A reader wants to know how I can call myself a conservative while posting links to the ACLU website & praising Barbara Forrest (plaintiff witness at the Dover trial, ACLU member, People for American Way member, etc., etc.) He also wants to know what I think of my favorite culture magazine, The New Criterion, running “a pro-I.D. piece” in their current issue.
To the first: Churchill famously remarked that if Hitler invaded Hell, he [Churchill] would cheerfully sign a pact with the Devil. The integrity of science is very important to me. I would go so far as to identify it with the survival of our civilization. The I.D. people are making war against that integrity — poisoning the wells of reason.
I’ll gladly support efforts by the ACLU to keep pseudoscience out of public school science classrooms.
To the second: perhaps my reader didn’t finish the TNC article. Quote from about 3/4 of the way through:
“Creationists cannot deny the fact of evolution–the development over extended periods of time of new forms of life and the survival of those forms that are the fittest. These aspects of the theory of evolution are adequately confirmed by facts and must be accepted as facts by rational observers. Those who insist that human beings were originally created in their present form are as irrational as those who believe the world is flat.”
But “that human beings were originally created in their present form” is exactly what the I.D. people believe! If John Silber supports the I.D.
program, he sure has a funny way of showing it.
In fact, Silber’s main argument in the TNC piece is against the arrogance of scientists who make grand pronouncements about the nature & meaning of life, the universe etc. He does not think they are any better qualified to make those pronouncements than you, me, or my dentist. I agree, with some not-very-significant quibbles.
That some scientists are arrogant, obnoxious jerks does not, however, tell us anything about science, and is certainly not a justification for making war against science.