Our old friend Dr. Dr. Bill is at it again, this time blowing a shitload of smoke over the supposed Darwin-Hitler “connection”, setting up a nice, big, dry strawman in his title:
“What’s wrong with uttering “Darwin” and “Hitler” in the same breath?”
Sorry Bill, no one is saying there is anything wrong with that. There is however something wrong with drawing the most tangential connections to smear your opponents with bargain basement guilt by association tactics, which appears to be what you immediately proceed to do:
“The Nazi emphasis on proper breeding, racial purity, and weeding out defectives come from taking Darwin’s theory seriously and applying it at the level of society. Yes, Darwin himself did not take these such steps, but Galton and Haeckel, his contemporaries, saw where this was going and did.”
In Dembski’s world, “taking Darwin’s theory seriously” apparently amounts to drawing spurious ethical and political conclusions from an incomplete understanding of it. I find it highly amusing that although Dembski has devoted a large amount of academic energy to theology, philosophy and rhetoric, he is apparently entirely unaware of the fact that this is a flagrant invocation of the naturalistic fallacy. Drawing moral conclusions from simple descriptions of the natural world is a tenuous proposition at best. Our lack of gills is not a moral admonishment against scuba-diving, nor is the germ theory of disease an admonishment against vaccination and antibiotics. Statements to the contrary are simply ethically vacuous. Many of our greatest, and that is often to say “most moral”, achievements as a civilization came from our defiance of “natural order”, not our conformity with it.
UPDATE: A little exasperation over Dembski’s long-winded and almost entirely irrelevant list of quotations is also in order. Needless to say, arguing from authority may work in theology, but science offers few sacrifices. Dembski’s problem is that he can’t distinguish the prescriptive cosmology that characterizes his inclinations from a well supported, descriptive theory such as evolution. Given his failure to subordinate reality to ideology, he assumes that everyone else does so as well.
UPDATE II: I must be tired, I somehow forgot to once again point out the obvious that somehow manages to elude IDers. Damn you, four of sleep!
April 18, 2008 at 8:38 pm |
I wish the ADL would smack these fuckers down.
April 19, 2008 at 1:17 pm |
In the first sentence you quote, Dembski uses the intriguing verbal device known as linguification, the peculiar kind of exaggeration when a claim about the world is turned into an assertion about language, an assertion which is often transparently false. This is what happens when someone writes, “You can’t say bisexual without following it with chic,” or, alternatively, “Those Volvo-driving, latte-sipping liberals can’t even spell family values.” There may be a real phenomenon at work: for example, mainstream media attitudes towards different sexual orientations have indeed been changing over the past couple decades. However, this underlying claim, which may have some truth to it, is transmuted into one which is flamboyantly false.
Scientists have no trouble uttering the names Darwin and Hitler in the same breath. Ask PZ Myers or Richard Dawkins to read the following sentence aloud:
We cannot legitimately blame Darwin’s science for Hitler’s madness.
I doubt they’d choke on their own tongues. Or, consider this passage from page 260 of Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World.
Gee, I didn’t have very much trouble copying that down or reading it aloud just now.
I mention this because it seems symptomatic of Dembski’s intellectual laziness and rhetorical sleaze factor.
April 23, 2008 at 6:03 pm |
[...] not because such certainty is compelled by objective reasoning. Like his IDeological compadre Leroy, he simply assumes everyone else must do the [...]