These fantastic textbook disclaimer stickers are a nice illustration of what Julian Sanchez discusses vis-à-vis public reason. Below the cut I go into longform about how the gods must be crazy, but the important thing is to click on those funny stickers.
If you ask me my opinion on, say, a preferred policy for taxation, and my response is, say, that I support a progressive taxation primarily so that public funds proportional to each tax bracket are set aside for the service of (that other Israelite god) Moloch, the Abomination of the Children of Ammon, to whom I insist that we pay tribute in the form of the daily, fiery consumption of toddlers, well, we probably won't come to a common decision about tax rates. We won't even have a shared understanding of even the components of taxation, because I'm unwilling to submit to a common vocabulary.
The Swarthmore professor who made those disclaimer stickers (all but the original that was mandated by some backwater schoolboard, anyway) somewhat angrily mocks the evolution/Creationism/ID debate; the scientific/Christian arguments in general make for a classic example of the utility of common discourse principles, because the whole science bag is about commonly agreed upon principles and shared evidentiary standards.
Yglesias notes how Christian policy arguments have successfully influenced the feel of the discourse. He gives as an example the gay marriage debate and the fact that both Jonathan Rauch and Andrew Sullivan make public arguments that gay marriage could, in fact, strengthen straight marriage, while their sub rosa, actual beliefs hold that discrimination against gay couples is wrong.
The absence of the empirical from the empirically begging threat-to-the-family position is astonishing—there aren't many data at all to be had on the subject, yet the anti-marriage crowd states conclusions as if they were widely supported by independently verified results. And completely confounding is the absence of the empirical from the public debate between evolution and Creationism, because there are no data to support Creationism and mines of data to support evolution—and this should, after all, be a debate that the empirically supported subject wins. And Creationists and IDers really are presenting their arguments in the guise of science . . . just, you know, science that is not based on data or the scientific method or labs.
I think that the rehabilitation of religious conviction, now granted equal and opposite status to whatever rational argument is at hand, fits under the larger umbrella of the definitive problem with the media: they've really fucked the discourse in the pursuit of objectivity. A Creationist with strongly held beliefs and a evolutionary biologist with a Ph.D. from an accredited university clearly do not sit at an equal table just by dint of their having opposing views. Would that media figures were professionalized (i.e., accredited), because then you'd have a shot at infusing the media with the Enlightenment principles upon which the nation was founded. And Wolf Blitzer would be out of a job. But so long as "sacred institution" makes for a legitimate public counterargument and isn't mocked off-stage, we may as well be asking ourselves "What Would the Ammonites Do?" when it comes to policy prescriptions.
Posted by Kriston at November 23, 2004 12:33 PMRauch and Andrew Sullivan make public arguments that gay marriage could, in fact, strengthen gay marriage
??
Posted by: j.scott barnard at November 23, 2004 3:14 PMCorrected—sorry, I'm dealing with a few MT drafts, so there may be more errors. . . .
Posted by: Kriston at November 23, 2004 3:25 PMCertainly religious convictions have no place in debates about natural science, but I don't think that you can say the same thing about moral science. Natural science is an empirically-based discipline while moral science usually lends itself to deductive reasoning from first principles.
Posted by: steve-o at November 23, 2004 9:04 PMReligious convictions definitely have a place in moral science. They inform decisions and broadly outline the sort of arguments you're going to use to assert your positions. My complaint and opinion is religious convictions have become de facto political arguments, as if America's strong Christian heritage or population were reason enough and Christians should not have to step beyond the pulpit to defend their policies. It's not really the way it works in Washington, I imagine, but it plays this way in the media.
Posted by: Kriston at November 24, 2004 9:09 AMkeep in mind that it plays this way in the media in large part because it plays this way with so many of its viewers. and the media, more and more, is a business in which the customer must be at least half-right.
Posted by: matty at November 24, 2004 1:47 PMI think that your outrage is thirty years too late, Capps. Its settled law that legislation or governmental conduct must have a secular purpose; otherwise, it violates the Establishment Clause. (I think that the case is called Lemon, but Con Law was a long time ago.)
Posted by: steve-o at November 24, 2004 9:47 PMThe problem with NDT (neo Darwinist theory)... that is, the belief that all life evolved out of a single-celled organism formed from raw materials millions of years ago... where mutations combined with natural selection served as the "engine" for this process...
...the problem here is that the scientific evidence clearly shows that this is not possible. Many very prominent scientists concur that this is impossible based on scientific evidence.
But it is not "science" that drives this debate on the pro-evolution side. Rather, the majority of the scientific community is determined to rule out any and all explanations that do not fit their pre-conceived world views BEFORE they give any alternate explanations a chance.
Basically, creationism has never been disproved... not even by virtue of evolution being (supposedly) proven. Rather... many scientists rule out creationism and then "sell" the best theory which conforms to naturalistic philosophy regardless of the facts.
Regarding your cute little disclaimers, the leading evolutionists of the 1800s and early 1900s were awful racists as they thought that Africans were less developed than Europeans.
For example, Thomas Huxley said:
No rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the white man. And if this be true, it is simply incredible that, when all his disabilities are removed, and our prognathous relative has a fair field and no favour, as well as no oppressor, he will be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a contest which is to be carried out by thoughts and not by bites"
In several other ways, I can detail numerous ways in which philosophy had "colored" the science of origins in very perposterous ways thoughout modern history.
(and you'll thought they came to these conclusions about Evolution because the "scientific method" led them there? ...nothing could be further from the truth)
Posted by: Rob McEwen at November 25, 2004 8:33 PMOh my god, he's not kidding.
Posted by: Erik at November 26, 2004 10:35 PMNo, I'm not.
Think about this. If it really did happen via Evolution, the evidence left behind (in numerous ways) ought to be so powerful that someone trying to argue to the contrary ought to look like someone arguing that the Easter Bunny is real. Would you agree? If so, take your best shot. You can start by telling me this: If you had a 10 year old child how somehow got exposed to some "crazy" creationist and came home doubting Evolution. Then your child asked, "Dad, what are the best evidences that Evolution is proven", what would you say?
Oh, and BTW, see if you can do this without sneers and sarcasm. I find that Evolutionists often are heavy on putdowns but loose on light on the facts.
Posted by: Rob McEwen at November 27, 2004 2:30 AMAfter a couple of days of "no takers", I'm debating this on the site which liked to Kriston's post. Therefore, if anyone wants to debate this issue, please do so there instead.
http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/archives/2004/11/warning_this_po.html
(You might have to sign in using "typekey" or whatever its called)
Posted by: Rob McEwen at November 29, 2004 10:56 AMCoincidentally, if anyone wants to see just how ludicrous the Creationist movement can sometimes be, it might be worth peeking at Rob's last post on the site he lists.
It's quite an eye-opener.
Posted by: Bernard at November 30, 2004 12:21 PMDon't stop there... read the whole thing. In fact, my last post does seem a little strange outside of the context of the thread as a whole. Therefore, please do read the whole thing.
Rob McEwen
Posted by: Rob McEwen at November 30, 2004 3:12 PMhi good story
Posted by: emma at December 6, 2004 12:56 PMthis site sucs
