Posted in Booknotes at 9:15 pm by nemo
Review and expose of Father Richard John Neuhaus’ new book. He is one of the hidden forces behind the ID movement. The review, not free online, “insists America is essentially a Christian country” with a “critical examination of a religious radical”.
THE CHRISTIANIZING OF AMERICA.
Without a Doubt
by Damon Linker
Post date 03.24.06 | Issue date 04.03.06
Liberal modernity exasperates traditional religion. It fosters a pluralism that denies any one faith the power to organize the whole of social life. It teaches that public authorities must submit to the consent of those over whom they aspire to rule, thereby undermining the legitimacy of all forms of absolutism. It employs the systematic skepticism of the scientific method to settle important questions of public policy. It encourages the growth of the capitalist marketplace, which unleashes human appetites and gives individuals the freedom to choose among an ever-expanding range of ways to satisfy them….
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03.30.06
Posted in Evolution at 10:08 pm by nemo
The Richmond Times Despatch asks the Archbishop of C. about Creationism.
I think it is understandable many Christians would wan’t to distance themselves from Creationism, but there is a strain of dubious thinking in the strategic attempt to make Christian and evolution compatible. The position is most double-talk, an attempt to not make waves.
Creationism
Richmond Times-Dispatch Mar 29, 2006
The religious affairs correspondent for Britain’s Guardian recently asked Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury:
“Are you comfortable with teaching creationism?”
The Archbishop answered:
“Ah, not very. Not very. I think creationism is, in a sense, a kind of category mistake, as if the Bible were a theory like other theories. Whatever the biblical account of creation is, it’s not a theory alongside theories. It’s not as if the writer of Genesis or whatever sat down and said, well, how am I going to explain all this . . . .[F]or most of the history of Christianity, and I think this is fair enough . . . ,there’s been an awareness that a belief that everything depends on the creative act of God is quite compatible with a degree of uncertainty or latitude about how precisely that unfolds in creative time.
“You find someone like St. Augustine, absolutely clear God created everything, he takes Genesis fairly literally. But he then says well, what is it that provides the potentiality of change in the world? . . . And some Christians responding to Darwin in the 19th Century said, well, that sounds a bit like what St. Augustine said of the seeds of processes.”
Williams makes two essential points:
Creationism (or its derivative, intelligent design) does not belong in public classrooms.
Supporters of creationism distort the scientific meaning of “theory” when they sneer at the “theory of evolution” even as they diminish the Bible and religious faith when they describe creationism and ID as theories in competition with Darwinism.
The Archbishop of Canterbury may not be infallible, but in this instance he has it exactly right.
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Posted in The Axial Age, World History and The Eonic Effect at 8:59 pm by nemo
Here’s a review of
The Great Transformation : The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions (Armstrong, Karen)
by Karen Armstrong
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03.29.06
Posted in Evolution at 10:33 pm by nemo
Kevin Kelly’s SPECULATIONS ON THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE. But technologically driven change has never resolved the issue of human consciousness.
SPECULATIONS ON THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE
By Kevin Kelly
Science will continue to surprise us with what it discovers and creates; then it will astound us by devising new methods to surprises us. At the core of science’s self-modification is technology. New tools enable new structures of knowledge and new ways of discovery. The achievement of science is to know new things; the evolution of science is to know them in new ways. What evolves is less the body of what we know and more the nature of our knowing
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Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy, Evolution at 10:25 pm by nemo
Maybe they are kidding. You mean it took this long to reapply Darwin to business. You guys started it first.
The Latest Boardroom Darwinism
From: Inc. Magazine, March 2006 | Page: 26 By: Donna Fenn
Finding fresh management insights in The Origin of the Species.
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Posted in Philosophy, History, Evolution at 8:32 pm by nemo
Madeleine Bunting wishes enlightenment on the enlightenment, Enlighten Me, comments at Crooked Timber and here.
This kind of amnesia about the enlightenment is getting a bit tiresome, but after the reign of postmodernism it is perhaps not surprising.
We have lost the ability, it seems, to defend a crucial turning point in history, and get distracted by debates over progress and rationality.
I can only recommend a close look at the eonic effect. There we see that the issue is the modern transition, which includes to total effect of the period of transition starting with the Reformation and leading to the Great Divide, i.e. the period the Enlightenment.
This transition, then, includes The Reformation, The Scientific Revolution, modern philosophy from Descarte to German Classical Philosophy, Hume, the Industrial Revolution, the birth of modern capitalism, the birth of democracy….
That’s a short list.
Does Madeleine Bunting wish this never happened, and prefer to let the status quo ante stand as superior? Yes or no?
Asking why Islam had no Reformation is an excellent question. Here again the question requires perception of the eonic effect.
It is important to understand the immense counterrevolution being attempted against this phase of history. So I think it important to recast the whole issue in a new updated form without the Eurocentric nonsense that has temporarily derailed the question.
In general, debates over rationality can be useless. Such quibbles. We see that the Enlightenment itself includes its own ‘dialectic’ here, and Kant’s ‘critique’ of reason is one of the seminal sources of the very opposition to the Enlightenment we see, as a sort of postmodern backwash.
These issues, then, are dwarfed by the transition factor, which includes a comprehensive, truly massive social transformation that rapidly began to globalize in the nineteenth century. The Enlightenment is just one small aspect of that total transformation.
Part of the problem is the narrow definition of the Enlightenment in terms of ‘reason’. But even this is a small universe of discourse, between the philosophes, Kant, Hegel, and many others. The Enlightenment as a periodized cultural totality inside the still greater totality of the modern transition is beyond definition, being a greater dialectical unity. Thus postmodernism is simply a leaf from the Enlightenment book, a moment in the progression started by figures such as Kant.
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Posted in The Axial Age, The Eonic Effect, History at 9:54 pm by nemo
Karen Armstrong’s new book, The Great Transformation, came out today and I have been reading it at high speed. First impressions: what a hopeless mess, just as I feared and predicted on the basis of her other book this year, The History of Myth. In fact, the latter book is somewhat clearer on Armstrong’s views, if not agenda, since it addresses the question of modernity a little more openly. I do not see anything about a ’second Axial Age’ in The Great Transformation. Armstrong has come to recognize the ‘Great Western Transformation’ too, but then she apparently can’t figure out how to square this with her ’second Axial Age’, which the many New Age movements are hoping to bring about in some postmodern reaction to modernity.
Armstrong’s views seem to have shifted, and, apparently, she has drifted into a kind of ’soft Buddhist’ cliche syndrome. The ‘Axial ethos’ is all about compassion, etc…
That’s the first gross misconception: there is no ‘Axial ethos’. The Axial Age shows parallel emergence of quite different things that can’t be collated. In fact, it is a play of opposites. Buddhism and monotheism, for example. And she simply fumbles the ball completely on the Greeks, trying to fit them into her prejudicial logos/mythos distinction on the side of logos. That’s nonsense. The Greek Axial period shows a stupendous variety of things, and the last great flowering of polytheism could just as well be claimed here. The emergence of the ‘logos’ theme in such figures as Heraclitus deserves something better than a swipe at ‘Greek rationalism’. What a bad piece of work.
Then there is the hopeless confusion of dynamics and content. The existence of the Axial interval, as Jaspers defined it, and as I slightly redefined it in my eonic model, is itself the question, and this question transcends the content. Thus Armstrong falls into confusion because Zarathustra is not in the short Axial interval, nor is Christianity or Islam. To include these she is unsure what to do, sometimes suggesting an expansion of the Axial period, making nonsense of the whole question. The simpler explanation is that the issue of the Axial period has no intrinsic connection to monotheism. That should be obvious if you see so many contradictions in parallel.
The solution is to see that the ‘transformation’ is something quite abstract, beyond the issue of particular religions.
Most of all, as in the eonic model,we need to see the phenomenon in a greater context, that of the whole history/evolution of civilization.
There are so many misconceptions in Armstrong’s book I barely know where to begin and feel a bit annoyed that someone with considerable market share will so damage the important data of the Axial Age. Frankly, it’s possible noone will take her seriously, such is the wishywashy character of her interpretations.
Also, I must strongly criticize current historiography/social science, and the mindset of scientism, Darwinism, and the rest. These fields are incapable of dealing with the obvious paradox/enigma of the Axial Age. It has been banished from discussion. And yet this data, interpreted rightly, is immensely important for our understanding of history. The more’s the pity Armstrong will, without interference, mess up the whole question, with no serious review or commentary likely from the scientific/historiographical sources.
I will be commenting further on Armstrong’s book, although the sheer scope of the problems with this book makes a critique a huge task.
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Posted in Evolution at 8:57 pm by nemo
I was impressed by Fuller’s essay at Crooked Timber, in the Mooney seminar. Why are there so few people in academia who can see the problems with Darwinian theory? It is baffling, and dangerous. Fuller’s relaxed attitude toward ID, however, leaves me to ask: Me Too! I am an outsider like Darwin, have an decisive critique of Darwin on the descent of man, amounting to a falsification, and a claim to demonstrate a ‘glimpse of evolution’, one that I have never retracted because it is solid.
My only problem is the lack of Ad Budget dollars. Thus I think this is not about science on either side, but about media control, and, more than that, the critical mind control of young adults in the battle for paradigm control.
Just how destructive that can be is visible in a book like Dennett’s. Intelligent people conditioned to narrow focus reach adulthood as true believers, with pathetic results. A whole generation of Dawkins types is thus coming into existence, and they are strangely narrow and stupid.
A similar phenomenon would come into existence if ID were to succeed. Fundamentalists with sophistical math skills like Dembski? An even worse outcome that what we have now.
In any case, if you open the debate, then you open it to many more than the two current contenders, Darwinism and ID. Otherwise, what is better propaganda than a pseudo-debate between two media blocks. That’s better than censorship, to monopolize dissent.
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Posted in Science & Religion, Evolution at 9:28 pm by nemo
From Crooked Timber Seminar.
Which leaves two questions; could there be a “Democratic War on Science”, and is this purely an American phenomenon?
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Posted in Science & Religion, Evolution at 8:05 pm by nemo
Why the intelligent design lobby thanks God for Richard Dawkins
Anti-religious Darwinists are promulgating a false dichotomy between faith and science that gives succour to creationists
Dembski praises Dawkins for being a foil for theism. Pharyngula bashes back.
Dembski’s tactic is a tried and true ‘psych the opposition’ tactic, that might/might not work, but I think Darwinists should forget the god question, as Darwinists. The issue is: does natural selection work as a theory? Not, natural selection explains everything and makes it easy to be an intellectual fulfilled atheist. The later is an abuse of theory. Anyway, what if natural selection fails. Creationists will be hot on your tail. Since, however ’stupid’, they realize it has failed, they will take you up on your offer.
As a Darwinist, of course, you haven’t a clue. You are still back in the Natural Selection mythology as the Bible Belt steps on the accelerator.
Such is the life of the ‘brights’.
To me, faith is a played out theological vein. It is not a question of making science and religion compatible, nor of entanglement in the futile theism/atheism dialectic, but of coming up with a better theory of evolution, and of transcending the mechanization of traditionalist religion, to achieve a new and higher religious understanding. The later can be something within the secular, and something that actually serves human potential, instead of making robot believers.
The correct use of the term ‘faith’ is in the Kantian ‘religion within the limits of reason’ discourse. And there ‘faith’ is a post-metaphysical non-belief system that can confront the complexities, and the dilemma, of the moral will, to whatever degree we might understand that. It is not a question of ‘faith’, in the decayed usage of Christians, but of being wary of the dilemma. To assume you have no ’self’, if that were metaphysical, can backfire. One should have, not faith, but a fine sense of the dangers of disbelief.
Meanwhile, Ruse has a point, as does Dembski. I conveyed my critiques of Dennett to a sufi acquaintance, expecting some agreement. Reply, are you kidding? Dennett’s book is perfect, grounds for a fight to the finish. They could never win such a battle, either.
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03.26.06
Posted in 1848+, Critique of Evolutionary Economy, History at 9:48 pm by nemo
Some left comentary on Fukuyama
Hegel has left behind left wing descendants as well. They are found in the communist, socialist and worker’s movements around the world who envision freedom in a radically different way than the FF’s of this world. Freedom is envisioned as human solidarity, not “free” market exploitation, as putting people before profits and using the economic resources of the world to benefit all of its people not just a class of elite owners of capital.
I agree with FF that the Bushites have to go, but so does he.
It is worth studying Marx and E ngels in the ‘48 revolution: e.g. The Red ’48s, by Oscar Hammen. This can free thinking from the leftist bilge that comes later.
This was the era in which the term ‘democracy’ got fixed, and Marx, in the name of true democracy, left his ambiguous legacy that came to be anti-democratic, having uttered like a slip of the tongue the Roman legal term ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, giving birth to that which Lenin later appropriated, to what would have been the horror of Marx, no doubt.
But, without defending stale Marxism, it is important to consider that Marx is the true democrat yet seeded its opposite, and this is incomprehensible unless you study that revolutionary period in which Marx’s terminology on class struggle is born. What was one to do? Sixty years after the French Revolution, a simple republic was seemingly unachievable, and the gesture toward republicanism/democracy produced the cooptation of the workers. And the split of the ‘bourgeoisie’ from the workers in the June slaughter, and so on. Note that if you already have a liberal democracy, a revolution is one thing. But if you don’t even have a republic, the attempt to create a ‘true democracy’ would obviously have to include the working class. But they were factored out at that point, hence the fumbled football on the term ‘democracy’, and the embittered motion to the left, to achieve the ‘end of history’. (This account oversimplifies).
The point is: in light of Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ idea: what system does ‘democracy’ refer to? Trouble here for Fukuyama.
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