August 29, 2009
Creationists, Now They’re Coming for Your Children
Imagine you are a teacher of more recent history, and your lessons on 20th-century Europe are boycotted, heckled or otherwise disrupted by well-organised, well-financed and politically muscular groups of Holocaust-deniers. Unlike my hypothetical Rome-deniers, Holocaustdeniers really exist. They are vocal, superficially plausible and adept at seeming learned. They are supported by the president of at least one currently powerful state, and they include at least one bishop of the Roman Catholic Church. Imagine that, as a teacher of European history, you are continually faced with belligerent demands to “teach the controversy”, and to give “equal time” to the “alternative theory” that the Holocaust never happened but was invented by a bunch of Zionist fabricators.
Fashionably relativist intellectuals chime in to insist that there is no absolute truth: whether the Holocaust happened is a matter of personal belief; all points of view are equally valid and should be equally “respected”.
The plight of many science teachers today is not less dire. When they attempt to expound the central and guiding principle of biology; when they honestly place the living world in its historical context — which means evolution; when they explore and explain the very nature of life itself, they are harried and stymied, hassled and bullied, even threatened with loss of their jobs. At the very least their time is wasted at every turn. They are likely to receive menacing letters from parents and have to endure the sarcastic smirks and close-folded arms of brainwashed children. They are supplied with state-approved textbooks that have had the word “evolution” systematically expunged, or bowdlerized into “change over time”. Once, we were tempted to laugh this kind of thing off as a peculiarly American phenomenon. Teachers in Britain and Europe now face the same problems, partly because of American influence, but more significantly because of the growing Islamic presence in the classroom — abetted by the official commitment to “multiculturalism” and the terror of being thought racist.
Posted by Robin Varghese at 02:25 PM | Permalink
Comments
I hope that there aren't many "relativist intellectuals" around anymore who insist that all ideas are true. In fact, I'm not sure there ever were many of them. People who hold that all ideas are true aren't intellectuals, they're stupids. And besides, if they're right, then my view that not all ideas are true is just as true as theirs, so there!
Posted by: JonJ | Aug 29, 2009 9:53:00 PM
It strikes me that Professor Dawkins could stand to learn a bit from Professor Sullivan (vide supra) about the nature of contemporary American Christianity. My own outsider's impression is that in mainstream Protestant churches and increasingly in Catholic ones, hierarchy counts for very little. The clergy are not treated as learned exegetes of a complex network of historical, textual, and traditional knowledge. (Probably good policy, since among the evangelical movement at least, they tend themselves not to consider the Bible at all allegorical, but rather the literal truth.) Instead they serve as inspiration for the individual's personal spiritual journey, which seldom involves any reflection about the interaction of faith and reason, or science and religion, but tends toward an egocentric obsession with a personal God who will solve their problems. Combine this with the more broadly socio-cultural phenomenon of anti-intellectualism and the sorts of things Prof Dawkins describes are quite unremarkable.
Posted by: Philodemos | Aug 30, 2009 12:09:49 AM
(Addendum) Prof Dawkins also makes one plainly false claim in the course of denouncing logic-choppers: "Evolution is a fact in the same sense as it is a fact that Paris is in the northern hemisphere." How absurd. The latter is true by fiat. Surely evolution is not true because Prof Dawkins or anyone else makes it so.
Posted by: Philodemos | Aug 30, 2009 12:13:10 AM
give me a break. I'm not going to sit here and read your self-righteous plight reminding me of those teachers when I grew up that tried to shove that evolutionist theory (which it still is) down my throat. Get it right.
Posted by: JM | Aug 30, 2009 2:40:05 AM
Many contemporary religions are in fact businesses. Maybe Dawkins & Co could cut a deal? Financed by grants from the big scientific funders...
Posted by: Mike Cope | Aug 30, 2009 4:27:16 AM
Let me say that I always find Prof. Dawkins' articles interesting, even if much of his writing focuses on the negative aspects of the religious experience. I found this article quite even-tempered in that regard. I am always encouraged when he describes dialog with the clergy on the subject of science and religion.
For all the nonsense promulgated in the name of religion, it is unrealistic to expect that religious belief will somehow "go away". Atheists (like myself) would do well to engage the more progressive parts of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, etc. They are natural allies in the battle against ignorance and intolerance.
Posted by: Bill | Aug 30, 2009 6:03:13 AM
Fashionably relativist intellectuals chime in to insist that there is no absolute truth: whether the Holocaust happened is a matter of personal belief; all points of view are equally valid and should be equally “respected”.
Who are these people?
I am getting tired of the Science Lobby inventing opponents in order to paint themselves as the defenders of reason and truth.
This is why it is standard practice in academia to require citations when claims are made or ideas are referenced. Pop-intellectuals hold themselves to no such standard.
Posted by: Nick Smyth | Aug 30, 2009 6:06:31 PM
Nick,
I wrote an essay for 3QD some time ago which deals with Dawkins's views in such matters: Richard Dawkins, Relativism and Truth. I agree with you for the most part, but it's a little harsh of you to dismiss Dawkins as a "pop intellectual," no?
Posted by: Abbas Raza | Aug 30, 2009 6:46:39 PM
"pop intellectual" indeed! He's a rock star!
Posted by: Vicki Baker | Aug 30, 2009 7:19:15 PM
My turn to call him a matinee idol atheist.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Aug 30, 2009 7:34:30 PM
Abbas,
I do not think the title is unfair, and I do not think you were harsh enough with Dawkins in your review of "What is Truth?". My criticism here is equally applicable in the case of that article. The man honestly thinks that creating ridiculous parodies of his opponents and then knocking down "their" "arguments" is a respectable way of criticizing philosophers.
I think your retraction was unwarranted: in the article, he does not take care to say who exactly he is targeting. Rather, he opens by explicitly claiming that his target is those who "learn philosophy". The target is unquestionably philosophers and students of the discipline in general.
His "Cultural Relativist" and his "Popperian/Kuhnian" are ludicrous parodies of actual positions, particularly in the case of the latter. I cannot believe that he actually refers to Popper and Kuhn as "low-grade... pseudo-philosophical poseurs", and I cannot believe that he accuses Thomas Kuhn (of all people!) of relying on a single piece of scientific history, the contrast between Newtonian and Einsteinian gravitation.
My personal hypothesis--which may be falsified in the future--is that Dawkins hasn't read any of these people. If he had, he would know that Kuhn's work discusses an extraordinary range of scientific history, not just Newtonian and Einsteinian gravitation.
If my hypothesis is correct, Dawkins is therefore speculating wildly about material he is not familiar with, and this is pop-intellectualism in a nutshell, is it not?
Posted by: Nick Smyth | Aug 31, 2009 5:02:41 PM
Nick, I note that Dawkins doesn't seem to be referring to Kuhn and Popper directly, but rather to those who name-drop them in defense of philosophical "relativism." It is interesting, though, that he doesn't come to the defense of the more nuanced arguments of the actual philosophers Popper and Kuhn. I think it is because he is uninterested in any serious challenge to his Whiggish epistemology, and it is extremely plausible he has simply never read them. There's always been a streak of hauteur in Dawkins (he now blurbs himself, on the cover of his new book, as "the most formidable intellect in public discourse"), and he may well feel he doesn't need to read his critics and disputants to know he is right.
As Abbas mentions in his piece, Dawkins doesn't seem to appreciate that no "relativist" actually challenges truth statements in their defining contexts. (There is no relativist position that airliners don't actually fly safely, for example.) Rather they observe that all conclusions rely on priors, which is why no truth can be "absolute," or unconditioned.
The sad thing is that Dawkins is such a clear and forceful writer and has such a powerful reputation as a man of clear-headedness and right-thinking that he seems to have convinced a multitude of readers of the veracity of the correspondence theory of truth, which has been moribund for half a century.
Posted by: Chris Schoen | Aug 31, 2009 7:41:18 PM
Hi Chris,
I'm not sure. He calls some of the truth-hecklers "Popperians". What can this mean, other than that the positions in question are supposed to be (at least) reasonable facsimiles of Popper's actual philosophy?
His potshots at Popper are particularly hilarious: as you probably know, Popper denounced the relativism of Kuhnian "paradigms" for decades, basically arguing for the supremacy and authority of scientific practice.
Posted by: Nick Smyth | Aug 31, 2009 10:37:15 PM
Nick,
That's a good catch. At first he hangs the "Popperian" heckle on the "approximation" of Newtonian mechanics to General Relativity, which almost, but not quite, conjures Kuhn's idea of the scientific revolution, which isn't Popperian at all.
A couple of paragraphs later he talks about "conjecture and refutation" which does have a Popperian ring to it. But then he discards this idea using commonplace, non-scientific "truths" like "I was in Chicago" or "the sun is hotter than the earth," none of which rely upon any particular theory to give them meaning.
(For example we could mount the defense that since there is, in reality, no self, or "I," then "I" could never have been in Chicago, but if we succeeded we wouldn't "win" our court case; rather we'd overturn the entire human system of justice based on personal agency. Dawkins is up to his ears in category errors here. It's interesting that his defense of his own reductionism is that there are "levels of explanation," though he doesn't seem to want to allow access to these levels to anyone but himself)
I tend to agree, though, that to Dawkins, "Kuhn" and "Popper" are just noises people make when they try to argue against the idea of absolute truth.
Posted by: Chris Schoen | Sep 1, 2009 2:14:58 PM
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