sheesh two articles in one day over there? Say good bye to a large chunk of possible new readers.
Are they trying to court christian fundamentalism, just because of the ‘secular’ competition over at reason.com?
This is horrible and sloppy thinking by Gary north. A man who wants to setup a Christian theocracy, and who is not even close to being a Libertarian. LRC is doing very dangerous work by promoting this type of ignorance just to spite the Kochtopus, and maybe pull in some Tea Party types through shameless populism.
The American public has a lot of idiots who believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old, ergo it is correct! And any type of ‘public education’ that says otherwise is just government indoctrination. Just like chemistry and geometry. Americans don’t know about those things, except people in those professions, ergo they are useless and lies. Just like almost 100% of scientists in related fields believe in evolution. Because the public doesn’t, means their work is w-r-o-n-g.
“Why have they failed? Because they have relied on the state to promote Darwinism and to defend it against rival views. Once any idea becomes dependent on federal money and federal law, its failure is guaranteed. Its promoters lose their ability to compete in the marketplace.” (gary north)
This is also nonsense. According to Gallup, where he got his information, 75 percent of Americans have ‘a great deal’ or ‘quite a lot’ of confidence in the military. 56% for the police. However, there is 25 for newspapers, 22 for TV, 21 for banks, 21 for big business – all of the ‘private’ things.
I don’t have a problem with this article. Your comparisons to chemistry and geometry are innacurate becuase of the ability to prove certain things in the hard sciences. For example, we can mathematically prove the Pythagorean theorem. The debate between Darwinism and intelligent design can hardly be proven in a laboratory or through equations.
“The American public has a lot of idiots who believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old, ergo it is correct!” This is right too, consensus does not necessarily equate truth among any group. Consensus among scientists that intelligent design is false does not equate truth. In fact, Modern science defines science as the study of only naturally occuring things, thus, they rule out any concept of intelligent design without inquirey and begin their search for truth after having ruled out an argument because it does not conform to their definition. Can you study a supernatural designer scientifically? No. does that necessarily make theories of intelligent design false? absolutely not.
The answer is NO to both,however, those are not the right questions
The question should be: Is intelligent design a “rival” theory to Evolution? The answer, by your own account, is NO, however, Mr North seems to think that it is. One is a scientific theory (wether it is a “good” or “bad” theory is another question), but one is no a theory at all. So why are we making comparisons between apples and oranges?
“Consensus among scientists that intelligent design is false does not equate truth.”
not their consensus, but the mountain of evidence which has made evolution a fact. This is close to postmodernism. Neocons, postmodernist leftists, and now fundamentalists love to tout the relativity of truth. Or to equate truth with some type of power, to which they then accept or reject something. If their ‘power’ can overcome, it becomes truth. Always someone is the ‘victim’ class who is the correct one. There is no care about what is true or false totally. But always within some imagined regime of power.
If scientists reject intelligence design by their criteria, it is outside of science. And thus not a competing science theory, but something else. Some have said to put in the philosophy or compative religion courses. On top of this, Intelligent design is neither Christian nor science. It is just some nonsense people made up to be an ad hoc ‘answer’. It has nothing to do with the teachings of the Jews or Christ, but a bunch of really bad pseudo-scientists in modern times.
The sad thing is that Americans are largely ignorant about science or religion. According to a recent survey on Pew Forum, atheists, agnostics, and Jews score the highest on a religious knowledge quiz. However, they averaged a D+. While protestants got an F, and catholics an F-.
This is very bizarre when science and religion simply means a ‘yes’ or ‘no’, and not an actual understanding. Notice how no one assesses people’s actual understanding of something before listing their conclusions.
Because we have scientific evidence that this is the case whereas the other view is based upon estimation from a book filled with unreliable sources which can’t account for a huge amount of the data which we have.
I’m in line with the OP. I think that talking about things like this is outside the scope of what LRC should be trying to do and what it is good at doing.
A lot of idiots who are extremely intelligent believe in Keynesian Economics. Also, there are a lot of idiots who believe that they have an account with the US Government called Social Security that has their savings plus interest invested in valuable securities that they will get a some point and that the US Government can not change the terms of the Social Security deal. There are a lot of idiots who are extremely intelligent (Some of my own siblings) who believe that a “Single Payer” system of healthcare financing can work. Are these idiots any different from the Creationists or Intelligent Design folks? Are they any less religious?
This thread is getting way of track. North’s point was not that Darwinism is wrong because 85% of the people say it is wrong. His point was that the idea of Darwinism has failed to influence more than 15% of the people because it was monopolized and totally dependent on governement. It wasn’t a free-market force that was pushing Darwinism; therefore, it lacked competetiveness and is not influential, despite 100 years of effort.
“but the mountain of evidence which has made evolution a fact.” With all do respect John Ess, this is laughable.
But the 4.5 billion years argument is ridiculous. Existence of any evidence is not incompatible with the hypothesis of the intelligent design. If the creator was able to create the universe, sure he was able to create it in any state, including a state that perfectly fakes arbitrarily long history. For what it’s worth, the Earth might have been created yesterday, complete with human beings believing they have spent all of their lives on Earth.
The only argument against intelligent design may be the Occam’s razor, I think. The intelligent design multiplies entities without explaining anything. E.g., it does not explain who created the creator.
The idea that any scientist has any clue as to what the Earth was like 6 billion years ago is so unrealistic it makes evolution every bit as much as a “leap of faith” as religion. It amazes me that evolutionists can’t make this distinction. They think that because they can do something in a lab that is must be “fact,” when they have no clue what to even base their experiments on. It gets even more ludicrous when you try to explain things such as Big Bang Theory and such. And then to call these things “fact.”
Exactly, the 99.99% of the people just take for granted whatever the priests in white labcoats tell them. This is one of the modern religions (along with the statism).
“But the 4.5 billion years argument is ridiculous.”
Not really. Astronomy, geology, genetics, biology, and many other sciences all converge on pretty much this ‘argument’. All of them working separately and coming to the same conclusion.
It seems absurd that God would create an earth to fake people out. And if so, then nothing is correct.
I share your frustration with LRC to an extent but it seems to be a bit of misleading headlines. Fred Reed’s piece which I read in detail simply does not say he doesn’t believe in evolution… in fact, I took away the opposite… it’s just that he doesn’t believe in “onward-upward” evolution, something that has long been dead outside of the population-control/eugenics community.
Gary North’s article is actually surprisingly insightful. I think it bears much more careful deliberation, however. There’s a lot more to it than just “Darwinism is pushing an agenda.” Darwinism is the religious faith of eugenicists, population-control fanatics and other misanthropes. Their interest in promoting Darwinism is wholly pseudo-scientific. Just take a gander at the Eugenics Review which is kept available in online form by the NIH - just open any volume from the pre-War era to see shockingly blunt statements of the eugenical agenda.
I followed the links to Appendix A of North’s Sovereignty and Dominion. There, he mentions the Geneticists’ Manifesto - a remarkably difficult document to find on Google, given the fact it was penned in the late 30’s by a Nobel laureate. Read the Manifesto and ask yourself whether there is a single point in that document that has not been actively implemented in American society to an astonishing extent, in just the seven decades since it was written?
Creationism is not necessarily opposed to evolutionary biology, a point that is overlooked in the false dichotomy created by the accepted narrative. Evolutionary biology simply states that no planner is required to explain the abundant varieties of life and their astounding functional complexity. This says nothing about the wider evolution of the Universe itself - a topic on which modern cosmology is embarrassingly bad - and North’s argument is essentially that the agenda of Darwinism in this regard is to obliterate any conception of a wider evolution of the Universe, as it might be understood through a creationist view, for example.
Of course, I’m not going to defend Christian fundamentalist creationism which is frankly opposed to scientific biology. My point is simply that there is nothing inherently incompatible with biological science and a view that attributes some kind of “wider purpose” to the Universe. And I think that North is on the mark in attributing the fascination of the eugenicists with Darwinism not to any actual interest in biology but, rather, to their egalitarianism, collectivism and elitism.