I haven’t really been reading the propaganda clearinghouse of the Discoverup Institute lately, primarily because I stopped finding anything funny there amidst the repetitive plugs for bullshit “academic freedom” legislation. But eventually I knew something would pop up, given that the low-rent apparatchiks who write on that steaming turd can’t resist attempting to say something intelligent once in a while (and failing). Lo and behold, Logan Gage to the rescue:
First, Altschuler amazingly makes a historical reference to the French revolution, noting that the great chemist Lavoisier was beheaded at a judge’s order. He then tells us, “Although scientists fared much better in the 19th and 20th centuries, millions of people remain uneasy with or hostile to them.” Yet this frame of reference loses all its historical content. It was not the religious or the anti-evolution crowd that led the French revolution but rather a materialist ideology of man and his place in the world stemming from Rousseau and other thinkers. Thus Altschuler gets it exactly backwards. Oh, and in case you haven’t noticed, judges haven’t exactly been on our side lately either.
Anyone familiar with the philosophes may be scratching their heads right this moment, trying to come up with a way that Gage has managed to avoid some very basic historical details of the French Revolution. Number one, that Rousseau, as well as Diderot and Voltaire, were proponents of de-anthropomorphized creationism, i.e., what Gage and his cohorts have repackaged as “Intelligent Design”. Number two, that the execution of Lavoisier was ordered by proto-cdesign proponentsist and anti-atheist reactionary Maximilien Robespierre during the Reign of Terror. Or that Lavoisier’s execution had basically nothing to do with the science versus religion but had everything to do with the fact that he was a French aristocrat and tax-collector who came to be seen as a counter-revolutionary traitor (a mistake that was, in all fairness, instantiated by the writer excoriated by Gage). It’s hard to believe that you can get so much wrong in one little paragraph. Nay, one little sentence within said paragraph.
