Many TV weathermen back then didn’t even try to give serious forecasts — they just gagged up their daily spots so no one got mad at them when their wild guesses turned out to usually be wrong.

   Which is probably why wacky financial folks like CNBC’s Jim Cramer has a strong core of loyal watchers. Regardless of what happens to your financial portfolio, at least you’ll be entertained.

8. Deelish, I’d argue that it’s the hyperbolic reaction to creationism that’s been the real problem in terms of global warming. If there was more of a live and let live reaction from the left on issues that don’t matter, the whole thing wouldn’t need to be so politicized, and there wouldn’t be so much mistrust.

   The truth is though that the main reason behind global warming opposition has to do with economic interests, not with creationism. It’s way more analogous to the long battle against cigarettes than to the creationist debates.

9. you haven’t convinced me that the societal harm of liberal elite bloggers patting themselves on the butt outweighs the harm of rejecting foundational knowledge (and by extension the intellectual freedom to reject interdependent disciplines). I’ll second Jason’s point that creationism isn’t just an individual belief, it’s a symptom of a cultural and political movement. Right-wingers infesting school boards isn’t just about inserting creationism into curriculum. It’s about making sure kids like me(tm) make it to adulthood without ever hearing the name Cesar Chavez, etc. etc.

10. The school system is so fucked anyway though. Creationists are part of that…but liberals certainly are too.

    The problem is, the whole question of what it’s right for kids to learn or not is fundamentally misguided. You end up with interest groups struggling desperately to make sure that their children *don’t* learn stuff — whether it’s evolution, creationism, who Cesar Chavez is or whatever. There’s this desperate fear by everybody that somebody will learn something wrong and the children will be damaged forever.

    Creationism is the result of a cultural and political movement…but that’s not necessarily a good reason to get off on sneering at people because they’re poorer and less educated than you are. Everyone’s convinced themselves they’re under siege, and therefore it’s okay to treat your neighbor as badly as you’d like. I just think that treating other human beings with respect is more important than whether you happen to agree with Darwin or not.

11. “The truth is though that the main reason behind global warming opposition has to do with economic interests, not with creationism.”

    Economic interests exploiting the grievances, reactionary world narrative, and solipsism of a substantial community of religious voters and elected officials.

12. I mean, you followed the election, right? The opposition to discussing climate change (or in fact the refusal to even really talk about it) had nothing to do with religion. It was all about both candidates desperately trying to top each other in their avowed love of coal.

    Barack Obama ran deeply duplicitous ads painting Romney as radically anti-coal in order to win Ohio. That’s the fault of creationists how?

13. I didn’t catch the fracas over coal you describe, but I suspect the absence of global warming from the debate had to do with the threatening tone of measures required to combat it in the current economic climate, and a calculation that pushing the issue would spark a conflagration over science and the environment that risked alienating large numbers of voters whom they stood a chance of winning by sticking to economic policy. It’s telling that the right attempted to stoke outrage over government invasion of religious turf, but they miscalculated and alienated female voters by making it about contraception. The Obama team’s decision not to push the environment was cynical but based on the climate of opinion in this country.

14. but an appeal for respect and mutual dignity in a call-out piece like this strikes me as more fuel to the empty rhetoric fire. i mean why not just go ahead and include a swipe at “arrogant atheists” while you’re at it?

15. “If there was more of a live and let live reaction from the left on issues that don’t matter, the whole thing wouldn’t need to be so politicized, and there wouldn’t be so much mistrust.”

    Only if that’s not viewed as another form of maddening superiority: my opinions are so right that I can’t even be bothered to debate you.

    And Katha Pollitt singling out Bible-college graduates and homeschooling parents without degrees is not the same as Katha Pollitt singling out all people without degrees. Those are two specific groups who have specifically opted out of secular society in some ways, in order to pursue their own, supposedly superior religious view of how society should be run. Personally, I think it’s because there’s no social safety net (which happens partially because the country is too large to have an umbrella value system) that religion ends up taking over so many of those functions for so many people. The fact that nearly half the country is being pulled out of secular schooling is concerning, how are we supposed to run a society like that?

16. I don’t think it has to be a refusal to bother to debate; agreeing to disagree isn’t necessarily arrogant.

    I think the lack of a social safety net has more to do with our country’s history on race than with its largeness per se.

    I’m all for everybody who can pulling their kids out of the school system. The school system is terrible. And I don’t think that you need everyone to be indoctrinated in the same way in order to hold our society together.

    And…yeah, I don’t really buy that the scorn is limited to specific groups without degrees. You start sneering at folks for not having degrees, I think the contempt is pretty clear.

    “but an appeal for respect and mutual dignity in a call-out piece like this strikes me as more fuel to the empty rhetoric fire.”

    I guess possibly. I think there’s some difference in hitting up vs. hitting down though.

    And, you know, I’m a liberal. I even like Katha Pollitt for the most part. I don’t think she’s stupid. But this issue brings out the absolute worst in the left, and I think we’d all be better off if we could cut it out.

17. I actually fault both ultra-liberals and ultra-conservatives with being anti-science when it suits their political leanings. I am fervently pro-science and have been so for 40-odd years, and watching both sides pervert science makes my blood boil.

    To religious ultra-conservatives (not all are, despite what leftist pundits think), I say use the brain God gave you and stop listening to theologists who are not scientific experts. There’s room in all religions for science, and the fact that the Earth is estimated to be about 4.5 billion years old shouldn’t undermine your faith. The Bible was never meant to be a science book anyway. Man put it together, and man’s interpretations of God’s word — especially portions that were beyond the realm of man’s understanding thousands of years ago — are going to be imperfect.

    To the ultra-liberal who cherry-picks research to bolster a non-scientific liberal agenda; get the fuck out of the way. You are hindering legitimate findings and research.

    To the rudderless or opportunist scientist who, because he/she would rather do research than teach, jumps on/fans the flame of the hot political bandwagon issue du jour to get the next big grant money score, shame on you. You are putting up a false research facade and diverting precious, limited grant money simply to keep your job and justify your existence for the next five years.

18. I never saw this before!! I really liked this one even more than usual (especially since I wrote a similar but less eloquent screed in education grad school, to the mild annoyance of my multicultural overlords). Learning about the ACLU-provoked freakshow that was the Scopes Monkey Trial really does bring home the way in which truth is constructed. And not all aspects of truth are constructed, but again, liberals are just as confused about that as anyone– since everyone who sees the Bible and The Origin of Species as the same kind of truth-claim are similarly deluded.

19. “since everyone who sees the Bible and The Origin of Species as the same kind of truth-claim are similarly deluded”

    Word. My secret dream is that if people would just stop bothering them, the creationists could maybe get ahold of themselves and stop debasing the gospel by trying to turn it into science.

20. “Word. My secret dream is that if people would just stop bothering them, the creationists could maybe get ahold of themselves and stop debasing the gospel by trying to turn it into science.”

    oh come ON.

21. Come on yourself, you and your irascible counter-normative capitalization.

22. Oh, you think the Gospel SHOULD be science? Or that it is already debased? Because we’ve “proved” that it’s wrong? “Nobody walks on water, this is obviously entirely hogwash” kind of thing?

23. “everyone who sees the Bible and The Origin of Species as the same kind of truth-claim are similarly deluded.”

    If the Bible wasn’t making the same kind of truth-claim as Darwin, then what does it mean that the book has been misrepresented for virtually its entire existence?

    The Bible is a mixture of genres, including the science of its day. The Genesis story is many things, but also a series of reasonable suppositions about the universe according to the evidence and observational tools people had back then. Discounting the evidence of telescopes and carbon dating because it conflicts with the Bible is foolish, and throwing out the Bible as literature because it gets its facts wrong is crude, but there’s also a sense in which you can distort the Bible and fail to appreciate it by not allowing it to be wrong. Darwin is not without art.

24. Deelish wrote: “That’s really myopic. Dismissing the theory of evolution, the fossil record, and the geological age of the earth means dismissing such a vast swathe of scientific opinion as to encourage dismissing the opinion of the scientific community on things like global warming.”

    As to discourage dismissing the opinion of the scientific community on things like Global Warming?

    Ah, crap! You touched on a nerve. This favorite liberal scientific cause of the past 25 years currently being rammed down everyone’s throat is a great example of politics, not science, driving an issue. In fact, from a scientific standpoint, Global Warming is to the left what Creationism is to the right.

    The Q & A below, which I just wrote, off-the-cuff, without any notes or detailed research, sums up my science-eye view of Global Warming. You see, I didn’t need any of that stuff because I’ve been researching and following the topic fairly regularly since the early 1970s, when some climate scientists were still arguing that man’s CO2 emissions were going to trigger Global COOLING.

    In any case, most of my points should be accurate, so here’s what I think about a subject driven by political doctrine more than anything else:

    Q – Do you believe the Earth is currently experiencing climate change?
    A – That’s a silly question – one that shows the asker has little understanding of paleoclimatology and geological time. Earth has been experiencing “climate change” since it first coalesced into a solid mass. It is an endless cycle of change that can be tremendously massive in scale and violent in ways we can scarcely dream of based on our paltry “recorded history” snapshot.

    Q – Do you think the increase of atmospheric CO2 since the start of the Industrial Revolution is caused by man?
    A – Probably.

    Q – Is this CO2 increase causing the planet to warm up?
    A – No one knows. The best guess by scientists is that the planet has warmed up about 1.5 degrees since the mid-1800s. But according to paleoclimatological evidence, usually there is a lag time of hundreds of years between historic CO2 increases and mean global temperature increases. CO2 is a greenhouse gas (though not a very powerful one), and its presence in the atmosphere HAS increased during the past 150 years or so according to Antarctic ice core samples – but that’s all we can say for sure. Keep in mind that, according to the estimated historical temperature charts, the curve shows we are still probably thawing out from the last ice age 18,000 years ago, and any temperature increases Earth has experienced recently may simply be ambient (i.e., natural) – ditto with any increases in sea level. In fact, after rising more than 100 meters since the last ice age, sea levels appear to finally be leveling off. This means that, judging by the way the Earth’s temperature cycles have played out during the past couple of million years, we may actually be due for the NEXT ice age right about now. If that’s the case, and if our CO2 emissions are, in fact, starting to warm the planet, we may very well break or delayed the next inevitable ice age cycle! Wouldn’t that be a hoot, Al Gore!

    Q – Won’t a warmer planet cause the end of civilization as we know it? Won’t rising sea levels from melting ice sheets flood cities worldwide; cause droughts, hurricanes, and other extreme weather; and kill the polar bears?
    A – Very unlikely. In fact, a warmer planet is most certainly better than a cooler one. During an ice age, there is far less arable land and livable space available on the planet, meaning a greater likelihood of food shortages, mass starvation and wars. As I mentioned above, sea levels have relentlessly been rising for 18,000 years, so chances are coastal cities at risk now were at risk anyway. The rise is gradual, and as mankind has been doing for millennia, those threatened adjust (as did the inhabitants of Holland), or move. There’s evidence worldwide of cities or settlements submerged under 20 meters or more of water, meaning living along the coast has always been a tenuous, relatively short-term proposition. As for claims of there will be sudden surges of extreme weather that will destroy civilization, that’s just crazy talk. Evidence shows that extreme weather is the norm on Earth, so predictions of such phenomenon carry about as much weight as a Mayan priest warning the great unwashed that an eclipse is coming. History has shown that civilization will always be at risk, whether it’s from “extreme” weather, massive earthquakes and/or tsunamis, super volcano eruptions, or large-sized asteroid impacts. The Sahara was once green in many places, just as North and South America had decades-long mega-droughts that wiped out entire civilizations. Finally, if the polar bears didn’t die off during the Medieval Warming Period, when many parts Greenland were actually green and arable for hundreds of years, they won’t be dying off if the northern hemisphere warms up once again.

    Q – Global Warming pundits say if we cut back on our CO2 emissions, we can prevent future temperature increases.
    A – That is a silly, arrogant claim. No one can control Earth’s temperatures like some sort of household thermostat. In fact, if every single CO2 emission by man ceased tomorrow, there is no scientist or computer model on the planet that can definitively say what the short term or long term climatological results would be. Keep in mind these same climate scientists and models cannot accurately predict even localized events, such as hurricane frequency in the Atlantic each year, despite the fact they make their predictions only a few months in advance of the season.

25. You should check out Nate Silver’s new book, Russ. He argues that predictions are much more likely to be true when science is well understood. We know that co2 causes warming; we know we’re pumping co2 into the atmosphere; it makes sense to take the threat of global warming seriously.

    What to do about that is another question, of course.

26. Oh…and deelish, I think it’s kind of ridiculous to see the bible as science…even as the science of its day. Science as we understand it certainly was not around as an ideology or a practice when the Bible was being written. There are multiple conflicting creation stories in the Bible anyway; to even come up with a coherent scientific ideology is kind of nuts. Creationism is as much of a modern innovation as evolution; indeed, intelligent design was a necessary initial development for evolution to be developed (Darwin was heavily influenced by intelligent design theorists like William Paley.) It’s really ahistorical and just incoherent to say that the Bible is “wrong” as science.

27. Noah — yeah, well spending trillions worldwide on a problem that we might be the cause of, and one that even if we did cause it, we can’t do anything about, is dumb. The alarmists making the biggest noise see dollar signs, not real solutions. Anyway, as I said, a warmer planet is better than a colder one.

28. The problem is that a transition from colder to warmer could be really brutal, for us and everything else here. Adjustments are possible and will occur, but they’ll be extremely costly in terms of dollar, human lives, and ecological devastation.

    Have you read Cool It by Bjorn Lomborg? Or seen the film? He’s really thoughtful about these issues — basically arguing that there are things that can be done to ameliorate warming, and things that should be done, but that you also have to pay attention to potential costs and political realities and practical possibilities. It’s pretty interesting, and not apocalyptic. It’s definitely worth looking at.

29. “Science as we understand it certainly was not around as an ideology or a practice when the Bible was being written.”

    “Creationism is as much of a modern innovation as evolution…”

    The biblical creation story is based on observable phenomena and ancient ideas about the structure of the cosmos. The idea of God follows from observing the unique creative abilities of human beings, the complexity of the world and living things, and supposing that they were designed by beings like us but superior.

    “There are multiple conflicting creation stories in the Bible anyway; to even come up with a coherent scientific ideology is kind of nuts.”

    The Bible is obviously a composite of conflicting and overlapping sources, but that hasn’t stopped interpreters from harmonizing the two creation stories. Scientists did come up with coherent universal models based on astronomy and the biblical story, for a long time. The Church prosecuted Galileo for saying the earth revolved around the sun because the Bible describes God making the sun stand still for Joshua.

    “It’s really ahistorical and just incoherent to say that the Bible is “wrong” as science.”

    The Bible is a great work of literature, and also consists of a number of claims about history and the natural world that are factually wrong. It’s ahistorical to try to defend them by claiming they were not intended to be literally believed.

30. “The Church prosecuted Galileo for saying the earth revolved around the sun because the Bible describes God making the sun stand still for Joshua.”

    Right…and that happened about 700 years ago. The oldest parts of the Bible were written something like 4 times as long before Galileo as Galileo is from us. Yet you’re using the interpretation of the Bible in the 1500s as evidence of how the Bible was intended to be believed when it was written. Then you’re accusing me of being ahistorical. Okeydoke….

31. —————————
    Noah Berlatsky says:

    Liberal attacks on creationists have, therefore, a unique note of barely restrained glee and purified contempt. Katha Pollitt’s recent essay in The Nation is an apt example of the genre. Riffing off a recent poll showing that 46 percent of Americans are Creationists, she vaults enthusiastically to the conclusion that almost half of her fellow citizens are actively and dangerously mentally ill.

    “… rejecting evolution expresses more than an inability to think critically; it relies on a fundamentally paranoid worldview. Think what the world would have to be like for evolution to be false. Almost every scientist on earth would have to be engaged in a fraud so complex and extensive it involved every field from archaeology, paleontology, geology and genetics to biology, chemistry and physics. And yet this massive concatenation of lies and delusion is so full of obvious holes that a pastor with a Bible-college degree or a homeschooling parent with no degree at all can see right through it.”

    The vindictiveness in that last sentence is especially nice. Obviously, if you don’t have a degree from an elite institution, you must be a fool.
    —————————–

    (??) Where did she assert that? Ah, the classic “accuse somebody of making some outrageous/absurd statement which they in fact did not make, then attack them for making an outrageous/absurd statement” tactic!

    I’m only a high-school grad — no one in the family or school administration ever bothered to explain to my mother and me that there were these things called “scholarships,” for which my excellent grades would have easily qualified me — and I take no offense in that statement.

    In fact, from what I regularly see, having “a degree from an elite institution” only confers expertise in some areas; hardly protects against being a “fool.”

    —————————
    If there was more of a live and let live reaction from the left on issues that don’t matter, the whole thing wouldn’t need to be so politicized, and there wouldn’t be so much mistrust.
    —————————-

    Yes, if liberals were more tolerant, then those right-wingers wouldn’t be “mistrustful.” Whatta nice way of describing their enragedly asserting that liberals are Muslim atheist feminist homosexual-agenda-pushing enviro-Nazis who want to abolish civilization and return us to the Stone Age! And Satanists, too; who want to put Christians in concentration camps, and kill your parents with Obamacare’s “death panels”!

    And, violating the separation of Church and State by allowing religious Creationist hogwash into the schools is an issue that “doesn’t matter”?

    —————————
    The earth is really old; dinosaurs existed long before people did; I’m related to apes, and have the hair growing on my ears to prove it.

    However, I don’t think you have to be a fool to believe the contrary. Really, all you have to be is human.
    —————————

    Uh, “fool” and “human” are not mutually exclusive conditions!

    —————————-
    The truth is though that the main reason behind global warming opposition has to do with economic interests, not with creationism. It’s way more analogous to the long battle against cigarettes than to the creationist debates.
    —————————–

    Hooray, a sensible remark! Indeed it is…

32. a warmer planet is better than a colder one. It’s not that simple.

    I don’t know if you do much with plants or hang out with farmers much (sincere question), but there’s several aspects of global warming which are causing a ton of concern now (as opposed to the future) and trillions of cash loss as well a big hit on health of those performing agriculture.

    I spend a lot of time with farmers, and I grow my own food (including having eaten a meal entirely from food I’ve grown, even in winter), and the warmth is just–very complicated and very destructive. I’d be happy to explain my views on what I see the problems as, but it’s kind of a digress in Noah’s article on something else. The other problem with global warming is that the warmth is happening along with several other huge problems (several of which are not well-known outside small circles–again, no idea if you already know of these). The bee problem, the phosphorus problem, the oil shock, and fracking.

33. Feel free to expound if you’d like, VM. Doesn’t bother me!

    I know about the bee die off, but not about phosphorous or oil shock. The other thing that I’d heard about which struck me as fairly terrifying was the giant reefs of plastic developing in the oceans which will basically never break down… And of course we’re in the middle of a mass extinction event which seems pretty likely to be caused in large part by humans.

    I do think that the focus on global warming can be a problem too insofar as these other ecological messes get drowned out.

34. Rehashing a bit:

    I don’t give care if the Bible “uses the scientific method” or “was written to be believed”. I care if it is used to make predictions that have ramifications for me within the public sphere. Insofar as we can identify a family resemblance of things called “science” we can see it’s often used to describe a set of corrigible stability claims about cause and effect (an example of a common sort of scientific proposition is under x conditions, I consistently correlate y). This corrigibility is key; science (arguably like evolution) is (in ideal conditions) a self-correcting process. Religious narratives (in my limited experience) tend to hold some elements outside the realm of corrigibility. This isn’t a problem except when it prevents us from developing a better explanatory narrative that could conceivably help us to do more desirable things. For evolution, the pragmatic ramifications of this come out when we talk about immunology (and other micro-evolutionary events). I can only speak to my (limited) training in cognitive neuroscience to talk about the predictive abilities of macro-evolution. What it often does for us is allow us to talk about nervous system development on a genetic timescale (i.e. which parts of the brain evolved first and what sort of effect that had on the organization of future structures). So insofar as evolutionary theory presents us with a set of (corrigible) stabilities that allow us to develop tools to conceivably treat things like Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s, I will prefer the practical consequences of evolutionary theory to the practical consequences presented by creationism (which seem, based on the limited research I’ve done) to present me with a much less consistent set of tools. If they come to the same thing in the mind of the legislature, then I could care less what narrative they build around it.

    There is a logical clash in the claim that “we can’t possibly know the way climate change will pan out because of the gargantuan amount of variables” and also the claim “the way that climate change will affect us in the future is predictable (highly unlikely to have a negative effect) and relatively low impact”. Similarly the claim a warm planet is a better planet” is as blandly reductive as the claim “a cold planet is a better planet” where both need careful analysis.

    I also love the Noah construction “I actually like x. X is [tolerable]”.

35. There isn’t really any doubt (at least not in my mind) that creationism is lousy science. But…most laypeople don’t have much of any idea about how most science works. Ask 100 people off the street how gravity works. I bet at least half the people you ask would give you theories as preposterous as creationism (especially since scientists have a significantly weaker understanding of how gravity works than they do of how evolution works.)

    If you want to be super-upset about the general lack of science knowledge, that’s fine, I guess…but the truth is most people don’t especially need specialized scientific knowledge to lead their day to day lives. If they want to think we’e not related to apea and/or that gravity is caused by the earth’s rotation, or whatever, it’s just not especially consequential.

36. My biggest concern over creationism is that it’ll get picked up here overseas by conservatives taking their cues from America. Local libertarians for example have a curious tendency to adopt rather alien Republican positions. It’s not perhaps an immediate concern but there are some portents this might create controversy where previously there was none. Furthermore there’s a trend of Muslim countries embracing intelligent design, I wonder if that’s an ironic case of American influence.

    About global warming, the thing is that it will hit hardest in the areas that can least afford it, Africa, Bangladesh, tropical island nations. The developed world isn’t just better equipped to deal with the problems but will probably not have to deal with as many of them and we’re the ones (probably) causing this.

    Ties in to a lot of different less publicized environmental catastrophes of course.

37. Where are you from Ormur?

38. You misinterpreted my intent: if your belief (about gravity or evolution or what have you) doesn’t have any discernible detrimental effect on the public sphere, then I could not care less. Believe away.

39. Ah…okay! You were agreeing with me. That’s all right then.

40. Noah — I had no problem curbing real air or water pollution caused by unnatural toxins, but CO2 is not a toxin. It is a byproduct of modern civilization that, with current technology can be lessened to some degree, but not eliminated. The whole carbon tax plan is a sham designed to cripple US industry and redistribute American wealth overseas. We can’t turn back the clock unless we eliminate a few billion people and return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

41. “The whole carbon tax plan is a sham designed to cripple US industry and redistribute American wealth overseas.”

    That seems kind of paranoid. I think it’s a big, amorphous, difficult problem that strikes as you say at the heart of how we create energy, and so it’s tough to figure out how to approach it that both addresses what is I think a real problem and doesn’t at the same time end up being worse than the problem we’re trying to address.

42. Iceland, but I’m basing this more on stuff I’ve heard from the continent. This isn’t a terribly informed fear but ideas, good and bad, from US seem to have this tendency to spread.

43. Noah — I’m not paranoid. I’m just stating the facts. A lot of people are either getting rich from; planning on getting rich from; or making a comfortable, secure living on the issue of Global Warming.

    It’s that way from any “important” cause that gets the attention of political leaders controlling the purse strings.

    Biofuels are a good example. Remember the big push about biofuels 10-15 years ago? From the very start I knew biofuels based on corn was no answer to the energy crisis. Corn is food, and a relatively limited resource to boot, so building an industry and infrastructure around it was a dumb idea from the start. Yet, it’s obvious fundamental flaws were ignored, and billions were spent lobbying for, and building up, a dead-end energy source. And lots of people got rich in the process.

    That said, biofuels built around stuff we and livestock don’t eat, and stuff that grows very fast, like algae, may have a long-term place in the energy mix. But corn? No way.

    Regarding CO2 emissions, I don’t mind building less CO2 emissive systems to replace old ones when updating equipment or facilities, but I am adamantly against the carbon tax sham.

    I’m infinitely more concerned about things like the tropical deforestation than I am about shutting down or severely hamstringing responsible manufacturers.

44. We can agree on biofuels like ethanol, anyway. It’s a terrible policy.

45. It would be nice if liberals could acknowledge that monolithic universalizing truth-claims are, while not all bad, inherently conservative (even if, say, Marxist). You have to keep the weirdos from believing in God. You have to keep the jerks from not recycling. There is just a limited amount of control we can exert on the universe.

46. I described the biblical creation story as reflecting the science of its day, that is, a reasonable hypothesis given the evidence available at the time, in response to Stabler that the Bible and Darwin were different kinds of truth-claims. As Owen A says, the important difference is testability; the institution of the Bible doesn’t allow for correction, and that’s why its adherents attack ideas that don’t square with the models of 600 BCE. Claiming it’s a “different kind of truth” is another way to resist correction. That’s not a satisfactory olive branch for creationists because they can spot intellectual dishonesty and condescension as well as the next person. The solution is allowing the Bible to be fallible, which you can do and still have your religious tradition. Berlatsky’s take that the most harmful effect of biblical fundamentalism is inconveniencing some schoolteachers and the real problem is liberal mockery suggests a person avenging his own grievances who doesn’t have anything those fundamentalists are buying.

47. You can call me “Noah”. Everybody else does.

    You’re avoiding the point. Science didn’t exist as an institution or a practice when the Bible was created. Obviously, its claims make no sense as science. This is the case even though much of it is meant to be literally true. For example, Jesus literally rose from the dead. But that’s not a testable scientific hypothesis, nor one which can even be said to be “scientific”. It’s a narrative. Narratives can be true, and they can be false, but they work a lot differently than science. Insisting that I’m somehow misrepresenting the Bible because people thousands of years later decided that it said the sun circled the earth in an idiom that is somewhat closer to our own conception of science is, as I said, completely incoherent. Calling me names or questioning my motives doesn’t change the fact that it’s incoherent.

    I think creationists are deeply, deeply misguided, precisely because they are trying to turn the Bible into science. I think it’s a betrayal of Christianity’s message, and a capitulation to all the worst in science without retaining any of the virtues (like, actually being able to make things that work.) Nonetheless, as Bert says, trying to control people who happen to disagree with me on matters that aren’t actually all that consequential is just a way to make everyone miserable. I don’t spend a ton of effort bewailing and/or ridiculing people who think Shakespeare didn’t write his plays; I don’t see any reason why this issue should be significantly different.

48. Accusing me of intellectual dishonesty and condescension at least gets deelish to allot the creationists some common sense. That’s how things go in conservative worldviews– you take from here, and it has to be balanced by something else over there. But at the end, what matters is who’s counting.

    Evolution as a rhetorical weapon just has different baggage than the discovery of descent from apes and protozoa. It’s no accident that Darwin’s grandson was a eugenicist, but it’s also no reflection on the fundamental truth of Darwin’s theory.

49. “It would be nice if liberals could acknowledge that monolithic universalizing truth-claims are, while not all bad, inherently conservative (even if, say, Marxist).”

    You just made a monolithic universalizing truth-claim.

    I suspect anyone who believes creationists and the other bible junkies out there only act the way they act because of liberal oppression has probably never lived around such people. Having gone through the public school system in Texas, I can assure you conservative Southern Baptists are not a live and let live people. Furthermore, Texas has helped dumb down the school text books across the nation. People like Feyerabend can play with contrarian ideas from a safe distance, since his family wasn’t likely to get fucked over by them. Not so with the people who grow up in such environments and can’t afford private education.

50. Liberals aren’t all that universal or monolithic, I don’t think.

    Again, the argument seems to always comes down to an appeal that the children are under siege, therefore we have to crush the opposition. Self-pity and a more-in-sorrow-than-anger denunciation of idealists who think that maybe possibly kicking people isn’t always the ideal solution to problems are also de rigeur.

    Often (not always, but often) creationists want to get out of the schools, rather than take them over. But somehow that doesn’t reduce the rhetorical anger; often it just increases it. Pollitt specifically signals out home schoolers for scorn.

    Rather than sneering at home schoolers, liberals could acknowledge that schools are often really crappy places for children, and work to allow folks who wanted to teach at home to do so, whatever their reasons. You could also allow people to opt out of biology classes if they wanted to. There are ways to try to defuse the situation rather than using it as a bludgeon.

    The right should do this too. And actually I find the right’s efforts to (for example) excise minority figures from history textbooks more troublesome — though again history is just so poorly taught in general in schools that you wonder whether tinkering with the curriculum can possibly matter. I guess, in general, I think the place we’ve reached, where everyone is basically terrified that their children will learn the wrong thing, is pretty straightforwardly bad for learning.

    It’s not just texas which has dumbed down schoolbooks, by the by. It’s the combination of texas and california. You put together the things the right doesn’t want to talk about and the things the left doesn’t want to talk about, and you don’t have a whole lot left. One of my gigs is creating content for high school exams, and the list of things that are excluded for bias and sensitivity reasons is preposterous, and often doesn’t have anything to do with left or right (no discussion of rats, for example…or dating. Or hurricanes. Or slavery. I don’t even know if that last one is because of worries about offending the left or right. Probably both.)

    I’ve worked developing curriculum materials for 18 years, often in a context where creationism was a very live issue. It’s certainly irritating to deal with, but based on quite a bit of professional experience, it’s just not the major problem you’re claiming it is.

    I mean, kids are getting shot in really alarming numbers on the south side of Chicago. That’s a far more serious threat to students than creationism. So’s ongoing segregation. Yet creationism continues to garner a lot more interest and attention and a lot more apocalyptic rhetoric. It’s almost like the children are an excuse rather than an actual concern.

51. Sure, I can own my sweeping generalisms. Like, some people like to think saying, “No, YOU’RE doing it!” qualifies as a burn. I think that some people really do think that.

    But if people had any actual clue about what education was for or what to do about it, they wouldn’t have to get their panties in a bunch about one particular subcategory of censorship in the massive institutional cataclysm that is schooling as we know it.

52. Giving up truth claims to conservatives is a pretty sure fire method for supporting the type of censorship on the left that’s being deplored here, where everything becomes about rhetoric, power and social construction. It gave us Foucaultians like Catherine McKinnon promoting censorship, or Stanley Fish arguing against free speech. (It was with Fish that a bright guy like Bart Beatty used to defend Fredric fucking Wertham.) And so on. Little wonder that this leads to getting rid of Mark Twain or some of what Noah mentions. This is the result of identity politics and postmodern bullshit. That is a different kind of defense for censoring text books than what would come from most conservatives, of course. They believe they have the truth and wish to make sure others are taught the truth. So, no, a proper response is not to divest oneself of truth claims.

    I agree that getting shot is worse than being taught creationism. But getting shot while learning about creationism is worse than either taken separately.

    My opinion on homeschooling is that if the parents are real bright and knowledgeable, then it probably won’t hurt. I had a friend who was homeschooled by two radical libertarians with PhDs. He was a bit nuts, but pretty bright. Kids homeschooled by some neo-nazis might have problems, though. Depends on the separatists involved, I guess.

    This post reminds me of the 90s.

53. ‘Mac’ I mean.

54. ———————-
    Charles Reece says:

    My opinion on homeschooling is that if the parents are real bright and knowledgeable, then it probably won’t hurt.
    ———————–

    Won’t hurt the kid, necessarily. But what about the woman? Even in “liberal, enlightened” households, once Baby comes along, child-rearing has been found to mostly end up divided along “traditional” lines, with the new Mom getting stuck with most of the shitwork.

    ————————
    According to the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, women spent an average of 27 hours a week on housework in 2002, while men spent 16 hours (which at least represents an improvement over the 16 seconds or so a lot of them spent a generation ago). Even today, married men perform little more than a third of household labor, whether or not their wives are in the paid labor force. And women spend more than twice as much time as men do on child care.

    Ask your typical American dad what size shoes his children wear, and you will likely draw a blank stare. He has no idea. Guess who makes sure the kids’ toes aren’t poking through their sneakers?

    My own husband claims that any imbalance in our household contributions derives solely from the fact that he has to go to an office while I work at home, a luxury that permits me to take care of many domestic tasks during my workday. This disparity in our schedules may explain why I make dinner every night—because I’m home to stir the pot on the stove—but it does not explain why our weekends begin with him enjoying a third cup of coffee over the morning newspapers while I rush around making breakfast, cleaning up the house, and organizing the children’s day. I’m the one everyone asks when they want to know when the next orthodontist appointment is, what the cross-country meet schedule is, or where the birthday party is being held (yes, I remembered to buy a present; yes, it’s wrapped and ready to go).

    And yet everyone acts as if Jeremy deserves some kind of medal just for making a run to the supermarket…

    …I live in Manhattan, which is full of smart, educated, successful women who are juggling the responsibilities of family and career with extraordinary competence. And yet most of them will readily admit that their husbands don’t do half of anything remotely domestic.

    Go to any school event for parents and you will find it crowded with working women who have taken time out of their busy professional schedules to meet with teachers or sit in on classes or attend the fourth-grade play. My children’s school sponsors a regular forum where parents gather to discuss such pressing issues as curfews, homework, and the social mores of hormone-addled teenagers. At every single one, the room is full of women — doctors, lawyers, and CEOs, as well as stay-at-home moms. The only man who ever attends is a widower who admits his son never tells him anything, so he comes to the discussion groups in hopes of learning what his kid is up to from his classmates’ moms.

    Where are the other fathers? In their offices, no doubt…
    —————————-
    http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/24206284/ns/today-relationships/t/chores-two-why-men-dont-pitch/

    In homeschooling, therefore, it’ll be the Mom — now required to stay at home, because of the huge mass of additional labor now piled on her — who ends up further buried under family obligations; further putting her life, career, personal interests and passions on hold.

    For anyone remotely “feminist” to advocate homeschooling because the schools “suck,” and “The school system is terrible” is, therefore,to put it mildly, counterintuitive.

    Why not say that because the average American diet “sucks,” that parents should therefore grow their own food and raise livestock, cook everything from scratch? Guess who, again, will bear the brunt of that burden?

    Speaking of food, though, isn’t feeding kids a vastly simpler task than educating them? Yet, childhood obesity, diabetes, and crappy diets are rampant.

    So we’re supposed to entrust people who can’t even feed their precious offshoots properly (to give credit where due, at least they don’t let them starve) with the vastly more demanding task of educating them?

    ——————————–
    Noah Berlatsky says:

    …Science education sucks for the same reason all education in the us sucks where it sucks, usually having to do with minimal resource allocation, an obsession with evaluation, and a general contempt for children and learning.
    ———————————-

    Excellent reasons! But instead of saying the system is significantly damaged, let’s fix it, isn’t abandoning it outright and dumping the burden disproportionately on the already overworked mothers of America an extreme reaction?

    ————————————-
    And I don’t think that you need everyone to be indoctrinated in the same way in order to hold our society together.
    ————————————-

    Yes, you can have half the country thinking slavery is fine and dandy, the other half that it isn’t. What’s the problem? What could go wrong?

    Take a look at the Middle East, where even different varieties of Muslims can’t work together, when they’re not persecuting and killing each other. Where a British plan to provide electricity to parts of Iraq — for free — was foiled by tribals, only concerned about benefiting their little group and not giving a shit about an abstraction named “Iraq,” who repeatedly tore down the wiring to sell the copper.

    And I’ll never forget seeing a black woman in the audience of a TV show introducing herself before making a comment: “I’se be a English teacher!” (I swear I’m not making this up.)

    As unfair as it might be, a society needs to have a minimal universal set of skills, knowledge, language skills and attitudes (” ‘Honor killing’ is a no-no in this country, sorry”) in order to cohere and work together.

    We are seeing the horrendous results of this divisiveness and demonizing of the opposition, mostly initiated by the Right, everywhere in this society. Nowhere with what are more increasingly obvious, disastrous results than in the Right’s opposition to facing the reality of man-made global warming, a disinformation campaign heavily financed by the energy industries, the wealthiest and most powerful in the world.

    Where this refusal to find a “reality-based” common ground leads to, in my favorite Tim Kreider cartoon, “The Meteor Issue”: http://www.thepaincomics.com/weekly021023.htm .

    As Kreider wrote about that: “The cartoon has more to do with the inefficient folly of human beings, which is harmless and amusing as long as there isn’t some actual crisis at hand. Then, what writer Kim Stanley Robinson calls ‘an imaginary relationship to a real situation’ (e.g. the Drug War, the War on Terror, or my understanding of finances or home repair) becomes deadly.”

    Even among Christians, get a load of the warring perspectives, from Kreider again: http://www.thepaincomics.com/Jesus%20vs.%20Jeezus.jpg

    Mo’ Kreider, with The Fundie reaction to “string theory”: r: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/files/2008/07/lhc_paincomics.jpg

55. “I agree that getting shot is worse than being taught creationism. But getting shot while learning about creationism is worse than either taken separately.”

    I presume this is a joke. Learning creationism doesn’t matter one way or the other when you’re shot.

    I guess it’s nice to be able to believe that you’re own opinions are so true that forcing them on everybody else is categorically different than when everybody else does it. Good illustration of the way self-righteousness and imperialism interlock, there.

    Mike, there’s nothing feminist about telling women they’re betraying themselves by caring for their children. I know some people think that that’s a feminist stand, but they’re wrong.

56. Let’s see, over at the Wiki entry for the informal fallacy known as ignoratio elenchi, or irrelevant conclusion, it says a related concept (an example of the fallacy, I believe) is the red herring, of which your kids getting shot in Chicago is a fine example, segregation being another. However, Wiki warns not to get the red herring confused with the straw man, for which you also provide an example to delineate the difference, namely “[creationism]’s just not the major problem you’re claiming it is.” Creationism is but one symptom of a right-wing fundamentalist agenda that’s powered by a lot of money. Of course, kids have something else to worry about in extremely impoverished environments, but that in no way makes creationism a good thing to introduce into science programs, as it would make the educational possibilities of poor Chicago kids even worse.

    Yeah, I’m self-righteous and imperialistic …

57. Mike,

    These are families choosing to teach their kids at home, so I’m guessing the moms are willing participants. My friend’s mom willingly quit work at a college to devote more time to teaching her sons. I don’t think that’s oppressive, at least. To my knowledge, it was her choice.

    The real problem with homeschooling is the majority of the families have real nutjob beliefs, fearing contamination from the lefties, darkies, aliens and/or pagans. That is hardly a healthy environment to raise children in, but what can you do, other than enforce good parenting standards on people?

    Which does bring up the issue of how we all have ideas forced upon us. It’s impossible to live without someone’s truth being implemented, whether everyone agrees or not. Look at gay marriage, which would seem to be a live and let live situation, but many extreme Christians feel their rights and traditions are being violated by simply letting others do as they wish. At some point, you have to say to stupid people, the way you want to live your life is stupid, which is fine for you, but we’re not going to run a civilized society in such a stupid manner. Go on and be stupid over there, but leave the commonweal out of it.

58. It’s sticking on my craw so I’m gonna’ respond to the “global warming is to the left as creationism is to the right” comment, and the notion that global warming is some sort of conspiracy to drive wealth away from the the US.
    As to the analogy, it’s flawed because as Maheras himself points out there really isn’t any disagreement that the climate is changing. And there’s a good deal of scientific support for the theory that human created CO2 emissions are a major part of the problem. I realize there are numbers and arguments to the contrary but unlike the notion that the world was created in 7 days, and even if you want to portray human induced climate change as a controversy, it’s hardly on a par w/creationism.
    As to the notion of money, the example cited (ethanol) doesn’t support the assertion. Big Agra is behind that one, and they’ve been pushing ethanol for a long time. In addition to global warming they also used foreign oil.
    What’s more, even if people are working on ways to monetize global warming and distribute the capital overseas, isn’t this pretty much standard operating procedure for multinational corporations? They do the same thing with oil and natural gas, food (see big Agra) etc. Frankly, it’s hard for me to believe that were there lots of money to be made off fighting climate change there’d be far more people doing it.
    And finally, the earth’s climate is a complex system. You can’t make blanket statements like a warmer climate is better than a cooler one with any confidence.

59. PS:
    I shouldn’t have used the word “conspiracy” in the “conspiracy to drive wealth away” sentence (I also shouldn’t have split the infinitive), as Maheras didn’t assert that there was one. Sorry about that.

60. Splitting infinitives is fine! Even Fowler says so.

    Charles, I think I’m just going to let it rest at this point.

61. “many extreme Christians feel their rights and traditions are being violated by simply letting others do as they wish. ”

    Not opposed to letting it rest, but that (and the Frederic Wertham remark) does illustrate the degree to which we really really feel it’s important to make their kids believe what our kids believe, which is that no kids should be taught beliefs, unless their our beliefs, because ALL kids are our kids dammit!

62. “they’re” our beliefs. Sorry, didn’t meant to come across as homeschooled.

63. Hauerwas has a great line in his memoir about how God really doesn’t necessarily think you should have children, in part because He knows that children can always be used as an excuse for violence.

    I kind of like Frederic Wertham. His take on Wonder Woman is a lot more insightful than that of most of those who have written about her.

64. Well, yeah, Wertham was too smart to not know he was a demagogue.

    And I agree with you on your last post, Bert. But there’s every kid should be taught to be open-minded or nonracist or whatever versus other types of fundamental beliefs.

65. I’m sure Wertham felt he was telling people what they should think for their own greater good. That’s how people generally work.

66. I was a bit too tongue-in-cheek in my last post to know how I was being read, but I think I was understood. But we may have gotten to a core issue. Teaching kids to be nonracist, anti-war, open-minded- you actually CAN use the Bible to encourage those principles, whereas the fundamental structure of the material universe does not necessarily, of itself, relate anything comprehensible, let alone meaningful, to anyone lacking a graduate degree in physics (or biology as the case may be).

67. The thing about Wertham was that here was a post-Marxist, Frankfurt-tinged leftist moving in Reader’s Digest circles to promote censorship, while not really emphasizing where he was coming from to his main supporters. I think he was a fundamentally dishonest person. Maybe he thought it was for the greater good, but that makes him a fool and immoral, rather than just immoral.

    You can use the Bible to promote just about any message, I suppose, which makes it about as meaningless in its default position as cold, unforgiving matter. I guess that’s why I’m more sympathetic to literalist readings and those who don’t believe a religious text means whatever anyone wants it to.

68. ———————-
    Charles Reece says:

    You can use the Bible to promote just about any message, I suppose…
    ———————–

    Yes; prior to the Civil War, churches in North and South used the Bible to promote abolitionism and slavery.

    http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/04/12/how-the-bible-was-used-to-justify-slavery-abolitionism/

    http://pacivilwar150.com/Understand/RoleofReligion

69. Here’s a very well-thought and accessible essay on the limits and arrogance of many scientists:

    http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-folly-of-scientism

70. Thanks for the link!

    Sure, scientists are flawed human beings with egos, agendas, and such. Yet — utterly unlike religion — the system is “self-correcting,” even if some drag their heels or get overly attached to a pet theory. (In contrast, has Christianity gotten rid of those “Virgin Birth” or “Jesus Rose from the Dead” bits?) The huge bio of Einstein I’m reading contains countless examples of precedent-smashing discoveries gaining widespread credence, some immediately accepting proof their most firmly held beliefs had just been proved to be nonsense.

    And if some are arrogant, like surgeons, it’s because they can actually do amazing things, unlike all the religious B.S. peddlers who claim they can save your soul if you renounce homosexuality, that Man was made to rule Woman, and other oceans of utterly unsubstantiated crap.

    From that article:

    ————————-
    Of all the fads and foibles in the long history of human credulity, scientism in all its varied guises — from fanciful cosmology to evolutionary epistemology and ethics — seems among the more dangerous, both because it pretends to be something very different from what it really is and because it has been accorded widespread and uncritical adherence. Continued insistence on the universal competence of science will serve only to undermine the credibility of science as a whole.
    —————————

    What planet is this guy living in? Maybe South Carolina– where he teaches — is a haven of ultra-rationality, but where I live, churches sprout up like mushrooms, astrology is massively popular, almost half the country thinks the world is 10,000 years old; we can’t have germs safely killed by irradiation — as is widely used in Europe — because the masses think it’ll make their burgers glow in the dark and give them cancer; any idiotic pseudospiritual bilge, or quack theory about vaccinations causing autism is accepted with open-mouthed credulity.

    And, he’s concerned that people will lose their massive, unquestioning faith in science because they’re be so intelligently critical that they’ll notice it can’t figure, say, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

    As for the author’s being “Carolina Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences,” well, so what? I’m interested in the consensus view of scientists on the subject. The tobacco companies were able to dig up and hire a doctor who said there was no proof smoking damaged your health; there are a couple of scientists who say there’s no proof global warming is man-made; one chap famous in his time became infamous for arguing that HIV does not cause AIDS; and so forth.

    Thought I’d get some more info about Austin L. Hughes; this is what I found:

    ——————-
    New Discoveries & Comments About Creationism
    Promoting Curiosity and Knowledge of True Science which Verifies God’s Word

    Evolutionary Biologist Drops Bombshell On Positive Selection
    Posted on September 6, 2008 by Michael

    Austin L. Hughes, an evolutionary biologist at the University of South Carolina writes to the scientific community a bombshell about the evidence gathered for positive section. And it wasn’t pretty for evolutionists…
    ———————
    http://thebibleistheotherside.wordpress.com/2008/09/06/evolutionary-biologist-drops-bombshell-on-positive-selection/

    A pro-“Intelligent Design” site ( http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/11/no_positive_selection_no_darwi052941.html ) — which features bits like “Why Intelligent Design Is Science: A Reading List” approvingly talks of Hughes’ work…

    “The American Catholic – Politics and Culture from a Catholic Perspective” has a video, “Austin L. Hughes — Science Si! Scientism No!” along with looks at “Messianic Prophecies: Malachi 3:1-5.” ( http://the-american-catholic.com/tag/austin-l-hughes/ )

    That these professional hogwash peddlers — who shriekingly point to the mote in science’s eye while ignoring the aircraft-carrier-sized stack of lumber in their own — eagerly embrace Hughes, oughtta tell you something.

    And no, I don’t unquestioningly worship science, any more than critics of the Vietnam War “hated America.” Again, I just prefer a more “reality-based” view of the world; which massively irritates ideologues on left and right.

71. Here’s a good point to mention that everyone (me included) loves to think that we are “massively irritating ideologues on left and right.” But you can be Mencken and write off everyone in the South as relics of a prehistory they deliberately choose not to believe in, in the name of an incomprehensible apparatus of trans-human metacognition that has replaced God, or you can be Bryan, and try to work with cultural tradition that inform everyday lives. Cause otherwise, why not eat the Irish and nuke the Japanese?

72. It’s interesting that the fact that there’s conflict within Christianity is seen as somehow disqualifying. Also interesting that Charles moves to Biblical literalism — a Protestant appeal not unrelated to enlightenment efforts to find ways to unquestionably resolve disputes.

    Despite those efforts, though, liberal secular rationality isn’t actually any less conflicted than Christianity on this issue. It’s not science to say, “creationists should be treated in this particular manner, x,” right?

73. —————————
    Bert Stabler says:

    Here’s a good point to mention that everyone (me included) loves to think that we are “massively irritating ideologues on left and right.”
    —————————-

    First, I wasn’t referring to everyone here; second, check out my sentence construction:

    “I just prefer a more ‘reality-based’ view of the world; which massively irritates ideologues on left and right.”

    In other words, the ideologues are themselves irritated by having mere facts shoved into their faces.

    ——————————
    But you can be Mencken and write off everyone in the South as relics of a prehistory they deliberately choose not to believe in…
    ——————————-

    I can enjoy Mencken’s take-no-prisoners approach while not fully sharing it.

    ——————————-
    in the name of an incomprehensible apparatus of trans-human metacognition that has replaced God…
    ——————————

    Oh, simple science is “an incomprehensible apparatus of trans-human metacognition”? Not to me and hundreds of millions of others.

    And this “replacing God” business is only claimed by a tiny minority of scientists. Indeed, throughout the early history of science, it was the Church perpetually frothing about how science was “replacing God” by arguing that the Earth was not the center of the Universe, that the primacy of their religious texts were being challenged, and so forth.

    Personally, like hundreds of millions of others, I see no conflict between science and spirituality (I firmly believe in the existence of God); only when religion, in seeking to retain claims by its primitive founders about the construction of the universe and biological structures, shoots itself in the foot does it richly deserve derision.

    Moreover…

    ——————————-
    What do scientists think about religion?

    Members of the scientific community are often seen as doubting Thomases, but the reality is more complex. Even Charles Darwin may have made room for God.

    Today, a century and a half after Charles Darwin published “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection,” the overwhelming majority of scientists in the United States accept Darwinian evolution as the basis for understanding how life on Earth developed. But although evolutionary theory is often portrayed as antithetical to religion, it has not destroyed the religious faith of the scientific community.

    According to a survey of members of the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science, conducted by the Pew Research Center in May and June this year, a majority of scientists (51%) say they believe in God or a higher power, while 41% say they do not.

    Furthermore, scientists today are no less likely to believe in God than they were almost 100 years ago, when the scientific community was first polled on this issue. In 1914, 11 years before the Scopes “monkey” trial and four decades before the discovery of the structure of DNA, psychologist James Leuba asked 1,000 U.S. scientists about their views on God. He found the scientific community evenly divided, with 42% saying that they believed in a personal God and the same number saying they did not. Scientists have unearthed many important fossils since then, but they are, if anything, more likely to believe in God today.

    The scientific community is, however, much less religious than the general public…

    But the Pew poll found that levels of religious faith among scientists vary quite a bit depending on their specialty and age. Chemists, for instance, are more likely to believe in God (41%) than those who work in biology and medicine (32%). And younger scientists (ages 18 to 34) are more likely than older ones to believe in God or a higher power.

    If a substantial portion of the scientific community is made up of believers, why do so many people think evolution and religion are incompatible? It may be because some of our most famous and prolific scientists, such as American evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould and British physicist Stephen Hawking, were or are atheists and agnostics. But what about Francis Collins, the former head of the Human Genome Project, who was recently appointed as director of the National Institutes of Health by President Obama? Collins is an evangelical Christian who speaks passionately about his faith — and also thinks evolution is an established scientific fact.
    —————————–
    http://articles.latimes.com/2009/nov/24/opinion/la-oe-masci24-2009nov24

    ——————————
    Bert Stabler says:

    …or you can be [William Jennings] Bryan, and try to work with cultural tradition that inform everyday lives.
    ——————————–

    Well, “cultural traditions that inform everyday lives” can be hogwash or worse, can they not? The inferior status of women and lower castes, slavery?

    I’d been meaning to bring up William Jennings Bryan and his participation in the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial. One could not ask for better proof of a point where Noah and I heartily agree: that it’s a mistake for religion to try and prove its relevance and validity by taking on science in its own turf.

    Might as well have scientists decide, since sports are vastly more popular than science, to create their own football team, and take on those of the NFL. The results would not be pretty…

    I’d been quite unsympathetic to Bryan’s role in that trial, until I learned that his concern was not solely with Darwinism per se, but with what ideologues from the Right were extending it to: Social Darwinism. Makes sense, with his admirable concern for the “little guy” and fights for equality, that he would see a “philosophy” — claiming to be following scientific lines of thought — that maintained the poor, oppressed and ignorant were that way because they were naturally inferior, rather than victims of circumstance, and thus deserved to remain in that situation. (For a more recent version, see the loathsome, bestselling “The Bell Curve.”)

    As told at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Jennings_Bryan ,

    ——————————–
    …He was…an opponent of Darwinism on religious and humanitarian grounds.

    Bryan opposed the theory of evolution for two reasons. First, he believed that what he considered a materialistic account of the descent of man through evolution undermined the Bible. Second, he saw Social Darwinism as a great evil force in the world promoting hatred and conflicts, especially the World War.

    In his famous Chautauqua lecture, “The Prince of Peace,” Bryan warned the theory of evolution could undermine the foundations of morality. However, he concluded, “While I do not accept the Darwinian theory I shall not quarrel with you about it.”

    One book Bryan read at this time convinced him that social Darwinism (emphasizing the struggle of the races) had undermined morality in Germany. Bryan was heavily influenced by Vernon Kellogg’s 1917 book, Headquarters Nights: A Record of Conversations and Experiences at the Headquarters of the German Army in Belgium and France, which asserted (on the basis of a conversation with a reserve officer named Professor von Flussen) that German intellectuals were social Darwinists totally committed to might-makes-right.

    Bryan also read The Science of Power (1918) by British social theorist Benjamin Kidd, which credited the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche with German nationalism, materialism, and militarism, which in turn was the outworking of the social Darwinian hypothesis.

    …According to author Ronald L. Numbers, Bryan was not nearly as much of a fundamentalist as many modern-day creationists, and is more accurately described as a “day-age creationist”: “William Jennings Bryan, the much misunderstood leader of the post–World War I antievolution crusade, not only read the Mosaic “days” as geological “ages” but allowed for the possibility of organic evolution—so long as it did not impinge on the supernatural origin of Adam and Eve.”
    ———————————

    Ah, if only Bryan had specifically and solely targeted Social Darwinism! Instead he brought the Bible into science’s turf…

    ———————————-
    An area of questioning involved the book of Genesis, including questions such as if Eve was actually created from Adam’s rib, where did Cain get his wife, and how many people lived in Ancient Egypt. Darrow used these examples to suggest that the stories of the Bible could not be scientific and should not be used in teaching science with Darrow telling Bryan, “You insult every man of science and learning in the world because he does not believe in your fool religion.”

    …Darrow asked where Cain got his wife; Bryan answered that he would “leave the agnostics to hunt for her” (pp. 302–03). When Darrow addressed the issue of the temptation of Eve by the serpent, Bryan insisted that the Bible be quoted verbatim rather than allowing Darrow to paraphrase it in his own terms.
    ———————————–

    ———————————-
    In the eyes of many of his followers, Bryan’s concession in his testimony that the “days” of Genesis might be “periods” made obvious for the first time that his theory of Biblical interpretation was not one of strict literalism. Bryan’s opposition to evolution clearly had another source. In the words of his biographer Lawrence Levine, “His literal acceptance of the Bible did not lead to his rejection of evolution so much his rejection of evolution led to his willingness to accept literally certain portion of the Bible.” Nearly a century after Dayton, one prominent evangelist faulted Bryan for his non-literal reading of Genesis. Jerry Falwell said Bryan “lost the respect of fundamentalists when he subscribed to the idea of periods of time for creation rather than twenty-four-hour days.”

    …Some biographers saw Bryan’s last stand as a contradiction of the progressive goals he fought for during most of his life. Others recognized his opposition to evolution as consistent with the themes that had long marked his political career. For the Great Commoner, who never really understood the theory of evolution but fully understood the theory’s misuse—and who saw things as black and white, not gray—the decision to fight evolution was an easy one. Not only did evolution threaten to leave students feeling lost in an uncaring universe, it also provided ammunition for those who, calling it “survival of the fittest,” would sterilize the abnormal or forget the weak. Given a choice, Bryan said, “I would rather begin with God and reason down than begin with a piece of dirt and reason up.”
    ————————————–
    http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scopes/bryanw.htm

    ————————————–
    Noah Berlatsky says:

    It’s interesting that the fact that there’s conflict within Christianity is seen as somehow disqualifying.
    —————————————

    I don’t think it is, any more than disagreements between scientists argue for chucking the whole “science” business.

74. Not sure what the rest of Noah’s post was pertaining to, but on literalism: if one believes that the bible contains the truth, which one is to live by, then one subscribes to some form of literalism. The conservative literalists are a lot more coherent on this point than, say, atheists who spend their time making up readings of the bible or a few Christians enamored with poststructuralism. I prefer a world with the latter 2 groups, of course, but think the former make more sense.

75. As for Mencken and Southerners: one thing we have going for us is that we’re not Yankees.

76. Mike wrote: “If a substantial portion of the scientific community is made up of believers, why do so many people think evolution and religion are incompatible?”

    Exactly!

    Gol-durned Philistines…

77. Yeah, William Jennings Bryan is pretty great. Mike had time to basically make my points for me (my fault fir being sloppy and rushed all the time– I am an actual school teacher, as well as a scurrilous poststructuralist Christian), while disagreeing with me, which suits me fine.

Comments are closed.