At tothesource this week gentle readers may imbibe contrasting reviews of the anti-Darwinism movie Expelled.
In favor is Dinesh D'Souza of Stanford's Hoover Institute. Against is John Haught of Georgetown University.
We still haven't seen the film. So our comments will be tentative. But being Seldom Wrong, we have opinions even on movies that we haven't seen.
We expect many gentle readers to be excited about the way, as noted by D'Souza, Expelled exposes Richard Dawkins's belief that life on earth was seeded by extraterrestrials. That is genuinely as good a demonstration as one can imagine that it's not reasonable to think that life arose by chance. We like the ET versus God dilemma that this problem presents, because we think God wins.
We have some sympathy for Haught's objection that Expelled throws out the entirety of "Darwinism" because of its failure to address the origin of life or to point inexorably to the existence of God. However, we think that Haught is ignoring a very real issue here, and probably the one that the movie addresses, even if imperfectly.
And so we return to a common complaint: in the United States we glory in interdisciplinary education unless it has to do with the relationship of science to religion. Then the purity of scientific inquiry must be protected against sinister inroads from religion.
We think that science can take care of itself and seriously doubt that rampant superstition and a revival of alchemy or sorcery will break out if discussion of the existence of God or the likelihood of life arising by chance is seriously discussed in a science classroom. We also think that religious belief can take care of itself in such a forum if it is not unfairly disparaged along the lines of the trash talk between professional wrestlers. And we think that no one much cares about the origins and development of life except as it relates to the ultimate question of God and whether human life has significance.
We assert further that evolutionary biology and ID are really only different in very narrow areas that have to do with these very questions: is it reasonable to think that life arose by chance, and is it reasonable to think that an intelligence designed the universe?
What Haught won't acknowledge is that mainstream higher ed is dominated not just by a division between science as a way of knowing and other disciplines but by an exaltation of scientific knowledge as the best knowledge and an irrational hostility to religion (or Judaism and Christianity, really, probably with some recent uneasiness with Islam, but for different reasons). That hostility is illustrated in many reactions to the announcement of a Wheaton College professor's resignation because of his divorce (see previous post below).
That's the problem: that the folks who control much of the power in higher ed want to exclude religion from consideration in our most exalted educational institutions, except to be studied as a curiosity of human behavior--one that can be explained (away) in evolutionary terms.
4 comments:
Bruce Alberts it was who first accepted from his post as the president of the National Academy of Sciences USA that the biological machinery can be called as such, machinery, without asserting to metaphora. He gave the students that license in 1998. Other animations on the tiny cellular machineries apart from the Expelled movie can be seen in here:
http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Videos_animations_flagella_evidence_existence_creation_contra_evolution.htm
I wish an analogous documentary film was made concerning the DINOGLYFS or dinolits:
http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/dinosaur.htm
It seems that the ancient man not only saw but also documented the last megafauna (gigafauna, I should say).
Haeckelian type of vulgar evolutionism drove not only the 'Politics-is-applied-biology' Nazi takeover, but also the nationalistic collision at the World War I. It was Charles Darwin himself, who raised the monstrous Haeckel in the spotlight as the greatest authority in the field of human evolution, even in the preface to his Descent of man in 1871:
http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Asian_Bioethics.pdf
pauli.ojala@gmail.com
Biochemist, drop-out (Master of Sciing)
http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Expelled-ID.htm
We welcome what we believe is our first comment from Finland.
Thanks. I quote from
http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Haeckelianlegacy_ABC5.pdf
Finns as a degenerate Mongolian race
Already in his Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, admired by Darwin in the introduction to
his Descent of Man, Ernst Haeckel had classified Finns as Mongolians or peoples who resembled them.
Finland was a country located at the bloody northern borders of the east and west. Were the
Finno-Ugrian people capable of establishing a state? Consult figure 9 for the place of Finns as the
degenerate "Mongolian" race in the Europe, in the linear Haeckelian evolution.
In his popular Wonders of Life, Haeckel categorized Finns as "middle civilized race" which
had 7 races below them and four races above them. Of the twelve races, these latter four were
"higher civilized races", "lower cultured races", "middle cultured races" and "higher cultured
races". Above us Finns were the fifteenth century Italians, French, English, and Germans.
Haeckel's evolutionary tree of the indoeuropean languages, naturally, did not include the Finns at all
(figure 10). The idea of Aryans popped up from the Indo/-European language gradient and idea of heroic conquedors, originally.
And Haeckel declared: "The views on the subject of European nations which have large colonies in the
tropics, and have been in touch with the natives for centuries, are very realistic, and quite different from the ideas that
prevail in Germany. Our idealistic notions, strictly regulated by our academic wisdom and forced by our
metaphysicians into the system of their abstract ideal-man, do not at all tally with the facts. Hence we can explain
many of the errors of the idealistic philosophy and many of the practical mistakes that have been made in the recently
acquired German colonies; these would have been avoided if we had had a better knowledge of the low psychic life of
the natives (cf. the writings of Gobineau and Lubbock)." (The wonders of life, 1905, p. 390-1).
Let us quote this Goubineau, recommended by the scientifically more correct Haeckel, on
Finns, then: "creatures so incontrovertibly ugly and repulsive as the ordinary specimens of the Mongolian race…
These are all people of low stature, with wide faces and prominent cheek-bones, yellowish or dirty brown in colous---
The Finns have always been weak, unintelligent, and oppressed---in the south through miscegenation with the
Negroes and in the north with the Finns." (Gobineau, Inequality of Races (1853-55, 1967).
Gobineau divided mankind in three races: the White, the Black, and the Yellow. In essence,
this meant the Good, the Bad - and the Ugly. The Yellow were extremely ugly, and the group
included not only Finns, but also Mongols and Tartars. Kemiläinen explains the history of the low
self esteem of the Finnish people: "Finns were a primitive aboriginal people in Europe and in Asia. They were
short of stature and deformed. Their limbs were feeble and they had protruding cheekbones and slanting eyes. They
were more yellow than the Chinese, who had the blood of the White race. How else could the Chinese have created a
high culture? Even the Hungarians were 'white Huns'; they had White ancestors… In an Aryan society at the top were
Aryans, in the second class were the Celtic and Slavic peoples and men and women of mixed blood. The deformed
Finns were lowest." (Kemiläinen 1998 p. 85).
Hitler's formulation of the differences between the human races was affected by the
brilliant sky-blue eyed Haeckel (Gasman 1971, p. xxii). At the top of the unilinear progression
were usually the "Nordics", a tall race of blue-eyed blonds. Haeckel's position on the Jewish
question was assimilation, not yet an open elimination. But was it different only in degree, rather
than kind?
Marriage laws were once erected not only in the Nazi Germany but also in the multicultural
states of America upon the speculation that the mulatto was a relatively sterile and shortlived
hybrid. The absence of blood transfusion between "white" and "colored races" was self evident
(Hailer 1963, p. 52).
In 1917 the immigration of "defective" groups was forbidden even in the United States by a
law. In 1921 the European immigration was diminished to 3% based on the 1910 census.
Eventually, in the strategical year of 1924 the finest hour of eugenics had come and the fatal law
was passed by Congress. It diminished immigration to 2% of the foreign-born from each country
based on the 1890 census in order to preserve the "nordic" balance in population, and was hold
through World War II until 1965 (Hietala 1985, p. 132).
Richard Lewontin writes:“The leading American idealogue of the innate mental inferiority of the working
class was, however, H.H. Goddard, a pioneer of the mental testing movement, the discoverer of the Kallikak family,
and the administrant of IQ-tests to immigrants that found 83 % of the Jews, 80% of the Hungarians, 79% of the
Italians, and 87% of the the Russians to be feebleminded.” (1977, p. 13.)
Finnish emmigrants put the cross on the box reserved for the "yellow" group (Kemiläinen
1993, p. 1930).
Rudyard Kipling, the first British Nobel laureate in literature, versified:
Take up the White Man's burden
The savage wars of peace
Fill full the mouth of Famine,
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest (The end for others sought).
Watch sloth and heathen folly;
Bring all your hope to nought.
(McLure's Magazine 12 (Feb. 1899).
You hint at this; the issue goes back to Hume's fork; Wiggenstein's Tractatus (verificationism) and G.E. Moore's naturalistic fallacy. All were an attempt at concept control. It made scientific (empirical) observation totalitarian in the epistemological realm.
Hume was the first. He propsed the principle of empirical verifiability which became the foundation for logical positivism (Vienna Circle).
Logical postivism later allowed mathematical propositions and tautologies. Hence the birth of analytical philosophy.
The principle of empirical verifiability stated that the only meaningful propositions about reality are those propositions that are verified empirically.
Any propositions that are not empirically verifiable are therefore meaningless. This would include religious (revelation) propositions.
The problem with the principle of empirical verfiability is that as a principle it is not empirically verifiable and therefore meaningless by its own definition.
Wiggenstein admitted this at the conclusion of his Tractatus, "My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it)". (6.54)
The problem with positivism as NT Wright points out, is that it is still alive and well in higher education and academia.
Though the basic beliefs of positivism (scientific inquiry) have long been refuted and rejected by philosophers, they are still used by scientists because they are pragmatic and allow science the "freedom for inquiry." I.e. the scientific method is verified because it works, not because it is metaphysically valid.
Post a Comment