The Protocols of the Elders of Bryan--The Discovery Institute Inherits the Wind
After the 1964 election, a book appeared damning Conservatism’s debut as a “brute assault on the entire intellectual world” and charging, “Republicans as a party have been alienating intellectuals deliberately, as a matter of taste and strategy.” This withering critique of the politics of Senator Goldwater and his spokesman Ronald Reagan came not from Bill Moyers but a recently graduated pair of Republican Harvard roommates, stalwarts of The Ripon Society, who, like some of the liberal democrats who applauded their book, have been flung though a sort of political time warp to land on the anti-intellectual end of the neoconservative spectrum.
Bruce Chapman is now The Discovery Institute's President, and George Gilder its preeminent Senior Fellow, together leading the Seattle group in a metaphysical assault on everything that smacks of "materialism." Though founded with a Reaganite focus on cutting-edge technology policy and the electronic revolution, Discovery has morphed away from futurism and libertarian economics. What began as a spinoff of Herman Kahn’s Hudson Institute became the bane of scientific modernity, waging culture war on everything from Darwin to Einstein to stem-cell biotech and quantum indeterminacy, now even dark matter.
After becoming director of the Census Bureau in 1981, Chapman became Edwin Meese’s protégé, and soon his zeal in defending “traditional morality” led The New York Times to declare “a converging of the intellectual Left with the religious Right ... under the Reagan banner.” He also admired conservative legal guru Phillip Johnson, whose Darwin On Trial aspired to deconstruct evolution by applying legal standards of evidence to biology, the better to subordinate science to religion and protect Social Conservative norms from “moral relativism.” The fact that O.J. Simpson has been “proven” innocent in a court of law reminds us why legal scholars shouldn’t leave their jurisdiction. William Jennings Bryan did win the Scopes Trial after all.
How two Rockefeller Republicans evolved, or devolved, into recapitulating Bryan’s Populist denunciation of Darwin is a puzzlement. Democrat Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science, asserts the Discovery Institute’s original "vibe was forward-looking, futuristic, and intellectually contrarian." From contemplating a Republican alternative to The Whole Earth Catalog to thinking the unthinkable slightly to the right of Cardinal Ratzinger is quite an intellectual odyssey.
Along the way, writes Mooney, Chapman and Gilder have "become everything they once criticized; their transformation highlights how ... the anti-intellectual disposition they so aptly diagnosed in 1966 still persists among modern conservatives, helping to fuel a full-fledged crisis today over the politicization of science and expertise." This has crystallized in their promotion of ' Intelligent Design,' the body of pseudo-science Wired calls “Creationism 2.0.”
Though this odd construct exerts a powerful appeal for those educated in traditions of religious orthodoxy and Biblical literalism, whether Old Testament or New, it tends to repel minds trained to question ideological authority. It appeals to unreconstructed pietism in its aspiration to return metaphysics to precedence over science and win back a century’s loss of cultural turf to the Left, an erosion it blames on the rise of materialism. It focuses on the perverse Marxist use of the word, while playing down what it meant to Hume and Hegel. This is a strategic choice, for a defunct Evil Empire is easier to wrestle with than The Enlightenment as the Founders saw it.
This ambitious project is hardly Gilder and Chapman’s alone. They long ago realized that Culture War à la outrance takes more than the editorial enthusiasm of small magazines. Though Gilder is a frequent Forbes contributor, and former part-owner of The American Spectator, The Discovery Institute has forged alliances with like-minded souls at Heritage, AEI, The Bradley Foundation, and elsewhere in creating an ecumenical team that, though it produces none of its own, seeks to publicly discredit a broad spectrum of scientific research it finds metaphysically unattractive—and even to subject it to legislative and regulatory constraint.
A project that began with rearing academic objections to evolution in Commentary, First Things, and National Review has grown down-market into raising a village of religiously devout and politically reliable scientific idiots. Their enterprise has transformed Talk Radio and the No Spin Zone into engines of faith-based mis-and-disinformation that leave scientists of both parties gobsmacked by the sheer infantilism of it all. Pre-eminent among the tour guides to this alternative scientific universe is another Discovery Institute Senior Fellow, a writer of considerable gifts and Anglo-Catholic education named Tom Bethell. The original tagline to Bethell’s Politically Incorrect Guide to Science leaves no doubt as to his goal:
"Liberals have hijacked science for long enough. Now it's our turn."
Just as Discovery has redacted its statement of a “wedge strategy” for the religious re-enchantment of world of science and public policy, Bethell’s astute publisher has wisely removed this astounding blurb from the paperback edition. Little wonder John Derbyshire took Bethell’s book to task on National Review Online. Here Derbyshire focused on its misrepresentation of evolutionary biology, being that Bethell is the literary lion of The Discovery Institute, but what of the rest of his science?
On global warming, Bethell invokes the standard canon of uncertainties, but not how science has acted to reduce them. Bethell's preference for his own cohort's climate polemics over the peer reviewed science literature is evident in the book's deadpan claim that satellites show no warming trend-- the overthrow of that unsound view by authentically skeptical scientists was front page news months before his book went to press. What gives?
In 2004, Reason science correspondent Ron Bailey asked Irving Kristol whether or not he believed in God, and Kristol famously responded, “I don't believe in God, I have faith in God.” Bailey continues,
Well, faith, as it says in Hebrews 11:1, 'is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.' But at the [2005] AEI lecture, journalist Ben Wattenberg asked him the same thing. Kristol responded that 'that is a stupid question,' and crisply restated his belief that religion is essential for maintaining social discipline. A much younger (and perhaps less circumspect) Kristol asserted in a 1949 essay that in order to prevent the social disarray that would occur if ordinary people lost their religious faith, 'it would indeed become the duty of the wise publicly to defend and support religion.'"
Bethel seems driven by the same imperative, for The Politically Incorrect Guide is as rich in the urban myths of faith-based policy as it is scientifically impoverished. Bethell deceives himself and his readers on everything from relativity to AIDS to molecular biology, deploying tabloid science and patently political op-eds in preference to peer-reviewed papers available from the internet or any university library. Disrespect for science is one thing, disdain from scholarship quite another. More aberrant than' incorrect' the Guide is less popularization than a catalog derangé of Bad Science assembled as an alternative catechism for Dittoheads who last cracked a science text in junior high.
Bethell is one of many comically anxious to lay the ideological horrors of the 20th century at science’s door, but the historical reality is anything but funny. When he wasn’t setting the stage for famine, Stalin’s pal Commissar Lysenko passed the time damning the Bourgeois Biology of the Darwinian Class Enemies, while Hitler’s guru Johannes Stark earned the right to oversee the implosion of Annalen der Physik by staging a monster rally denouncing the Decadent Relativism of the Einsteinists.
Tom Bethell writes,
"A criticism of intelligent design is that the claim, ‘God can do anything, therefore this critter was designed by God’ gets us nowhere. I agree that it doesn't. But a very similar objection can be raised against Darwinism." … [Darwinism's] "partisans are at liberty to say of any organism whatever that it arose by mutation and natural selection—without having to produce any supporting evidence. In the end, it amounts to nothing more than the belief that supernaturalism must be avoided at all cost."
Having winded his hobby horse , he hops back into the saddle to deliver the inevitable conclusion, “Darwinism is simply a deduction from a philosophy—the philosophy of materialism..." .
Yet if science has anything to teach about the material world, it is that laws at once impose limits on simple phenomena and give rise to complex ones. All critters great and small are, being made of matter, naturally subject to the laws of physics. Saying otherwise injects the supernatural into the discussion, which is exactly what Bethell did in the NRO exchange in which he accused John Derbyshire of being reluctant to do so. Gilder has likewise averred “the Darwinist materialist paradigm … is about to face the same revolution that Newtonian physics faced 100 years ago.”
This is 19th-century Vitalism warmed over. From the 21st-century perspective of the multi-billion-dollar enterprise of molecular biotechnology, Bethell and Gilder are less in denial than up the river without a paddle. Science is not a high-school debating tournament. The sophomoric invocation of statistical arguments about “insurmountable complexity” falls flat in the face of algorithmic sophistication, let alone the insights of quantum computation. Synthetic biology blithely ignores ID’s arguments as it goes about the business of building living organisms from scratch.
Its practitioners can only scratch their heads at a stem-cell debate as doomed to historical obscurity as wars fought over guano to assure the Victorian guncotton supply. But, in a display of metaphysical solipsism bordering on the miraculous, Bethel simply insists things he finds inconceivable simply cannot be. Robots were already roving Mars when he wrote in 2005:
“When it sinks in that genetic and stem-cell engineering is beyond our ken, the anticipated downloading of our minds will also be postponed -- indefinitely. (By the way, don't they know we haven't even been able to get robots to move around the room without bumping into the furniture yet?)”
Really? Two years later, a cybertruck demonstrated downloaded horse sense enough to successfully negotiate the Mojave Desert, and the Ventner Institute uploaded a completely synthetic genome into an eviscerated bacterial corpse, in effect kick-starting Life Itself. I hold no brief for machine consciousness, but in the light of what science gets up to nowadays, objections to the trend in artificial intelligence that fall much outside the realm of Moore’s Law seem increasingly, for lack of a better word, metaphysical. If the Politically Incorrect Guide’s author has never succeeded in adding a page to the scientific literature he so epically misconstrues, it may be because he evidently reads so little of it.
Some years ago, physicist John Baez devised The Crackpot Index—a simple method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to science.” Bethell’s ID manifesto generates an exceptionally high score, as does his earlier polemic dismissal of Einstein’s work.
Baez assembled 17 criteria to aid science editors in separating claims of radical advances from the crackpot screeds major journals receive almost monthly, assigning points to the gambits cranks reflexively indulge. Since we all make mistakes, statements" widely agreed to be untrue" get just 1 demerit, but grandiosely “claiming that when your theory is finally appreciated, present-day science will be seen for the sham it truly is” will earn 40. Under the Baez system , a science journal editor is justified in returning without comment any screed that racksup more than 100 points , both to spare the author’s feelings, and the time of the experts who shoulder the burden of peer review.
If you think Baez’s idea facetious, you have never opened a Young Earth creationist journal, or seen the vanity press offerings that flow over the book review transom of flagship science journals like Nature. Forget Darwin and Einstein—not even Newton’s Law of Gravity is safe these days.
So be forewarned, here come some excerpts from Tom’s deadpan reply to Derbyshire in NRO, punctuated with Baez’s criteria for Crackpotdom as they apply. Commencing:
“I wonder why Mr. Derbyshire drags in so many red herrings. [A 5-point starting credit.]
“Let's posit a libertarian triumph so that public schools have been abolished.”[1 point for every statement that is widely agreed on to be false]
“Now does JD look kindly upon the teaching of intelligent design? Of course not.”[2 points for every statement that is clearly vacuous.]
“His real desire is to de-legitimize any discussion of the subject by identifying ID as creationism. He positively longs for a return to the good old days when creationist Bible thumpers could so easily be ridiculed.[“20 points for defending yourself by bringing up (real or imagined) ridicule accorded to your past theories.]
“He doesn't seem very eager to get into a discussion of science, either. He objects to ‘pseudoscience’ (but is big-hearted enough to be amused by it). He appeals to judicial authority; and to the ‘consensus’ of scientists. Science is not properly based on authority, however.” [40 points for claiming that the "scientific establishment" is engaged in a "conspiracy" to prevent your work from gaining its well-deserved fame, or suchlike.]
“Intelligent design is not creationism, and repeating that claim over and over will not make it so. [20 points for talking about how great your theory is, but never actually explaining it.”]
“Structures or signals of specified complexity permit an inference to design without any necessary recourse to the supernatural. There's an institute in Mountain View, California, where scientists are involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.[30 points for claiming that your theories were developed by an extraterrestrial civilization.]
”No such signals have yet been detected, but they are not giving up any time soon. [40 points for claiming that when your theory is finally appreciated, present-day science will be seen for the sham it truly is.]
As Tom’s already past 100 points, let’s cut to the chase:
“If an organism exists, it is ‘fit,’ and therefore Darwinism accounts for it. But as Derbyshire may also have heard, a theory that explains everything, without any possibility of encountering a falsifying instance, is not really a scientific theory at all.” [10 points for arguing that a current well-established theory is "only a theory," as if this were somehow a point against it. Plus 50 points for claiming you have a revolutionary theory but giving no concrete testable predictions.]
“A criticism of intelligent design is that the claim, ‘God can do anything, therefore this critter was designed by God’ gets us nowhere. I agree that it doesn't. But a very similar objection can be raised against Darwinism. [10 points for arguing that while a current well-established theory predicts phenomena correctly, it doesn't explain "why" they occur, or fails to provide a "mechanism.”]
Trespassing 10 of Baez’s crackpot criteria in 1000 words or less is a considerable achievement! And what of its impact on readers, including Derbyshire?
If the sin of scandal consists in conduct harmful to faith, the fellowship of Christian apologetics may have cause to fear Bethell more than he fears Darwin. Mild mannered mathematician John Derbyshire entered the fray over The Politically Incorrect Guide To Science declaring:
“I am not a philosophical materialist, and I don't know what grounds Tom has for supposing that I am. I have made this plain numerous times, on NRO and elsewhere. I even count myself a religious person, and have said that numerous times, too.”
He departed the controversy the following year declaring himself a convinced atheist.
Epistemology is about why we think we know things, and in studying Intelligent Design people of faith risk a perilous epiphany: it is about being prepared to believe that what science already knows can never be discovered. Tautology rarely rises to the level of the sin of despair in human intelligence, but this Big Idea is clearly exceptional. Though consigned to a brief footnote in the history of science, The Discovery Institute may go down in the annals of theology for articulating the Third Millennium’s first insult to the honor of God.
Comments
Russell Seitz’s articles on science seem to indicate that for this website, any stick is
good enough to beat neocons with.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
I didnt know there was furniture on mars for the robots not to bump into.
This is why it is impossible to discuss the subject intelligently.
Asking the question ‘where in the accepted known laws of mathematics and the physical universe is the possibility of something as complex as the DNA-ribosome mechanism arising spontaneously’.
Instead of engaging the question, insults like the long fine example above are returned.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
There is a new book out on William Jennings Bryan, and the Scoops Monkey Trial, that indicates that Bryan’s motivation was based more on his defense of Christianity as the foundation for a just and humane morality. We have to remember that Bryan worked in the age of “Laissez Faire” and he feared without Christianity moraility, morality would deteriorate into pure selfish materialism. The book is “A Godly Hero: The Life of Willian Jennings Bryan”, by Michael Kazin.
Of course, Bryan’s concern that with Christianity debunked, society would deteriorate into teh “purse selfish materialism” is pretty much born out in the popularity of Ayn Rand’s cult group, or the economic agenda of the Republican Party.
Given the attack on Christianity by the Corporate Media, Hollywood, and the promotion of materialism and consumerism by Big Business, and the resulting loss of hard won economic security by America’s midlle class, maybe Bryan was right all along.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
“The Protocols of the Elders Of Bryan”....nice touch....Pondering this debate over “Creationism vs. Evolution”, a debate that effectively punishes both realms of thought, is consistent with pondering virtually any staged debate in this silly age.
Beneficial discourse regarding faith and reason certainly occurs but the popularized form of this old debate is currently underwritten by the great edifice of popular culture so that it has become little more than a kind of Big Truck Rodeo if said rodeo was a cross between Butoh and Roller Derby.
Elaborately staged conflict over the ridiculous is the rule of the day and so it is no wonder that the Marxist definition of Materialism remains the refuge of ultimate resort for our triumphal leisuretariet. Our current mangy dog Republican Party rants and raves about this debate to whip the party stalwarts into bare sentience and it begins to take on the hue and cast of a performance of Wagner’s “Der Ring des Nibelungen staged at Branson, Missouri with the neo cons starring as Mime the Nibelung Dwarf and the GOP Bigwigs as Siegfreid. Much hellfire and brimstone here, swordplay the primary occupation.
What it all means is that the important stream of this debate..... man’s habitual ability to let his technology exceed the capacity of his faith and reason to punishing effect....is buried under an avalanche of emotional cant.
That the high ground of “intellectualism” would seem to be controlled by the Left alone is but one of many punishing results of this prevailing paradigm of Industrialized Thought and the Popular Consumer Hegemon.
Watching Mr. Kristol and his peers alternately embrace and shun the rube element has been a kind of underlying theme of the destruction of Conservatism in this country. There is nothing they will not do or say to prove their septic ideology and it is no wonder now that after granting them the honor of controlling battlefield strategy, we see such a bloody mockery of our traditional principles.
It really is just a five card monte ploy to retain both attention and confusion so they can spin more lies. The various Drunken Think Tanks that infest Washington are along for the ride and in this atmosphere of noisy emptiness, both Faith and Reason are left to whither and die.
A discursive Republic demands better and until we have it, we’ll be right roundhousing ourselves to the groin between firm left hooks to our own nose.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
This entire fatuous column could have been rendered in one sentence, saving us all a heck of a lot of time:
“Tom Bethell is a big, fat poopyhead.”
However, I won’t say there weren’t some substantive moments, such as the condemnation of ID by that highly respected academic journal, Wired Magazine.
Sheesh. If this is the best paleos have to offer, count me out.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
@ Caper,
But I thought any stick was good enough to beat a Neo Con with, including another recently gutted neo-con’s right femur or left shin bone.
In fact, The Mass Flagellation of All Neo Cons should be made into a National Holiday , reminiscent of the chasing of all snakes off the Emerald Isle by Saint Patrick.
Perhaps they could dye the Chicago River Red given so many of these dingbats have emerged out of the swamps of the University of Chicago. City of Broad Shoulders? Hell, I’d say a new refrain is needed for Sandburg’s Poem....City of Pointy Heads on a Whining Soundtrack.....This, of course, exempts the denizens of the Blues and Jazz Clubs and a large number of the natives but only if they put together a speedy pogrom toot sweet. An ecumenical pogrom of course, Neo Cons being the universalists they are.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
I saw a graph this morning that showed about 60% of professed Republicans don’t believe in evolution with the same percentage of independents and Democrats saying they do believe in evolution.
The Republican party are anti-intellectual. George Bush is beloved of the base as he professes a dislike of pointed-headed intellectuals.
We seem to have a choice between decadent dems or anti-cultural reps. Civilization suffers from both. I am with Pope Benedict, head for the monasteries and wait out the new Dark Ages we have been led into by Bush and the Neo-Cons with the support of Pelosi and the liberal wing of the neo-con party.
Tcha
Click to flag this comment as abusive
“A much younger (and perhaps less circumspect) Kristol asserted in a 1949 essay that in order to prevent the social disarray that would occur if ordinary people lost their religious faith, ‘it would indeed become the duty of the wise publicly to defend and support religion.”
Judging by the situation here in Europe, he had a good point.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
This article is facile, shallow, and
snotty - entirely of a piece with the decline
of Taki’s Top Drawer ever since the wonderful
Mr. Sarto left.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
I second all the comments here pointing out how bad Seitz and his articles are, and how Seitz’s presence here is a symptom of Takimag-decay.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
“It appeals to unreconstructed pietism in its aspiration to return metaphysics to precedence over science and win back a century’s loss of cultural turf to the Left, an erosion it blames on the rise of materialism.”
So am I correct in understanding that Mr. Seitz does not sympathize with said aspiration, and does not think the erosion of American culture can be linked to the rise of materialism?
Click to flag this comment as abusive
“thinking the unthinkable slightly to the right of Cardinal Ratzinger is quite an intellectual odyssey.”
This, now, is a more mystifying statement. Is there some particular reason why Mr. Seitz opted to call Pope Benedict “Cardinal Ratzinger?”
Is he suggesting there is some parallel between the Pope and these various people whom he describes as exhibiting “sheer infantilism”?
“If I catch you reading Dawkins...”
Am I correct in assuming that Mr. Seitz would consider Richard Dawkins an improvement over the Discovery Institute?
Click to flag this comment as abusive
G.S., you see what I mean when I say that on this website “any stick is good enough to beat the neocons with.” Although a great many paloconservatives and just plain conservatives are critics of Darwinism and support
ID, Russell Seitz attempts to identify a rejection of science as something specifically neocon. And
since he introduces the neocons into his scheme as bad guys, his work is published here, even though
the matters he discusses cannot be easily mapped onto the neocon/paleocon divide.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
The fact that O.J. Simpson has been “proven” innocent in a court of law reminds us why legal scholars shouldn’t leave their jurisdiction
It seems the author should not leave his jurisdiction either - OJ was not “proven” innocent - he was found not guilty, meaning the jury did not believe the state had met its burden of proof, not that OJ was necessarily innocent.
Before you snottily contend you are “better” than others, at least get your facts right.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
@Caper:
Yeah, I’ve always thought that forming coalitions based on shared hatred (i.e., of neocons) to be dangerous at best, absurd at worst. That is, after all, the mindset that allowed neocons to get into power in the first place.
If everyone will excuse the crudity, it seems to me that Mr. Seitz is dropping trou and taking a big ol’ dump all over the work of Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, Eric Voegelin, and just about any other classic conservative thinker who critiqued the ideology of Scientism and the Cult of Materialist Progress.
I’m highly skeptical of the ID movement myself, but I wouldn’t typify everyone involved in it as some dishonest idiot.
For that matter, all the Creationists I know fall into either two categories:
A) Honest, down-to-earth country folks who know a lot more about tending their own land, engaging nature, and minding the business of their own communities than any enlightened blue-state metrosexual ever will
or
B) Products of the homeschooling movement, many of whom are astonishingly gifted & intelligent.
I’d much, much rather somebody adhere to a literal interpretation of Genesis and know their Plato and Shakespeare backwards & forwards than the alternative proposed by the busybody educrats of the State teaching racket.
What’s odd to me is that I don’t see how rallying behind the benevolent educracy fits into either the paleo wing or libertarian wing of Takimag. You’d assume from Mr. Seitz’s piece that all the Darwin crusaders out there are motivated solely by a dispassionate commitment to truth, and that there are no materialist or atheistic ideological commitments intertwined with their passion for the man.
“...easier to wrestle with than The Enlightenment as the Founders saw it.”
Not that I drink from the Enlightenment Kool-Aid myself, but at the least I would doubt that the Founders wanted a State which had the power to override parents’ authority on what their children were taught.
Another gem:
“Bethell is one of many comically anxious to lay the ideological horrors of the 20th century at science’s door, but the historical reality is anything but funny.”
Yeah, the insatiable desire for power over the material world, while banishing the Aristotlean notion of final end, or purpose (as prescribed by Bacon) had *nothing* to do with the horrors of the 20th Century.
All those atom-bombs and chemical weapons just grew up in the middle of the woods by themselves, like mushrooms.
And the Germans were clearly Luddites—as evidenced by the V-2 rockets which were later evolved/intelligently designed into the Saturn V.
The Soviets, too. (Cough!Sputnik!Cough!Cough!)
Of course one could claim that these regimes were able to engage science in some practical areas, while being ideology-blinkered in others—but this only begs the question of whether the regime represented by mainstream liberal society is any different.
Dawkins and his fellow-travelers don’t believe that we evolved from beasts any more than a Creationist does—they believe we *are* beasts, only with some extra accessories like language and mathematical reasoning, which are seen as no more fundamental than adding air-conditioning , GPS systems, and CD-players to automobiles.
The proper claim of the Dawkins camp is “All critters great and small are, being made of matter, naturally subject to the laws of physics,” PLUS something along the lines of “and those laws are completely and thoroughly understood by us today, and are all-encompassing explanations which debunk any notion you may have had that pleasant delusions such as poetry, philosophy, literature, or art can provide substantive insights into Truth.”
From crime to the conflict in Palestine, the “scientific” approach is that we should see these things in terms of evolutionary psychology rather than considering the cultural, theological, or religious issues at stake.
“a stem-cell debate as doomed to historical obscurity...”
From the viewpoint of someone opposed to fetal stem-cell resarch, this is rather like saying Auschwitz is doomed to historical obscurity. I suppose I shouldn’t worry about the perversions going on in the here-and-now, since future generations will see entirely new and exciting perversions which render the old perversions obsolete.
“Forget Darwin and Einstein—not even Newton’s Law of Gravity is safe these days.”
Uhhh… does the author realize that one of Einstein’s most notable accomplishments was the radical overthrow of the Newtonian picture of the Universe?
Or are these just important names he likes to invoke as authority-figures?
As to Derbyshire, the most generous thing I can do is assume Mr. Seitz is careless in making it out as if Derbyshire went from being mildly pious to being an unbeliever, all as the result of a single debate with an ID proponent
("I even count myself a religious person,” wow, now there’s a classic trophy of fuzzy-speak. Was Einstein “religious”?)
According to Derbyshire in an interview about his religious convictions (or lack thereof), Derbyshire said, “To say I lost my faith would be to over-dramatize it, since I was never a person of strong faith anyway.”
He also made clear that although he was not a materialist, he did not believe in the personal Trinitarian God of Christianity.
He attributed his loss of faith (his expression, not mine) to a number of reasons—such as growing up in a lukewarm Anglican tradition (rooted in nothing more than habit & Englishness), and because he “got acquainted with a lot of academic biologists, geneticists, anthropologists, and the like”, immersing himself in the latest in evolutionary theory.
Although he does mention Creationism—to say that his immersing himself in biological research worked against his faith—he never mentions Bethell, the debate, or Bethell’s book.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
I used to read the Derb on a regular basis starting in the late 90s. I noticed the slide towards religious sketicism long before Bethell’s book. By 2002 he was attending church only from habit and his scepticism was obvious.
I read the exchange between Derbyshire and Bethell on “American Spectator” not long ago. The Derb came out of that on the end of a very short stick. He was clearly out of his element and poorly informed as to the issues involved in Evolution. Having just read “The Corner” exchange, Derb came out just as badly as he did in the “American Spectator” exchange. This outcome has been the typical result of all exchanges on the subject. I observed this repeatedly in the 80s, when Duane Gish was shredding every evolutionist that dared stand on the same stage and debate him. The evolution camp had serious trouble with Gish as he held an earned PhD in Biochemistry and had reutation that was beyond question.
I’ve read much on the Discovery website and have seen no evidence of the “anti-intellectualism” Seitz implies.
My observation of the entire brouhaha is that the evolutionist side is utterly convinced that they have the answer when all they have is a framework for interpretation. It is both a conceit and a confusion of the facts on hand. Consequently, they engage in consensus “science” which actively discourages anything that may question the consensus. The end result is not science, but another religion.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
The author’s essay uses the argument from authority and emotion, rather poor ‘humor’, to make his case.
As to Baez, too bad he’s not a folk singer. General Relativity is flawed.
As Dr. Jeremy Dunning-Davies writes below:
“Many topics are included in this but those of immediate concern here are probably the theories of relativity (both special and general), the theory of the ‘big bang’, the theory of black holes, etc.
As Stephen Crothers has recently pointed out, this final topic should really be a non-starter, based as it is on an incorrect statement of Schwartzschild’s solution of the Einstein field equations. However, again as Stephen has pointed out, even the incorrectly quoted ‘solution’ is included in, and protected by, conventional wisdom. One further surprising aspect of much of conventional wisdom is that the originators of much of this body of knowledge would have welcomed discussion and even criticism, provided that criticism was constructive. In this day and age, however, people who disagree with conventional wisdom do not face discussion and constructive criticism; rather they are either quietly ignored or destroyed. The first of these is possibly the more destructive action occurring in modern science because if something is quietly ignored, it gains no publicity and so remains unknown, except to the favoured few.”
http://www.thunderbolts.info/thunderblogs/guest2.htm
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Readers are invited to Google the sublimely funny works of the Institute For Creation Research ,and to apply the Baez criteria to what they find on the link James Parker has kindly provided, whose proprietor is rsther telllingly the self appointed head of the
‘Santilli - Galilei Association on Scientific Truth’
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Post a Comment
By submitting this form, you give Taki's Magazine permission to publish this comment. Comments will be published at our discretion, and may be edited for clarity and length. Personal attacks, ethnic slurs, the riding of hobby horses and the beating of dead ones will be deleted as soon as they are detected by our small but alert staff. Repeat abusers of this policy will be barred from leaving comments. All comments reflect only the views of those posting them and not necessarily those of this website, its editors, or authors. For best formatting, please limit your response to one paragraph and don't hit "enter" to force line breaks.
Commenting is not available in this section entry.