We’ve touched on this subject in several earlier posts. Today we’re gathering much of that into one convenient place, so we can easily refer to it when necessary. This is going to be one of our weekend political rants, so feel free to ignore it.
Your typical, walking-around, everyday creationist has no idea about the consequences of his belief system. He probably imagines that it’s pure niceness, and it will assure him a happy afterlife. How wonderful that must be for him. But by definition, the typical creationist knows nothing. The leaders of today’s creationist movement, on the other hand, have very different ideas.
In one of our earliest posts, Discovery Institute: Enemies of the Enlightenment, we discussed the preference of the Enlightenment — particularly the Scottish Enlightenment, for reason over authority. This is a big problem for creationists — whose views are exactly the opposite, hence their fanatical opposition to science. The same tyrannical preference for authority is responsible for the tension between economic freedom and various forms of state-controlled economies, but our focus in this blog has always been on science, so we’ll try to stick with that (although we may not succeed).
The results of the Enlightenment were a civilization based on reason, liberty, science, and free enterprise — all of which were manifest in the American Revolution and Constitution. Most people were delighted — but not all people. Would-be tyrants, theocrats, Grand Inquisitors, Marxists, fascists, and other assorted despots are nostalgic for the pre-Enlightenment days when men lived in ignorance and poverty, and they unthinkingly obeyed authority. The clash between those who praise and those who oppose the Enlightenment is the engine that drives most of the political and cultural unrest in the modern world. It’s definitely at the core of the modern creationist movement, even if their followers are (and always will be) clueless.
The creationists are on the wrong side of history — their movement today is literally a counter-revolution against the Enlightenment — and that’s why we oppose them. For the same reason, we also oppose Marxists, fascists, and theocrats of every variety. Although here we mostly talk about creationism, it’s just one aspect of a much greater struggle. In The Infinite Evil of Creationism we said:
Creationism is being used as the front for a coordinated, multi-pronged assault on every worthy human accomplishment. It provides a handy base of exploitable ignorance, which is manipulated to wage a deliberate and relentless campaign against reason itself — and reason is the fountainhead of everything that makes human life worth living.
In the US, today’s creationists are largely — but not exclusively — found in the Republican party. That wasn’t always the case (see Creationism and American Politics). A generation ago, creationists were mostly Democrats, and like their hero, William Jennings Bryan, they weren’t conservative at all. They were progressives, and they were the heart of the Democrat party — which still retains those views.
That was the situation until Richard Nixon’s southern strategy, which brought the South into the Republican party, which has now inherited a large part the William Jennings Bryan constituency, along with Bryan’s creationism, populism, progressivism, and his anti-intellectualism. They are not friends of liberty or the Enlightenment. It is no longer the Republican party of Barry Goldwater, for which your Curmudgeon is nostalgic.
Today’s Social Conservatives, a large part of the Republican base, tend to be very close to Bryan in their thinking, although they somehow manage to retain — at least superficially — the old Republican beliefs in a small central government. But that’s mostly ceremonial. In practice, they don’t seem to take those ideas very seriously. It’s difficult to imagine what men like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin — or Goldwater — would have in common with such people.
Today’s Democrats, although they no longer espouse creationism as a political goal, have not abandoned Bryan’s progressivism and populism. Indeed, having been freed from concerns about ever again winning the South, they seem to have moved even more toward the left. But we shouldn’t overlook the obvious similarities between an intelligent designer of the biosphere and an all-powerful (but loving and benevolent) state that plans and controls the economy. In that sense, both American political parties are creationists. The Democrats, at least superficially, favor evolution, but somehow it’s been forgotten that Darwin was raised on — and his theory is consistent with — Adam Smith’s ideas about free enterprise.
So we have a modern paradox. Creationists are authoritarians, and although they’re a significant portion of today’s Republican party, in all important respects (if one considers liberty important) their goals are compatible with those of the leftists; but in the US the creationists are so confused they think their ideas are conservative. They aren’t conservative, of course — not in the Enlightenment sense — and the only way they can harmonize their theocratic vision with America’s Enlightenment-inspired Revolution is by revising history so that the beliefs of the Founders are distorted beyond recognition. That’s the reason for so much of the revisionist history we see, for example: Discovery Institute: Usurping the Fourth of July.
Looking at the big picture, it’s irrelevant what dogma politicians use to achieve their authoritarian goals. They’re all eager to be tyrants, and if the principles of the Enlightenment are abandoned, it doesn’t really matter to the citizen what his masters’ ruling doctrine is.
Okay, this little essay is wandering all over the place, so we’ll have to end it here. We’re still focused on creationism, but we should never forget that it’s only part of a much larger, far more important struggle. And it’s not one that we can be certain of winning.
Copyright © 2013. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.
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The Sensuous Curmudgeon 
Very well said. Neither party has anything really in common with the views of America’s Founders. Nor do they realize when the look at each other they are looking into a mirror.
*Today’s Democrats, although they no longer espouse creationism as a political goal, have not abandoned Bryan’s progressivism and populism. Indeed, having been freed from concerns about ever again winning the South, they seem to have moved even more toward the left. But we shouldn’t overlook the obvious similarities between an intelligent designer of the biosphere and an all-powerful (but loving and benevolent) state that plans and controls the economy. In that sense, both American political parties are creationists. *
I think Curmy (and Robert M. Price, another atheist Rightie I’m familiar with) do some great things in opposition to the scourge of American scriptural literalist/Dominionist/revisionist history fundy knotheads, but the two of you should wean yourselves from FOX. Or wherever it is you come up with your similar political/social revisionist ‘history.’
As to this move to the left by progressives you claim occurred, 1972 was the first election I was legally eligible to vote in. I was a slightly leftist Dem that year. I have not encountered any new evidence since than that persuades me to change my views on economics/social policy/contraception/sex ed/family planning/abortion, etc. I’m not sure any position I held in 1972 has changed, in either direction, because over 40 years of observation and life experience has not resulted in significant contradictions to reasoned positions I arrived at as a college student. (I was a poli sci major then, and an Oklahoma US Senator (R) would legislate the evidence a poli sci major is privy to, but in my case it is too late for that particular totalitarian control to change anything about me.)
Over the ensuing 40+ years I see how the countries who currently lead the world in so many economical and social categories retain economic/social policies abandoned by America beginning in the middle of the 70’s, and how the US has plummeted precipitously from the top in so many of those economic/social categories we once established world standards for.
It is not difficult, Curm, to locate poll data that shows that Democratic voters have mostly held their positions on issues relative to 1972 — except in instances where there has been a shift to the right by too many lax-principled weasels (particularly at the Party national leadership level).
The same polls show an enormous shift by the center of the GOP to the right. Far, far to the right. I was explaining this recently to a friend as we rode in the car he drove down the road. I extended both arms straight in front of my face, thumbs touching directly in front of my nose. Those thumbs, I said, are where the center of each party met in 1972, and the little fingers of each hand are where nutjob extremists were; I was at about the middle finger on my left hand then. The two party’s had clear and distinct differences, but much common ground, too. Think environmentalism and social policy.
“Nowadays, though,” I said, “my left hand (representing Democrats) has moved to the right a couple of finger widths.” I swung my right arm from in front of me 60 degres in the direction of the passenger door. “But way the hell over here is where the bulk of the GOP has let itself be dragged by Austrian/Chicago School economic policy, Ayn Rand amorality, Koch Birchian paranoia, and the sinister alliance all of that formed with Christian fundy fanaticism. Because that group of born followers — the Christian fundies revolted by human sexuality and its outcomes — was a ready, willing, and able voting block vitally necessary to neofeudal capitalists to achieve Corporatist ambitions for economic dominance.
“Corporatists could care less about the societal havoc that ensues from empowering the theocratic mass too willfully ignorant to recognize they are voting against their own best economic interests, because they — the corporatists — know the wealth they acquired over the past 3 decades insulates them from experiencing most if not all political outcomes the theocrats manage to achieve. Not only that, a goal of both groups is obedience to authority, and corporatists know that only one group, in the end, will be calling the shots in the authoritarian society that disproportionate wealth distribution often results in. And it won’t be the theists.”
The best governance is when we have a split house and senate, or congress and president, such that legislation requires negotiation and compromise between the two parties. Usually, a middle path will emerge that makes sense. Both parties have their extremists, but they generally have good ideas too, and the grown-ups can sort them out.
Of course, that’s the ideal, and one that has worked over much of our history. Today, not so much. I think the fix is to (1) revamp the primary system to expand the number of people voting, and thereby lessen the influence of the die-hard extremists and single-issue voters, (2) ban all political adds not placed by the campaigns themselves, (3) restrict campaign donations to individuals only, and (4) set national standards for voting for national office (hours, methods etc), and (5) create sufficient polling places to capture a high percentage of the populace. This way special interests, extreme views, etc. will not have the extraordinary influence they currently exert over elections.
None of that will ever happen, except maybe revising the primary process. It’s nice to dream though.
@Ed
6. All candidates for office, federal, state or local must show a minimum proficiency at math and science and have a clear understanding of the scientific method as qualifications to run for office.
S. C., the fight between reason and authority is, as you say, the core political disagreement in the world today, and has been so ever since the Scottish Enlightenment set forth those principles so clearly. In your essay today, you fiinally make it clear to me the fight that you have taken on, and the seriousness of your purpose. So, I am a little slow to pick things up, but now I understand. Thank you.
Yes, enlightenment is what needs to support our society, unfortunately, the creationists have set up camp in the GOP. And so have the climate-change deniers, and those who believe in big-hand economics. Its ended up being a collection of deniers of all sorts, right down to Karl Rove denying that Obama could have won Ohio. Not a lot of enlightenment there. Fiscal and social conservatives can count as enlightened, but they are drowned out by these ideological extremists.
The thing is, these extremists project their way of thinking onto the left the same way creationists call evolution a belief system or religion. And the only way to make this work is that there must be a conspiracy afoot, making them all the nuttier. Climate change must be a conspiracy of scientists to sell more Chevy Volts for their King Obama, or something like that. And that conspiracy becomes their enemy, and they don’t really focus on the facts at all.
Meanwhile, on the left, we don’t see conspiracy in the behavior of those far-righties, just stupidity and stubbornness. That’s why there is no successful Media Matters or Right Wing Watch that focuses on the left.
Its going to be an interesting year to see if the GOP can survive to be a tool of the people again, not factless ideologues.
Bob Carroll: “In your essay today, you fiinally make it clear to me the fight that you have taken on, and the seriousness of your purpose.”
I’m serious, but I’m just a grumpy voice in the wilderness. Reality is what it is.
anevilmeme: “6. All candidates for office, federal, state or local must show a minimum proficiency at math and science and have a clear understanding of the scientific method as qualifications to run for office.”
All well and good, but who gets to decide what the minimum level of proficiency should be, and whether a particular candidate meets it?
Also, even if you could solve that problem, it would require amending the U.S. Constitution and each of the states’ constitutions as well. Good luck with that!
After the first three paras and the first sentence of the fourth, this often reads like the political equivalent of Ray Comfort.
You feel free to abuse Marx. While Marxist economics may have gone the way of Newtonian mechanics, to abuse him is to display complete ignorance of social history. He and Engels were intent on stopping a social system in which starvation, child prostitution, the most horrific poverty and worse were not just accepted but regarded as part of God’s Great Work. You may agree with that — I have no idea how much enthusiasm you have for child prostitutes — but I don’t. Was the proposed Marx/Engels solution ideal? No, of course it wasn’t; it discounted the notion that in any social system there’s the near-inevitable risk of the worst individuals rising to the top.
In short, Marxism represented the cutting-edge economics science of its day. That it proved to have difficulties is something it shared with a hell of a lot of the science of its time — we could start with Kelvin’s reckoning that the maximum age of the earth could be four million years, because otherwise the sun would have burned up all its fuel by now. (Yes, Kelvin knew nothing of nuclear fusion. Hey, why not insult him anyway! He was the Karl Marx of physics!)
I think your blog serves a very valuable purpose in its efforts to push back the Dark Age garbage of the creationists. I’m just alarmed you have so little ability to self-criticize that you fail to realize how very, very much in common the underpinning of your politics has with folks like AIG.
And, yes, I’ve written at length in more than one book about William Jennings Bryan and how the liberals of his day confused natural selection with what would later be called social darwinism. You can indeed harken back to a time when the Republicans were the lefties and the Democrats were the rightwing bigoted assholes; that doesn’t have much relevance to the politics of today, as you yourself describe. The fact that most of the modern US antiscience comes from the Republicans (I used to think antivaxerism was the great exception, but I learned more recently that this apparently spreads all across the US political spectrum) is not some silly little anomaly that you can blithely dismiss; the modern Republican alliance with antiscience is part and parcel of that entire political philosophy.
JG, in my (very) humble opinion, the reason Marxism fails as an economic system is that it removes individual initiative.
Perhaps my understanding of Marxism is flawed, but in any event, it doesn’t seem to have worked out very well in those countries that had embraced it.
Totally unrelated, but since you brought it up — Kelvin was known for the fact that he attempted to calculate the age of the earth based on the earth’s rate of cooling, not on the rate at which the sun was consuming fuel. He assumed that the heat inside the earth was the remnant heat from its beginning. He had absolutely no idea that heat was continually being generated within the earth’s core by the decay of radioactive elements, because radioactivity had not yet been discovered. Not only did Kelvin know nothing of nuclear fusion, he knew nothing of nuclear fission as well.
And thank you, abandonwoo, for that long and beautifully written comment. I imagine our host will retaliate tediously against it, on the grounds that any attack on his rudimentary rightist politics must be, y’know, all lefty and stuff. It is depressing that scientific discourse in the US has been reduced to this level. I get hate mail on the grounds of my “far left poltics” because I defend established climate science against fruitbat conspiracy theorists.
SC says: “Looking at the big picture, it’s irrelevant what dogma politicians use to achieve their authoritarian goals. They’re all eager to be tyrants, and if the principles of the Enlightenment are abandoned, it doesn’t really matter to the citizen what his masters’ ruling doctrine is.”
That assumes that the USA will not balkanize itself into a handful of smaller nations based on regional cultures. Someone (James Kunstler?) a few years back drew up a map that included, for example, a group of states which in the future become the new nation of “Nascarland” If that happens, people may decide to vote with their feet and move to a region that they find more agreeable to their personal views on government.
Marxism failed because it’s a utopian fairy tail just like every other religion, and managed to create even more pain, misery & suffering.
@retiredskyguy
JG, in my (very) humble opinion, the reason Marxism fails as an economic system is that it removes individual initiative.
Perhaps my understanding of Marxism is flawed, but in any event, it doesn’t seem to have worked out very well in those countries that had embraced it.
Too right! If you’d bothered to read what I said you’d have realized I conceded this point.
Marxism, like free-trade politics, doesn’t work because the humans who gravitate to the top of it tend to be corrupt; if you google around you should be able to find Arthur Clarke making the same point about Xtianity. In the late 19th century, though, Marxism seemed a much better alternative than the status quo. Like, y’know, natural selection was an improvement on the watchmaker. Science is about progress. Things change. Your comment implies that you resent this.
retiredsciguy says: “JG, in my (very) humble opinion, the reason Marxism fails as an economic system is that it removes individual initiative.”
I think “individual initiative” can only be understood in the context of the times. While he was president, Jefferson skirted the constitution to acquire the Louisiana Purchase from France. This doubled the land area of the US, and made possible a lot of individual initiative for the 5 million population, which was mainly agrarian, and rapidly expanded onto the land.
But now the context seems to be that individuals are valued more for their ability to live in dense cities and consume unnecessary plastic objects from China, than any other purpose.
What was the productivity like in those countries who embraced Marxism. I have no doubt that he was a good man and that I would have stood with him back when he was around, especially given the alternatives at the time, but it is my understanding that the problems experienced by Marxist countries was worse than bad leadership but that there was significantly less reward or punishment for individual effort. That being said, I am we’ll aware of the propaganda put out by Republicans saying that billionaires and millionaires are people who were simply more motivated and it sickens me, especially when I see how these people have damaged my country. That being said,the reward punishment system of Marxism for the common worker seems to have dampened their productive levels more than a tad which hurt everyone in the long run.
JG: “Too right! If you’d bothered to read what I said you’d have realized I conceded this point.
You did? Where? I did read what you said, and I re-read it, and I still couldn’t find any mention of Marxism stifling individual initiative. But as long as you say you concede the point, so be it.
Anyway, arguing politics is like arguing religion. Each individual feels as though he is right, and all other views are wrong.
I’ll stick with science — it’s based on observable evidence.
Curm is wrong on several points here, but his misuse of the term “Progressive” is pure Fox News.
Curm: A generation ago, creationists were mostly Democrats
A generation ago…? You mean 1988? I remember 1988. Creationists were not mostly Democrat in 1988.
Perhaps Curm meant 3 and a half generations ago, as the Scopes Trial was 88 years ago.
However, even in this case, he’s wrong. To say that most Creationists were “Democrat” even in 1925 is inaccurate and backed up by no evidence.
Cumr: , and like their hero, William Jennings Bryan, they weren’t conservative at all. They were progressives, and they were the heart of the Democrat party — which still retains those views.
There is so much wrong with this it’s hard to know where to begin.
1. Progressive and conservative were not mutually exclusive prior to WWI. Before then, many progressives were what we would call in the modern sense Christian conservatives. Christian conservatives abandoned the progressive movement during and after WWI, leaving only liberals behind.
2. Curm ignores that WJ Bryan’s views changed over the years, like many other people’s: as he became more creationist, he became more conservative and racist. By the time of his anti-Darwin crusade, he could not be called a liberal in any meaning of the word, including economic.
3. The Democratic party does not “retain those views” if you’re talking about anything WJ Bryan believed.
Curm is unaware of the difference between Progressive pre-WWI and post-WWI, so he assumes that equations “progressive = liberal” and “liberal = Democrat” are equations that hold all through time, like 2+2=4.
Historians call that essentialism, and it’s a fallacy. Prior to World War I, you cannot say that “progressive = liberal.” The word for liberal in those days was mostly “modernist”, but progressive did not equal even modernist prior to WWI.
From the late 1890’s (let’s say the Spanish-American war) until some time before WWI, the Progressive movement was not “liberal” nor modernist, but a mixture of people we would today consider liberals and the religious right. From the modern perspective, they were strange bedfellows, but that’s just how things look to us now. You cannot project categories like “progressive = liberal” back through time. Categories change.
Pre-WWI, the religious right was attracted to Progressivism because they wanted to morally reform society, fight alcoholism by smashing saloons, closing down bawdy houses and whorehouses and improving people morally. People we would now call liberals, including liberal Christians, were attracted to Progressivism because they cared about the poor.
World War I changed everything. The religious right saw Germany’s defeat as a moral disaster brought on by Germany’s alleged secularism (everybody knew God was on America’s side.)
Moreover, the religious right soured on the idea of helping the poor, and decided that the “Social Gospel” was the most invidious sort of anti-Christian heresy, a false Gospel, and turned against it.
A classic example of this is William Bell Riley, who was the founder of fundamentalism as a political movement. Riley would certainly be called a Progressive during the Spanish-American War, but was arch-conservative by 1914 at the latest. Riley came to regard the Social Gospel, indeed all concern for the poor, as heresy and anti-Christian.
This is important: the religious right by the end of WWI had come to view poverty not as a “social problem” to be solved, but as punishment for immorality. When the Great Depression struck, the religious right described it as due to the American people’s immortality, and their immorality as due to their lack of (fundamentalist) faith.
This meant that by 1932 the religious right was primed to hate Roosevelt’s New Deal, which they did– indeed, the religious right, the founders of creationism and the anti-Semitic far right were united 100% by their hatred of Roosevelt and his New Deal.
By the 1930’s, if you were a leader of the anti-Darwinist creationist crusade, or an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist, or a Nazi sympathizer, you were certain to hate Roosevelt and his New Deal. That’s guaranteed, and it meant you either voted Republican or for some fringe party, as I’ll prove below.
Curm: That was the situation until Richard Nixon’s southern strategy
So Curm’s claim that the creationists abandoned the Democratic Party under Nixon (!!) is off by at least 3 1/2 DECADES. It’s not 1968, it’s more like 1932 or at the latest– arguably earlier than that.
The creationist movement of the 1930’s loved free enterprise, the free market, and the Republican economic philosophy that the poor are to blame for their poverty. To assert that the poor are NOT to blame for their poverty would be to embrace the “Social Gospel” which was anti-Christian heresy.
Do you want evidence?
Well, of course, many fundamentalists demonized Roosevelt and the New Deal: the aforementioned William Bell Riley, his ally Gerald Burton Winrod, Gerald L. K. Smith, and Elizabeth Dilling– all of these were super-anti-Semitic racists and sympathizers with Adolf Hitler (except arguably Smith, who was super-anti-Semitic but said conflicting things about Hitler).
Gerald Burton Winrod and Gerald L. K. Smith both ran for the US Senate– as REPUBLICANS.
Moreover, the Southern “States rights” conservatives started to abandon the Democratic party in 1948 when Truman integrated the Armed Forces and announced a civil rights program. That initiated the US Civil Rights movement, infuriated conservative southern Democrats, and led to the 1948 schism between Democrats and Dixiecrats led by Strom Thurmond. That was the beginning of the formation of the liberal/conservative dichotomy we have now.
Curm: That was the situation until Richard Nixon’s southern strategy
He means ~1968. Curm, surely you must see that you’re off by several decades.
Diogenes says: “Curm, surely you must see that you’re off by several decades.”
I remember Richard Nixon’s southern strategy, and I’m still alive. So it was a generation ago (more or less).
Curm, I hate to break it to us, but you and I are older than a generation.
Curm…nice post. As a card carrying Republican Conservative who frequents some Conservative forums I agree entirely with your assessment of the socons in the party as I fight the good fight against the authoritarian statist theocrats who claim the third leg of the conservative stool. They are legion and they are wrong and they are not conservatives. Unfortunately…they control much of the party infrastructure and you can’t win an election without them. Nor can we expand our appeal to independents and moderates with them.
All we can do is keep speaking out on real conservative principles…. keep educating that you CAN believe in god AND science…you just can’t believe Adam’s rib made Eve or Jesus rode on dinosaurs. Keep countering falsehoods with facts….”the only GAPS exist between your ears!” etc. etc.
Keep up the good work and know that age is their enemy and the young ain’t buying their crap…so every year will get a little bit better for our side.
(Oh yeah…I thought Nixon’s Southern strategy was to grab the Democrat racists…not the Fundies, though there was significant overlap I’m sure, the appeal was to “states rights” [no decoder ring necessary]…but anyway…The Carter Electoral map was a solid blue south and we didn’t get the Solid Red south till Reagan…even if the idea was Nixonian.)
@Cam:
“you CAN believe in god AND science”
Well, actually, no you can’t, or at least not without airtight compartmentalization of one’s mind.
First of all, science and religion have different methods of acquiring the content which they accept as true; science relies on empiricism and is falsifiable; religion on faith and authority, and is not. Second, science and religion have different content, which can be seen by comparing the contents of textbooks in biology, chemistry, physics, and astronomy with the contents of the bible (bats aren’t birds), koran, or book of mormon. Third, science has a way of adjudicating any disputes that arise among its adherents; religion does not, which accounts to a great degree for its history of violence and intolerance.
Religion is the *only* reason why people do not accept the findings of science in general, and evolution in particular; I’d refer you to Jerry Coyne’s paper “SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND SOCIETY: THE PROBLEM OF EVOLUTION IN AMERICA” available as a free download at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1558-5646.2012.01664.x/abstract
Mark Joseph says: Well, actually, no you can’t [believe in god AND science], or at least not without airtight compartmentalization of one’s mind.
Not in the Noah’s Ark sense, no, because the dogma conflicts with the data. But I often say it doesn’t bother me if someone believes in some kind of Deism, or a first cause, or an afterlife. There’s no evidence FOR such things, but in the absence of evidence to the contrary, provisional beliefs like that are tolerable. But such beliefs should never dominate one’s life, and reason demands that when there is verifiable evidence to the contrary, the facts of reality must prevail.
Cam says: “I thought Nixon’s Southern strategy was to grab the Democrat racists…not the Fundies, though there was significant overlap I’m sure”
As I recall it, what gave Nixon the opportunity was the South’s unhappiness over Johnson’s support of civil rights legislation — something the South had always opposed, and which they assumed would continue because of LBJ’s presence on Kennedy’s ticket. Nevertheless, Nixon’s outreach to the South wasn’t an overt appeal based on racism; the mainstream GOP wouldn’t go for that. Rather, it was more like: “Okay, now that your big issue is lost forever, why in the world are you supporting those Dems?”
@The Curmudgeon:
I have no trouble with this; my attempts to run everyone else’s life ended when I left the evangelical church. Obviously, some sort of deistic worldview, or ethereal pie-in-the-sky hope is not threatening to society in the way that fundamentalist islam and christianity are.
Still, your argument (or rather, that of the person who adheres to the existence of “something out there”) boils down to Russell’s Teapot. But, in cases where evidence is to be expected, then absence of evidence *is* evidence of absence.
Also to be considered is Christopher Hitchens’ statement that “Contempt for the intellect has a strange way of not being passive.”
Mark Joseph says:
Not quite. Russell’s teapot involves: (a) making an unevidenced claim; and (b) insisting that others prove it wrong. It’s an improper shifting of the burden of proof. In contrast, a non-belligerent belief in Deism, Valhalla-ism, etc., is just … well, just an unevidenced belief that places no burden on anyone else.
@Mark… my point is that IF one accepts the facts of science and don’t try to use your religion to deny them and impose your beliefs through government…then it is your right to believe whatever the hell else you want to believe and it is none of MY business. Sorry not to make that more clear.
Also…belief in God does not pre-suppose belief in a particular religion…or if one is say…a Christian…does not pre-suppose a belief in everything in the Bible. As I recall…as far back as Mr. Jefferson…his theism used the bible…but he re-wrote it removing all the miracles including the Easter rising from the dead.
While a belief in God may violate Occam… that does not make it WRONG in any scientific sense. It just makes it unproven and without evidence. Kinda like life from non-life…until we can demonstrate it. It does no good to alienate 80% or more of the country when the goal is to have them listen to why evolution is true and change their minds. As long as whatever they believe doesn’t affect education in the sciences..or cross the line between church and state…I’m fine with it.
@Cam:
No problem; what you state in the first paragraph is pretty much what I said in my first response to our esteemed host.
“It just makes it unproven and without evidence.”
OK, I’ll accept that, instead of “wrong in any scientific sense” 😉
“As long as whatever they believe doesn’t affect education in the sciences..or cross the line between church and state…I’m fine with it.”
Me too, as I’ve already mentioned. However, where are these people? Aside from Curmy’s reference to “non-belligerent Valhalla-ism” (I love it! If I’m ever forced at gunpoint to become religious again, and they give me a choice, I’m definitely going with non-belligerent Valhalla-ism), that is. I personally know *one* peaceful religious intellectual, maybe half a dozen practicing religionists who are nevertheless wonderful people–and quite literally *hundreds* of screaming, ranting, right-wing, anti-intellectual, YEC theocrats who adhere to every “social” and “family” issue so much decried on this blog (or is it a website? 😉 and who wouldn’t know Barry Goldwater from Thomas Jefferson, or the man in the moon.
The problem is precisely that these people are greatly affecting education in the sciences, and not only crossing the line between church and state, but denying that such a line should exist. Richard Dawkins said it best:
In response to the criticism of the first edition of The God Delusion, “You always attack the worst of religion and ignore the best. You go after rabble-rousing chancers like Ted Haggard, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, rather than sophisticated theologians like Tillich or Bonhoeffer who teach the sort of religion I believe in.”
Dawkins replied:
“If only such subtle, nuanced religion predominated, the world would surely be a better place and I would have written a different book. The melancholy truth is that this kind of understated, decent, revisionist religion is numerically negligible. To the vast majority of believers around the world, religion all too closely resembles what you hear from the likes of Robertson, Falwell, or Haggard, Osama bin Laden or the Ayatollah Khomeini. These are not straw men, they are all too influential, and everybody in the modern world has to deal with them.”
@Mark Joseph
Hurrah and thank you.
@JG:
You’re most welcome. I have a lot of bad karma to burn off from my 23 years as a YEC fundamentalist, so anytime I can put in a good word for science, reason, and logic, I do my best. But, I learn more here than I teach; Curmy’s more accurate explication of Russell’s Teapot was much appreciated.
By the way, I loved your comment “I get hate mail on the grounds of my “far left poltics” because I defend established climate science against fruitbat conspiracy theorists.”
@Mark Joseph
“I have a lot of bad karma to burn off from my 23 years as a YEC fundamentalist”
Hey, Mark, I feel I ought to shake your hand solemnly and congratulate you the way people did to me when I gave up smoking after 35 years! In fact, your feat is significantly greater than mine. You have my huge admiration.
By the way, I loved your comment “I get hate mail on the grounds of my “far left poltics” because I defend established climate science against fruitbat conspiracy theorists.”
Thanks. The tragic/comic part is that Jim Hansen, whose politics are moderately to the right of center, gets the same accusation a billionfold.
Cam: “It does no good to alienate 80% or more of the country when the goal is to have them listen to why evolution is true and change their minds.”
Well-said. Are you a science teacher, perchance?