Category Archives: Belief

Good news = opportunity for sarcasm

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Here’s some more on the global-warming-as-somehow-anti-Christian front–I consider it good news:

The board of the National Association of Evangelicals has rebuffed leaders of the Christian right who had called for the association to silence or dismiss its Washington policy director because of his involvement in the campaign against global warming.

Prominent Christian conservatives like James C. Dobson, chairman of Focus on the Family, and Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, had sent a letter to the association’s leaders this month accusing the policy director, the Rev. Richard Cizik, of “using the global warming controversy to shift the emphasis away from the great moral issues of our time,” which they defined as abortion, homosexuality and teaching children sexual morality and abstinence.

Yes, because as we all know, hordes of gay commandos are at all times massed at the Canadian border, waiting to loose their gay all over everyone, stop all the breeding, and offer fact-based sex ed to the nation’s teenagers (with a catchy techno backbeat). Gay is most commonly transmitted through phlogiston, a little-known fact. Gay also causes hurricanes, tornadoes, and microphone feedback. The Minoan civilization was destroyed by a giant explosion of gay. Thank goodness some people still understand that this is the greatest crisis America now faces.

Say, did anyone notice Baghdad is on fire?

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86%!!!

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I am 86% religiously literate, according to this USA Today test. Interesting stuff:

Sometimes dumb sounds cute: Sixty percent of Americans can’t name five of the Ten Commandments, and 50% of high school seniors think Sodom and Gomorrah were married.

Stephen Prothero, chairman of the religion department at Boston University, isn’t laughing. Americans’ deep ignorance of world religions — their own, their neighbors’ or the combatants in Iraq, Darfur or Kashmir — is dangerous, he says.

His new book, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know — and Doesn’t, argues that everyone needs to grasp Bible basics, as well as the core beliefs, stories, symbols and heroes of other faiths.

Belief is not his business, says Prothero, who grew up Episcopalian and now says he’s a spiritually “confused Christian.” He says his argument is for empowered citizenship.

“More and more of our national and international questions are religiously inflected,” he says, citing President Bush’s speeches laden with biblical references and the furor when the first Muslim member of Congress chose to be sworn in with his right hand on Thomas Jefferson’s Quran.

“If you think Sunni and Shia are the same because they’re both Muslim, and you’ve been told Islam is about peace, you won’t understand what’s happening in Iraq. If you get into an argument about gay rights or capital punishment and someone claims to quote the Bible or the Quran, do you know it’s so?

“If you want to be involved, you need to know what they’re saying. We’re doomed if we don’t understand what motivates the beliefs and behaviors of the rest of the world. We can’t outsource this to demagogues, pundits and preachers with a political agenda.”

Scholars and theologians who agree with him say Americans’ woeful level of religious illiteracy damages more than democracy.

“You’re going to make assumptions about people out of ignorance, and they’re going to make assumptions about you,” says Philip Goff of the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at Indiana University in Indianapolis.

Goff cites a widely circulated claim on the Internet that the Quran foretold American intervention in the Middle East, based on a supposed passage “that simply isn’t there. It’s an entire argument for war based on religious ignorance.”

“We’re impoverished by ignorance,” says the Rev. Joan Brown Campbell, former general secretary of the National Council of Churches. “You can’t draw on the resources of faith if you only have an emotional understanding, not a sense of the texts and teachings.”

There’s more, but that gives you an idea.

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Not all Christians are scary…

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In fact, the vast majority of Christians don’t scare, bother, annoy, or irk me. In fact, they’re generally great people. If this sounds strangely backhanded, I honestly don’t mean for it to be. Perhaps it is unfair that I pick on an entire belief system because a small handful of nutbars keep getting a national stage–I could also blame that on a market-driven infotainment system that generally finds putting nutjobs on screen to spew crap gets better ratings than an actual reasoned discussion of faith (sad but true, and I’d rather be watching the Sci Fi Channel, anyway). Perhaps it is my own rather unpleasant history with the faith that makes me get a bit of a thrill from being mildly provocative (not sure who I’m provoking, but a guy can dream).

Anyway, my point is that this guy scares the crap out of me. And he works out of my hometown. And I sure hope he does not represent the mainstream of Christian (or any) thought.

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Why is this a religious hot-button issue???

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From the Washington Post:

Focus on the Family founder James C. Dobson and other conservative Christian leaders are calling for the National Association of Evangelicals to silence or fire an official who has urged evangelicals to take global warming seriously.

In a letter this week to the board of the NAE, which claims 30 million members, Dobson and his two dozen co-signers said the Rev. Richard Cizik, the NAE’s vice president for government relations, has waged a “relentless campaign” that is “dividing and demoralizing” evangelicals.

Cizik has been a leader in efforts to broaden evangelicals’ political agenda beyond abortion and same-sex marriage. He says Christians have a biblical imperative to protect the environment, which he calls “creation care.”

Is there a Biblical basis for doubting global warming? Is it scientific? (That would raise more questions, potentially.) Is it political? Seriously, I’m curious.

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Give Audhumbla her due, seriously

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Interesting bit from the Washington Times:

A Tennessee lawmaker is demanding answers about the creation of the universe from the state education commissioner.

State Sen. Raymond Finney sponsored a resolution to ask Education Commissioner Lana Seivers whether the universe “has been created or has merely happened by random, unplanned and purposeless occurrences.”

Mr. Finney, a Republican, said he wants the department to say there’s no scientific proof for the theory of evolution and to let schools teach creationism or intelligent design.

“Is there a creator? If yes, why are we afraid to teach creationism?” Mr. Finney said Tuesday. “And if the answer is ‘well, we can’t tell,’ then why are we prohibiting an alternative theory?”

Excellent, excellent point. Let us teach our children the alternative theories of how life has come to be. There are, after all, quite a few conceptions of the Demiurge. Now, explain to me why all of the following theories shouldn’t be given equal weight:

Intelligent design: Life has aspects that possess irreducible complexity. Therefore, they cannot have originated naturally. Therefore there must have been a Creator, but let’s not actually call said creator God. Now, what’s on TV?

Creationism (also here): God created the world in seven days. Genesis says so, in two different chapters with quite a few differences between them. They’re both true. If you disagree, you will go to hell. (Yes, I know I’m paraphrasing with liberal bias.)

Flying Spaghetti Monsterism (or Pastafarianism, also here): The world was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. Honestly, it’s not any more inherently ridiculous than most other creation stories.

Norse creation (but not here):

According to the Scandinavians, the beginning of life starts out with only fire and ice. It began with the existence of only two worlds: Muspellheim and Niflheim. When the warm air of Muspellheim hit the cold ice of Niflheim, the outline of the Thurses Ymir and the icy cow Audhumbla were created. Ymir’s foot bred a son with the other and a man and a woman emerged from his armpits. Thus he would be the father of an entire host of the cruel creatures known as giants. As Ymir slept, the continuing heat from Muspellheim made him sweat. He sweat out Surt, a flaming giant who went to Muspellheim, whose fire made him feel welcome. Later Ymir woke and drank Audhumla’s milk. And while he drank the cow licked on a salt stone. The first day a mans hair appeared, on the second day the head and on the third day the entire man emerged from the stone. His name was Bure and with an unknown giant he fathered the three gods Odin, Vili and Ve.

Anyway, they went on to somehow create Yggdrasill, the giant tree where we all live.

Greek creation (also not here):

The most widely accepted account of beginning of things as reported by Hesiod’s Theogony, starts with Chaos, a yawning nothingness. Out of the void emerged Ge or Gaia (the Earth) and some other primary divine beings: Eros (Love), the Abyss (the Tartarus), and the Erebus. Without male assistance Gaia gave birth to Uranus (the Sky) who then fertilised her. From that union were born, first, the Titans: six males and six females (Oceanus, Coeus and Crius and Hyperion and Iapetus, Theia and Rhea, Themis and Mnemosyne, Phoebe and Tethys, and Cronus); then the one-eyed Cyclopes and the Hecatonchires or Hundred-Handers. Cronus (“the wily, youngest and most terrible of [Gaia’s] children”)castrated his father and became the ruler of the gods with his sister-wife Rhea as his consort and the other Titans became his court. This motif of father/son conflict was repeated when Cronus was confronted by his son, Zeus. Zeus challenged him to war for the kingship of the gods. At last, with the help of the Cyclopes,(whom Zeus freed from Tarturus), Zeus and his siblings were victorious, while Cronus and the Titans were hurled down to imprisonment in Tartarus.

I think Tartarus was also home to the God of Fried Seafood, but I may be mixing my theologies.

Anyway, if we don’t know who the “creator” in intelligent design is, how do we know we don’t actually live on Yggdrasill and may wind up spending eternity hanging with Sisyphus?

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A few clarifications

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Some excellent points were made about some recents posts of mine, so I’d like to make a few clarifications.

First of all, I tend to post only when I’m worked up in a frenzy of blog-fueled rage. Not at all an excuse for any half-baked arguments, more a setting of context.

With regard to my comments on Al Gore’s alleged electrical hypocrisy, I don’t have an inherent problem with people making information available and letting the public draw their own conclusions, ever. And I have to conced that it’s probably impossible for anyone to present information without some sort of bias–if you look hard enough, you can find traces of spin anywhere. I do have a problem with people making information under the guise of an official-sounding organization that may or may not exist–for me, it’s an honesty thing. People are free to draw their own conclusions–I happen to fail to see the relevance in this particular instance, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be said.

That wasn’t the intended point of my post, though. The proper treatment for dishonest/deceptive/hateful/whatever speech is more speech. That generally isn’t what happens in these situations. I invoked the Swift Boat analogy because this situation reminds me of that situation: a group made a number of allegations that were capable of being disproven by numerous records and witnesses, yet the Kerry campaign didn’t say squat back in 2004. A lot has happened since then, and it would be nice to see someone with more credibility and a bigger audience than me offer some sort of counterpoint to what people and groups like the Tennessee Center for Policy Research have to say. Like, say, Al Gore. And he did.

A quick note on the relevance issue–the argument seems to be that (a) Al Gore addresses the severity of global warming; (b) Al Gore uses electricity at a level above the national average; therefore (c) Al Gore is a hypocrite. The problem is, (c) doesn’t say anything at all about (a); it just attacks the messenger.

With regard to the Discovery documentary on Jesus, again I have no problem with anyone presenting information or opinions. I draw my own conclusions and my own opinions. Personally, based on what I have seen so far, I think the documentary is full of crap–it is an interesting premise but has about as much historical weight as the Da Vinci Code. I don’t blame Mr. Wildmon for trying, either, but if that is the best he can do, I kind of feel bad for him. My point is that if watching the documentary shakes someone’s faith to the core, you really can’t blame the filmmakers for that. My objection here is similar to my issue with the Gardasil debate: valid arguments against a proposal that are grounded in science, history, logic, etc. supercede arguments based only in faith. Object to the documentary because it’s bad science, bad archaeology, bad statistics, and so forth. If someone publicizes information that contradicts the foundation of someone’s faith, and that information is objectively flawed (e.g. not based in sound science), why not make that your first argument? My understanding of Mr. Wildmon’s argument is something like this: (a) the Bible states that such and such happened; (b) a new documentary may present evidence that contradicts the Bible; therefore (c) Christianity is under attack.

In retrospect, my statement “I am not out to offend or denigrate anyone else’s religious beliefs” was not entirely accurate. I do not intend to denigrate religious people. There is a difference, subtle though it may be, between crticism of a system of beliefs and criticism of the believers. I may not agree with someone’s beliefs, but I do not intend to disrespect the person. And I have a very hard time respecting a lot of religious beliefs. I could probably write a book on that issue (and I might), but if anyone is offended by what I have to say about religion, it’s honestly kind of flattering because it implies that the person is placing my words on a rhetorical level with the Bible or whatever book they follow. Well, that’s how I look at it, anyway. I can’t help how people interpret what I, or anyone else, say. All I can do is try to be honest and rational–I’ll admit it doesn’t always work (although I still think it did this time.)

I also stand by my characterization of faith, which was pretty much based on the definition at dictionary.com:

1. Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing.

2. Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence. See Synonyms at belief, trust.

3. Loyalty to a person or thing; allegiance: keeping faith with one’s supporters.

4. often Faith ChristianityThe theological virtue defined as secure belief in God and a trusting acceptance of God’s will.

5. The body of dogma of a religion: the Muslim faith.

6. A set of principles or beliefs.

The difference between faith and science is that science (assuming you are dealing with an honest practitioner), has to change in the face of contradictory evidence. Faith does not. Yet they can co-exist for most people just fine, most of the time.

If I do have any particular bias creeping into posts of this nature, it is my frustration that agnostics (I prefer the term apatheist, but I’ll go with a more recognizable one) are so often misunderstood and disrespected on a personal level. That must be a topic for another day, however.

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Don’t bother me with pesky "evidence"

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Courtesy of my daily e-mail from the Texas Freedom Network:

E-MAIL FROM THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT
Text is taken directly from e-mails written by religious-right groups. The Texas Freedom Network does not edit the content for grammar or accuracy.

Date: February 28, 2007
From: American Family Association
By: Don Wildmon

The Discovery Channel documentary slams Christianity

The documentary claims that the tombs of Jesus, Mary, Mary Magdalene and a supposed son of Jesus —Judah— have been found, thus making the Bible and two thousand years of history a lie.

According to the Discovery Channel’s documentary “The Lost Tomb of Jesus” airing Sunday, March 4, the bones of Jesus– buried with His family — have been found. In addition, the documentary says that Mary Magdalene and Jesus might have had a son named Judah.

Here is what The Discovery Channel says about the program and the Christian faith: “All leading epigraphers agree about the inscriptions. All archaeologists confirm the nature of the find. It comes down to a matter of statistics. A statistical study commissioned by the broadcasters (Discovery Channel/Vision Canada/C4 UK) concludes that the probability factor is 600 to 1 in favor of this tomb being the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth and his family.”

Having watched how Hollywood portrays Christians and Christian values for the past 30 years, it is clear that Hollywood considers Christianity its greatest enemy. Because of our silence, Christianity is the only religion they feel free to attack!

It is time for Christians to send a message to The Discovery Channel and Hollywood that enough is enough! Don’t stay silent while The Discovery Channel and Hollywood continually attack our faith and our values.

The documentary was produced by James Cameron, whose claim to fame is directing the movie “The Titanic.” Saying that Cameron is qualified to make a documentary on Jesus is like saying Hugh Hefner is qualified to make a documentary on abstinence before marriage!

Having not seen the documentary yet (and I doubt Rev. Wildmon has either, unless he has a time machine), I can’t say much about its production values, attribution of claims, or the general quality of its historical research. I can say that there is not very much harm in presenting information about something that somebody found somewhere and letting people draw their own conclusions from it. The e-mail above does not challenge the veracity of any claims made by the documentary–it barely scratches the surface of identifying any claims made by the documentary. In fact, Rev. Wildmon does not challenge a single assertion made by the publicity for this documentary. He does say this, though: “The documentary claims that the tombs of Jesus, Mary, Mary Magdalene and a supposed son of Jesus —Judah— have been found, thus making the Bible and two thousand years of history a lie.”

I guess one man’s metaphor is another man’s lie. Rather than critically examine archaeological evidence that may or may not have any impact on his faith, he would stick his nose back into an old book and pretend it isn’t happening. And he would have everyone else do the same.

But it doesn’t stop there. See, presenting evidence that might contradict one man’s narrowly-drawn version of reality isn’t bad enough…there must be a bigger bogeyman behind the scenes. He identifies the documentary as a broadcast of a Canadian network, a British nework, and the Discovery Channel (whose umbrella corporation is headquartered in Maryland), and then makes the following statement: “Having watched how Hollywood portrays Christians and Christian values for the past 30 years, it is clear that Hollywood considers Christianity its greatest enemy. ”

Huh?

How did we get to Hollywood? And what happened 30 years ago?

Oh, right. Hollywood is run by liberals, liberals hate America, America is Christian to its core, and therefore Jesus is going to kick our asses…the argument goes something like that. Point being, it’s a docu-freakin’-mentary. At least try to formulate a coherent argument that addresses the evidence it presents.

Or is “Hollywood” a code word for something else???…

“Don’t stay silent while The Discovery Channel and Hollywood continually attack our faith and our values.” He isn’t so clear what he wants his peeps to say to the Discovery Channel and Hollywood (oh my!), but I’m not exactly his target audience. I guess something along the lines of “Your objective and corporeal evidence offends me. I object to your displaying it on a basic cable network most people do not watch on a Sunday night.” Come to think of it, that is easier than actually crafting a counter-argument.

I should note that I am not out to offend or denigrate anyone else’s religious beliefs. I should also note that I do not believe for a millisecond that people like Don Wildmon would ever extend to me the sort of courtesy I tried to extend in the previous sentence. So anyone with tender religious sensibilities should just skip the rest of this paragraph. Now then, it may seem easier to draw life lessons from an ancient book of fairytales that has not been edited since at least the 5th century AD (or CE). But really, in the face of a second-rate documentary by the guy who brought us The Abyss, I guess peddlers of a rather poorly-edited anthology of uncertain attribution and extensive internal inconsistencies should be worried about the staying power of their wares.

That said, there are many valid criticisms of the documentary’s facts (remember those?), such as the following:

Stephen Pfann, a biblical scholar at the University of the Holy Land in Jerusalem who was interviewed in the documentary…is even unsure that the name “Jesus” on
the caskets was read correctly. He thinks it’s more likely the name “Hanun.”

Archaeologists quickly discounted the theory that the boxes contained the bones of Jesus and his family because the names inscribed on the boxes were quite common in the region during the 1st Century.

So how’s about we quit the whinin’ and the bellyachin’ and let the documentary stand on its own (possible lack of) merits. I have no idea if the documentary is any good, or in the least bit convincing. If it shakes Christians’ faith to the core, that’s their problem, and it would only prove that Don Wildmon is not very good at his job. See, faith isn’t supposed to depend on facts or evidence anyway, remember?

I can’t finish this post without ridiculing one other part of the e-mail:

The documentary was produced by James Cameron, whose claim to fame is directing the movie “The Titanic.” Saying that Cameron is qualified to make a documentary on Jesus is like saying Hugh Hefner is qualified to make a documentary on abstinence before marriage!

Ah, the ad hominem attack, lynchpin of the man with no solid argument in the first place. But really, is a film director making a documentary on Jesus any worse than a glorified televangelist attempting to discuss archaeology?

Also, give Mr. Cameron a little credit for The Terminator, seriously.

In closing, now that I’ve read about all this controversy, I’m definitely going to watch the documentary (Sunday, March 4, 8 p.m. CST).

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Evolution as Conspiracy???

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From the Dallas Morning News, this is just embarrassing:

The second most powerful member of the Texas House has circulated a Georgia lawmaker’s call for a broad assault on teaching of evolution. House Appropriations Committee Chairman Warren Chisum, R-Pampa, used House operations Tuesday to deliver a memo from Georgia state Rep. Ben Bridges.

The memo assails what it calls “the evolution monopoly in the schools.”

Mr. Bridges’ memo claims that teaching evolution amounts to indoctrinating students in an ancient Jewish sect’s beliefs.

“Indisputable evidence – long hidden but now available to everyone – demonstrates conclusively that so-called ‘secular evolution science’ is the Big Bang, 15-billion-year, alternate ‘creation scenario’ of the Pharisee Religion,” writes Mr. Bridges, a Republican from Cleveland, Ga. He has argued against teaching of evolution in Georgia schools for several years.

He then refers to a Web site, www.fixedearth.com, that contains a model bill for state Legislatures to pass to attack instruction on evolution as an unconstitutional establishment of religion. Mr. Bridges also supplies a link to a document that describes scientists Carl Sagan and Albert Einstein as “Kabbalists” and laments “Hollywood’s unrelenting role in flooding the movie theaters with explicit or implicit endorsement of evolutionism.

I guess the idea is that, if all people have equal worth and deserve respect and attention, then likewise all ideas deserve equal attention. Not to get all existential, existence preceding essence and such, but there actually are some very, very bad ideas. It just seems so self-evident to me. Dammit, I’m too tired to get into this.

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Death before having to mention sex to kids, say religious conservatives

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Perhaps I’m being a little bit melodramatic with this topic, but I really do want to know if religious conservatives find it preferable to keep life-saving vaccines away from people rather than run the risk that kids might get the idea in their heads that sex exists.

From liberal conspiracymongers People for the American Way:

Following a recommendation by the Centers for Disease Control, a number of states have implemented or are considering vaccinating girls attending public school against HPV, a virus that causes 70 percent of cervical cancer cases. While vaccinations against measles, mumps, and tetanus are not controversial, the Religious Right sees HPV differently: It is sexually transmitted. The Family Research Council’s Bridget Maher warned that young women may see vaccination “as a licence to engage in premarital sex,” and former Focus on the Family advisor Reginald Finger said that marketing the vaccine “would undermine the abstinence-only message.”

…

[T]he Religious Right’s strong reaction against “forc[ing] little girls to be shot with a sex virus vaccine” leaves little room in the debate for details about which form parents have to fill out to preserve so-called “parents’ rights.” Instead, the Right’s abstinence-only refrain makes it sound like Texas is requiring girls to carry condoms, as one right-wing group put it. The emphasis on abstinence to the point of excluding other information is already dangerous policy when it comes to sex ed, but it’s doubly so when it comes at the direct cost of passing up a life-saving cure – especially when many on the Right acknowledge that abstinence might not be enough. Vaccination would protect not only the 94 percent of women who have sex before marriage, but also those who “practice[] abstinence and fidelity” yet “could
be exposed to HPV through sexual assault or marriage to an infected partner,” as FRC’s Sprigg admitted.

First of all, can anyone maintain a straight face while arguing that the “94 percent of women who have sex before marriage” do so because they learned about sex in public school? Actually, I’m sure some people can. They’re wrong. I’m happy to argue that point further, but I’ll move on.

The position seems to be thus:

  1. We should not teach sex ed in schools.
  2. We should not educate kids about, nor distribute the means of, protection against STD’s or pregnancy.

I suppose the resulting assumption, then, is that people are endowed by God with all the necessary knowledge re: sexuality on their 18th birthday? Well, since our tax dollars are also being spent to encourage abstinence among adults, maybe that is not the case.

Some say it is a slippery slope (yes, I’m talkin’ to you, CK)…okay, where would said slope lead? If we have to give sixth-grade girls shots of yet another vaccine is the slope that we would have to tell them more and more about sex, or that we would have to start giving them more and more vaccinations? Today, an HPV vaccine…tomorrow, a vaccine against, uh, herpes…by next year, we will be vaccinating our children against livestock-based STD’s. I don’t see it happening.

If the concern is about having to explain it to kids, a few questions:

  1. How many sixth-grade girls really listen to their parents? Seriously, I have no idea, but I doubt it’s a huge number.
  2. How is vaccinating someone against a virus that renders its victims infertile and/or kills them a bad thing? Why not play up the aspect of “this will protect you from an unpleasant bug” rather than “now you can shag little Johnny from down the street with reckless abandon”? It’s the religious conservatives who are constantly cataloguing the omnipresence of sexuality in our culture–a catalog I would totally want to see, BTW.

My point is this: kids aren’t taught sex ed, kids aren’t taught about contraception, kids aren’t protected against preventable STD’s, kids develop hormones, nature takes its course in secret because the ‘rents would totally freak, and then adults act surprised and horrified when teens turn up pregnant or with STD’s or cancer.

Sure it’s a slippery slope–I just have not been convinced that it’s a slope leading anywhere particularly bad.

And no, I don’t have kids. Anyone who thinks I lack the right/ability to opine on this subject because I am not a parent probably has kids who will grow up to join a Sataninc cult and/or lesbian commune to spite your haughty sense of morality. Or maybe I’m wrong.

BTW, WWJD? He seemed to have a thing for helping the sick. Preventing disease in the first place would have freed him up for even more miracles.

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Postmodernism, redux

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The smarmy genius behind the Sokal affair has written a great piece in the LA Times about Washington’s general aversion to science that conflicts with prescribed policy positions.

It’s amusing to me (for so long as I can keep from vomiting), the way opponents of such concepts as evolution and global warming seek to use politics to prevent observable scientific phenomena from seeing the light of day. Not too long ago, it was postmodernists–usually painted into the same rhetorical corner as “liberals,” “secularists,” “abortionists,” and presumably vampires and werewolves–who made the most impassioned arguments about the inherent unreliability of science. It would appear the wheel is still spinning.

Postmodernism essentially said, inter alia, that scientific observations cannot be trusted because everything is influenced by cultural dialogue, or something like that. I have never been a student of postmodernism, so I may be misstating its premises somewhat. Nevertheless, it is not clear to me how cultural perceptions can affect gravity.

The Sokal affair was an amusing effort to address the general lack of scientific rigor in postmodern thought. From the Wikipedia entry:

The Sokal Affair was a hoax by physicist Alan Sokal perpetrated on the editorial staff and readership of a leading postmodern cultural studies journal called Social Text (published by Duke University). In 1996, Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University, submitted a pseudoscientific paper for publication in Social Text, as an experiment to see if a journal in that field would, in Sokal’s words: “publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions”.

The paper, titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” was published in the Spring/Summer 1996 “Science Wars” issue of Social Text, which had no peer review process, and so did not submit it for outside review. On the day of its publication, Sokal announced in another publication, Lingua Franca, that the article was a hoax, calling his paper “a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense”, which was “structured around the silliest quotations I could find about mathematics and physics” made by humanities academics.

In short, this event exposed the intellectual bankruptcy of much (if not all) postmodern thought.

Now if only someone would do something similar for attacks from the opposite side of the political spectrum.

The motivations of critics of global warming seem clear to me. There are many financial interests at stake, and who wants to give up their big cars, frequent flyer miles, and giant houses if they do not absolutely have to?

The motives of intelligent design proponents, on the other hand, are less clear to me, at least insofar as financial interests are less readily apparent. It seems like we have a dispute over the philosophical implications of either (a) accepting the reality of widespread observable phenomena, regardless of any metaphyiscal implications; or (b) clinging to the dictates of an ancient, repeatedly translated, poorly-edited book of which no original drafts remain (Am I talking about the Bible or the original scrolls describing Yggdrasil? You decide. I don’t even know if Vikings used scrolls.)

What we really have here is a dispute over the nature of reality–is our purpose in this life to be gleaned from what we can observe about our physical reality, or can our purpose be determined based on what we really, really, really, really, really want to be true?

I’m going to go with the first choice, that any purpose in this life, to the extent there is one, is determined from what we can see and prove about the world. A cell phone is not powered by faith (sorry, creationists). Neither is it powered by cultural memes (sorry, postmodernists).

Here are the points I am trying to make in this post:

  1. Postmodernism is an unverifiable load of crap.
  2. Intelligent design is an unverifiable load of crap, as well as a breathtakingly dull cop-out. To say that life is so complex that it just must have been created by something, end of story, has about as much intellectual heft as the arguments I painstakingly crafted in high school to get out of doing homework–at the end of the day, many questions were left unanswered.
  3. Therefore, both “liberals” and “conservatives” have, at varying times, put forth worldviews that are at staggering odds with observable reality.
  4. No postmodernist has ever been elected president, held a leadership osition in Congress, attempted to subvert school boards or state boards of education, or generally ventured off campus.
  5. Intelligent design proponents and global warming critics have done all the things listed in #4. That’s what makes me want to vomit.
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