History, Evolution, and the Darwin Debate
Secular liberalism misunderstood
The rise of secularism is more than just the coming of science. There is a twin realization based on the science of the causal and emergence of freedom. This duality was beautifully discussed by Kant.
The reign of scientism will spoil liberalism, and ruin secularism.
This post makes obvious that science education is crippled by its agenda of scientism. The issue of biology and free will was addressed by Kant two hundred years ago, and has a vast tradition of its own. But Big Science has completely censored all this.
Scientists think themselves omniscient. The sad reality is they are trained to be stupid.
In all fairness, part of the problem is the Christian attempted monopoly on all such issues, resulting in their being ruined by bad theology.
David Noble: Peer Review, Where Are The Scholars?
Friday, 26 February 2010, 2:43 pm
Column: Suzan Mazur
No, passing peer review is not the scientific equivalent of the Good Housekeeping seal of approval. . . I confess that decades ago as a Hearst Magazines fledgling I would on occasion pass by, and with some curiosity, peek in the glassed-in Good Housekeeping Institute where the coveted seal of approval was given to mattresses able to withstand umpteen thrusts, to pantyhose, pots and other utilitarian items. And how can I forget running into Johnny Weissmuller in the hall one day? The seal meant something – even Tarzan wanted to be associated. But to help me flesh-out what scientific peer review IS exactly, I contacted the Tarzan of science and technology historians, David F. Noble .
David Noble is currently a tenured professor in the Department of Social and Political Thought at York University in Toronto. His activism about matters involving the politics of science first surfaced in the early 1970s when he says he was “coerced” by the University of Rochester to sign away rights to his doctoral thesis in history in order to get his PhD.
Ferris’ attempt to smear over the classic issues of the philosophy of history with the crude sociology of scientism deserves a look at the legacy of the Enlightenment here. Scientists can’t claim the Enlightenment then trash its classics.
The question of a science of history is discussed at length in World History And The Eonic Effect and this is connected with what I call ‘Kant’s Challenge’, that is, the paragraph of his famous essay cited in this passage:
Kant’s Challenge
I am not an interpreter of Kant here, as such, but simply take his beautiful implied change to resolve the issue of freedom and causality across history. The pattern of the eonic effect provides a spectacular answer to that implied challenge.
Note that the eonic effect automatically picks up the question of the rise of liberalism (and science) and shows its deep relationship to the historical/evolutionary process of man’s descent, and creation of world civilization.
Let me note my suspcion here, for the umpteenth time by various authros, that Ferris is well aware of World History And The Eonic Effect and wants to produce an answer (without citing the book in question) that negates the apparoach indicated. One thing is sure these people are afraid of the challenge to produce a ‘science of history’. They can’t do it in conventional terms, and Ferris produces a whole book of moolah to distract attention from that fact.
Science the cause of liberalism? That’s a joke. As here, we see the effort to asphyxiate the public with the propaganda of scientism, and to eliminate history, as in any totalitarian system.
Make sure you don’t get drugged and put to sleep forever.
I also reviewed Ferris’ The Science Of Liberty. It won’t appear right away as a second review in one day.
I recommend a look at the eonic effect if you wish to indulge in causal analysis questions to do with the history of liberalism.
Despite its breezy style and superficial charm, this book, whether from ignorance or unspoken design, ventures into a quagmire of its own making, a point visible in the title itself. What a pity, since the book has a lot of potentially interesting material. But it seems to be a devious or sneaky book in the way it proceeds in a curious conspiracy of silence of its own making. Read the rest of this entry »
The Case of the Missing Centuries
We already commented today on Ferris’ new book The Science Of Liberty. I haven’t read the book yet, and on one level his thinking may be straightforward, but it is NOT true that science led to the emergence of liberalism. The parallel independent emergence of liberalism and science is one of the enigmas of modernity, one that can be better understood in light of the eonic effect.
The mystery of the history of science is the way it correlates exactly with the eonic sequence, and the way it nearly dies out after the period of its first Axial Age flowering. The point here is that the dynamic of the history of science, and that of liberalism is macrohistorical, strange as that might seem at first.
We can see that science by itself can’t ensure its own survival, what to say of the generation of liberalism.
Free Science Peer Review From Cultish Conspiracy
By Suzan Mazur
While the hacked emails episode several months ago revealing attempts by scientists to withhold information about global warming from publication has put the matter of peer review under scrutiny like never before, secrecy in peer review continues to be upheld by the science establishment as a good thing rather than seen for what it is – a brake on the flow of ideas, a reminder that rogue scientists face rejection by powerful forces, ostracism and other tortures.
Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini report colleagues attempted to silence them from publishing in their new book that Darwin’s claim was wrong about natural selection. Some of these dark forces afflicting Fodor were brought to light in a chapter in my own book The Altenberg 16: An Expose of the Evolution Industry.
Symphony of Science – ‘The Unbroken Thread’ (ft. Attenborough, Goodall, Sagan)
YouTube – melodysheep
MP3: http://symphonyofscience.com
from dawkins site
“The Unbroken Thread” is the fourth video in the Symphony of Science series, and it features David Attenborough, Jane Goodall, and Carl Sagan. The clips used in this installment come from Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, David Attenborough’s Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life, The Life of Mammals, The Living Planet, BBC Life, XVIVO Scientific Animations, IMAX Cosmic Voyage, Jane Goodall’s TED Talk, and a clever Guiness Commercial. The themes present in The Unbroken Thread attempt to explore the wild diversity of life on our planet, the intricacy and origin of its mechanisms, and its close relation to all other life forms.
Comment on Is Science Just A New Religion
James said,
November 6, 2009 at 6:04 pm ·
The issue is not “science vs. religion” or “faith vs. reason” but intellectual imperialism. You would have to be extremely stupid and/or brainwashed to not realize that this is a huge problem with Big Science. It is an undesirable human trait, and few, if any, groups in human history have ever been able to transcend it. The problem can be seen in the hilariously knee-jerk dismissals of anything that is vaguely associated with “religion” by modern scientistic atheists. They’re as brainwashed as any fundamentalist Christian.At any rate, isn’t it amazing that the mainstream debate here hasn’t produced one first rate intellect among any of the parties? It’s just the same canned, mass produced ideas repeated over and over again. Read a little Kant and Schopenhauer (or even a little Bennett) and you realize the insignificance of the debate.
The Science of Freedom
Students of science these days are given a very narrow history of their subject. But real science education should include the history of modern philosophic reaction to Newtonianism, and the paradoxes that are generated by reductionism. Beginning with Rousseau and Kant a counterpoint to modern science arose that tried to clarify the issues that subsequently became suppressed by the rise of scientism.
nce, Non-Science, and Pseudoscience
John Wilkins points to a post by Nick Smyth with the delightful title Science, Pseudoscience and Bollocks on the demarcation problem and what Smyth thinks is a flawed tactic in the war against ID/creationism. Smyth’s basic argument is that labeling ID/creationism as non-science, or as pseudoscience, fails because there is no clear demarcation between science and non-science; we do not have criteria such that we can draw a bright line between science and all other human intellectual enterprises.
More on the science issue at Panda’s Thumb.
Current science, in good Kantian fashion, cannot locate the data for much of what it imperialistically claims to be able to explain, in principle.
Science in its sophmoric mode issues a promissory note that it explains everything, and then bungles almost everything that isn’t physics, Darwinism especially.
You folks should stop being sophmoric (one year in college was enough) and experience a dose of realism.
Arnhart comment on Essentialism and Self
Larry Arnhart said,
September 20, 2009 at 7:35 pm ·
So the human self is beyond “the space-time framework”?
I have no idea what you are talking about.
Could you please explain how something is real although it does not exist in time or space?
Larry, if I could answer that question I would be the world’s greatest philosopher, able to resolve Plationic ideas and the rest of it.
The statement is a variant of a Kantian idea: if the mind constructs space/time, then the mind must (at some level, not totally) be beyond space and time.
It is a classic Kantian issue, with respect to phenomena and noumena. Note that the distinction of phenomena and noumena is not the same as material/spiritual and/or existence/non-existence.
As a trained philsopher you should be less surprised that this issue haunts darwinism. You can be a philosopher or a Darwin propagandist. The latter expresses shock at challenges to scientism. The former knows better and sees the plight of science here.
I, for myself, have often considered the Indian Samkhya here: then the answer to your question might be that some aspects of the self (not the self as such) is material in some sense, yet perhaps beyond space and time. Universal materialism by definition, in that framework can have some kind of ‘existence’, whose status we do not understand.
In any case there are plenty of things that are real, but not in space and time: the abstraction of an isoceles triangle: where and when is that in space and time, apart from its realizations as drawn figures?
These issues are not so simple, as you should know. Most regrettably, scientists are trained to be stupid about such classic questions, and trained to do precisely the metaphysical blunders Kant warned against. What a misfortune.
But in general these are the hard questions Kant warns us are not easy to deal with, intractable, and dialectically unstable.
Standards for discussion and the bloggingheads.tv controversy
My standard for taking part in any forum about science is pretty simple. All the participants must rely on peer-reviewed science that has direct bearing on the subject at hand, not specious arguments that may sound fancy but are scientifically empty. I believe standards like this one are crucial if we are to have productive discussions about the state of science and its effects on our lives.
This is not Blogginghead’s standard, at least as I understand it now. And so here we must part ways.
The discussion over Behe’s appearance at bloggingheads.tv is something of an eye-opener. I hold no brief for abuses of ID, but to wallop Robert Wright for allowing a mere diavlog with the author of Darwin’s Black Box leaves me speechless. Once again I underestimate the totalitarian impulse in Darwinists, who can’t allow even a whisper of outside discussion.
Zimmer prattles about the need for peer review, as if that weren’t what has gotten Darwinists into the paradigm fixation they are in, and can’t get out of because they don’t know they are in it.
Members of the sci community should consider the consequences of their own behavior: they are locked in a kind of box where all dissenting views are filtered out. If the reigning view in that box is Darwinism, then calamity has struck.
The Triumph Of Positivism
One of the most confusing aspects of Darwinism is the way, in the name of the Enlightenment on the part of its fans, it represents a decline rather than an advance. This, and the rise of positivism, thus confuse people because by the normal law of succession thence progress the later should be the better.
Here the study of the eonic effect can instantly unravel the confusion with its ‘discrete-continuous’ model and the study of the timing of the Enlightenment. Positivism is already, thus, a kind of decline from the Enlightenment.
Actually the left was long locked in a box comprising the narrowest scientism, Darwinism (despite Marx’s initial protests), materialism, and atheism.
And we can see how the left has suffered for that, a warning to liberals determined to let themselves be dominated by an increasingly cult-like science community determined to enforce Darwinian fundamentalism, Dawkins-style atheism, and the rest of it.
But liberalism was never a narrow cult such as Marxism became, something contemporary scientism is threatening to reinvent and impose on general culture armed with a new way to be ‘fanatic’: you must be ‘scientific’ and the science gang decides what you are to believe, for that reason. The resemblance to a priesthood is remarkable.
Liberalism emerged in the early modern in a remarkable symmetry with science, and the two found their harmony construed in the works of Kant.
The conflict of liberalism and religion is misleading, since in many ways the liberal tradition has deeper connection to the larger framework of the spiritual than religion does: I recommend very strongly a close look at the eonic effect and the history of liberalism in that context. It has a larger evolutionary status, and a connection to a larger spiritual framework, more than the ersatz ‘religion’ we call Christianity, which after all is a late creation of the world of the Roman Empire.
Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future (Hardcover)
by Chris Mooney, Sheril Kirshenbaum
I finally got a hold of a copy of this book, and set it aside after five minutes.
Despite the importance of the issues the authors start to kowtow to scientists, who are already sophmorically arrogant enough, and, worse, incapable of doing science on a couple of crucial questions, like evolution.
Being stupid and convinced you are smart is a bad way to be.
It is pointless therefore to castigate the american public for science ignorance if scientists themselves have distorted science into a kind of cult.
Impossible to finish the book. I will try again next week. Meanwhile serious scientists should be asking themselves if they haven’t blown it.
You figure it out.
In any case, scientists already have enough power. What is this obsession for more?
All Hell Breaks Loose (The End of Science My Ass 2.0)
George Dvorsky’s July IEET article “The End of Science My Ass” counters the idea put forth in several publications that breakthroughs in basic science are hitting the wall. I would like to elaborate on two major points that George made. First, based on only a partial snapshot of the most important breakthroughs included in Dvorsky’s list, he concludes the rate of scientific breakthroughs is slowing down. This needs to be understood in the context of cycles in Kuhnian revolutions. Second, the main argument both Horgan and Masood were setting out to support is that ultimately revolutions in science, not scientific breakthroughs are reaching their limits.
Welcome to the Revolutionary Minds Think Tank
I think this is daydreaming, and the revolutionary mind is really a paradigm bound conformist think tank.
How about establishing some revolutionary credentials by seeing through the Darwin illusion (and fraud)?
Critiques of scientism are often confusing to those who equate scientism with modernity or secularism: a look at the eonic effect, and its discrete-continuous model show the way that the period after the characteristic transitional interval, here The Great Divide can explain the sudden loss of quality in the outcome after the transition.
Scientists won’t ever admit it, but the inability to produce a ‘science of freedom’ makes science forever limited in principle from constructing a Darwinian or reductionist account of human evolution, and psychology.
The point was clear in the Enlightenment period, but the rise of scientism has caused amnesia, and a new kind of ‘science stupidity’.
Two hundred years of being stupid….
by Alom Shaha
from Dawkins site
http://whyscience.co.uk/
“Happy is he who gets to know the reasons for things”. I wish this 2000 year-old statement from Virgil was enough to deal with the question that must plague teachers all over the world — “what’s the point of this?” But, as someone who’s just returned to the teaching profession after a seven-year break, I can assure you it’s not.
Unscientific American and the End of Science
Mireille Celibataires said,
July 14, 2009 at 8:00 am · I don’t believe in the end of science! I want to say something else: Science is a product of society and, despite of what some fanatic scientist like Dawkins say, it should serve society and not replace religion as food for the masses.
I don’t believe in the ‘end of science’ either. But the phrase itself has a spectrum of meanings, and, from one point of view, science reaches the limits of its method, beyond which it cannot go. For good Kantian reasons.
At that point the creation of a metaphyiscal science begins to hide this outcome, e.g. Darwinism is made to be the solution to all metaphysical issues.
Unscientific America by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum
Uncertain Principles blog has a quote from the new Mooney-Kirshenbaum book, Unscientific America, which I haven’t read.
I am getting a bad feeling that the mood here all around is ‘nobody loves me (anymore)’, as the Dr. Kildare era passes and we confront Oswald Spengler’s (yes, you read that right) ‘end of science’.
I say that to be a bit boorish, and possibly set scientists worrying about their fan club status to chattering teeth mode. Just at the moment of Big Science’s spectacular success something odd begins to happen.
I am emphatically not a proponent of Spengler, but he had a funny way armed with one of the worst theories of history ever written to hit a funny bone, with notions that are sometimes ‘right’ for the wrong reason.
I say all this as a prelude to forgetting Spengler, but pointing to the issue he raised and the suspicion he was onto something, with his ‘end of science’. As John Horgan, another misfire along these lines, also sensed, the ‘end of science’ is actually happening, and what does it mean? I don’t know, but all this hand-wringing over the science public is beside the point.
Actually the ‘end of science’ happened at long time ago, beginning with Rousseau, perhaps, and the onset of the Romantic revolt against scientism. So after some late night movie suspense, you can, if you’re a scientist, relax, the end of science has already happened, even as science is expanding in all directions.
The issue is clearly outlined for all time in the critiques of Kant, and ‘at the end of science (scientism)’ the limits of science are faced and a new hybrid discourse of the ‘science of freedom’ (if it exists) joins the Newtonian fixation of science frankensteins. If we are lucky.
But, as Darwinism shows, we aren’t very lucky, as science turns into biological pseudo-science attended by a science priesthood of complete idiots.
I should conclude by noting that religion is not the issue here, and isn’t going to help.
Our culture has changed vastly since the mid-twentieth century. Science has become much less cool, scientists have ceased to be role models, and kids aren’t rushing home any more to fire rockets from their backyards. It would be unproductive and also unfair to blame scientists alone for this sad state of affairs. For every scientist who shuns or misunderstands the broad public, there’s another who deeply wants to find better ways to connect and who may exert considerable energy and ingenuity to that end. And we’ve already seen how other crucial sectors of society fail to give science its due.
Still, it is undeniable that the troubling disconnect between the scientific community and society stems partly from the nature of scientific training today, and from scientific culture generally. In some ways science has become self-isolating. The habits of specialization that have ensured so many research successes have also made it harder to connect outside the laboratory and the ivory tower. As a result, the scientific community simultaneously generates ever more valuable knowledge and yet also suffers declining influence and growing alienation. too many smart, talented, influential people throughout our society don’t see the centraility of science in their lives; and too many scientists don’t know how to explain it to them.
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
By RICHARD HOLMES
Reviewed by Dava Sobel
A different take on the Romantic Generation, especially its interest in science, is to be welcomed, but one is left to wonder if the real significance of Romanticism isn’t being given a revisionist disguise.
The source moments in Rousseau, and Kant, in many ways provide the real keys.
And we cannot forget the challenge to scientism that emerges from the Kantian revolution in philosophy.
Our current generation is probably too brain-dead, and its scientists too sophmoric (witness the puerility of the New Atheists) to appreciate the Romantic era.
I’ll admit I was stunned to learn that the chemist Sir Humphry Davy was so well acquainted with the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth — and furthermore to find them all collegially botanizing, geologizing, analyzing, and versifying through that yeasty interdisciplinary era that Richard Holmes calls the “Age of Wonder.” It was a time defined by two great voyages: James Cook’s passage to Tahiti aboard the Endeavour to observe the 1769 transit of Venus, and the surveying mission of the Beagle, which set out in 1831, carrying the young Charles Darwin to the Galapagos islands. Within those Romantic six decades, the universe opened wider as William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus and the first balloonists realized the dreams of Icarus.
Paralyzed People Using Computers, Amputees Controlling Bionic Limbs, With Microelectrodes On (Not In) Brain
ScienceDaily (July 6, 2009) — Experimental devices that read brain signals have helped paralyzed people use computers and may let amputees control bionic limbs. But existing devices use tiny electrodes that poke into the brain. Now, a University of Utah study shows that brain signals controlling arm movements can be detected accurately using new microelectrodes that sit on the brain but don’t penetrate it.
Comment on ID gang tries to sound like Max Weber
James said,
June 20, 2009 at 11:26 am
“That scientific endeavor has arisen from, and not despite, fervent religious belief, generally of the orthodox Judeo-Christian variety. The dependence of the rise of modern science on Judeo-Christian theology, philosophy, and social and economic structures is a matter of historical fact. ”
The poor Greeks. Their great contribution is coopted by these right-wing Christians and totally ignored by the postmodernist Armstrong types. I guess they can’t win either way.
I am glad at least someone is not fooled by these religious conservatives.
The confusion, of course, arises from looking at the linear continuity from the Middle Ages, and then cutting everything off prior to the arising of Christianity.
This is an issue prime for resolution by the eonic model of the eonic effect, which highlights the way the Scientific Revolution first arises in ancient Greece.
Reason vs. Faith: the Battle Continues, an essay by Richard Wolin.
This discussion by Wolin is somewhat more helpful than the Fish/Eagleton postmod concession to the antisecularists (which is of course not an endorsement of all Wolin’s statements, & check out his Seduction of Unreason).
It is significant that he starts with Hegel (why not Kant or Rousseau?) who was the trickiest of the tricky on the subject, but who had a unique sensitivity to the dilemmas of modernity and tradition. However, again, I can hardly endorse Hegel’s views. That very profound philosophic generation beginning with Kant is now replaced with the degenerated version holding forth between Dawkins groupies promoting scientism and Bible Belt fundamentalists.
It might help to start over at that point and look at the way the issues were framed. Hegel, whatever our stance toward his thinking as a whole, was able to think he could reconcile Christianity and secularism, as a final voice in the Protestant Reformation, as it were. Yet he thought that religion was transcended in philosophy (by his definition) and had a stunningly exotic view or descant on the Enlightenment theme of Reason, well versed as he was in the whole gamut of challenges to Enlightenment Reason discourse.
There is a lot in Wolin’s essay, fit for more discussion, but I would note that he seems on the verge of postdarwinism, so why not burst asunder from the Darwin pretense.
Much of the responsibility for the confusion over secularism springs, not from religionists, but from the way it has been hijacked by such a narrow set of viewpoints on the secular side, the Darwin to Dawkins axis of natural selection metaphysics and lame-footed atheism unable to grasp the complexities of religion.
The generation from Kant to Hegel/Marx tackled the question of religion and secularism and created a set of frameworks that can help the current discussion. I cannot hope that conservative Christains will avail themselves of any of this (e.g. Platinga, thus, is the sophistical lifeboat for Christians against that ‘dratted’ Kant), but I can expect scientists to have the capacity to review the historical record of secularism, and be aware of the complexity of the issues at the dawn of modernity, at which point secularism became defined.
But as Wolin senses, a cadre that finds Dennett’s Breaking the Spell serious discourse on religion is, like fundamentalism, too far gone to deal with a situation that threatens to produce real chaos.
You can’t possibly hope to roll back secularism. If you try it the Thirty Years War begins anew, adding more years to that bloody conflict. That, in a way, is the protection of secularism. You can rant on religion all you please, but you likely don’t have the stomach to add more years to the original thirty, so, end of discussion.
And those who call themselves secularists tend to have lost the thread of their curious ‘ism’, which isn’t a genuflection toward scientific fundamentalism, but a multidimensional set of cultural chords that pose the question of both science and the evolution of freedom. It is the inability of the culture dominated by the degenerating culture of scientism that, in failing to really address what modernity is, has fed its own opposition, feeding the flames of religious reaction.
To be sure, the Weberian indictment of the ‘iron cage’, noted by Wolin, seems a terminal verdict on modernity by one of its greatests sociologists. But I think that Weber’s dire conclusion arose not in response to modernity, as such, but precisely to the generation sliding into Darwinian scientism, and the cadre-closure of scientific professionalism. That’s not the same as the culture of modernity, which is a robust totality with more potential in principle for, not religion, but religious understanding, than the in any case long lost fantasy world of medievalism, pined after by conservatives religionists, who would die of fright if their conservative fantasies were ever realized.
I hold no brief for conservatives plying the evolution debate in the schools, but, like it or not, the symbolism of their actions points to a failure of education.
The point should be understood by those who construct the education of scientists, who would not be condemned to life in the iron cage if their educational guides did not insist on it.
In 1802 Georg W.F. Hegel wrote an impassioned treatise on faith and reason, articulating the major philosophical conflict of the day. Among European intellectual circles, the Enlightenment credo, which celebrated the “sovereignty of reason,” had recently triumphed. From that standpoint, human intellect was a self-sufficient measure of the true, the just, and the good. The outlook’s real target, of course, was religion, which the philosophes viewed as the last redoubt of delusion and superstition. Theological claims, they held, could only lead mankind astray. Once the last ramparts of unreason were breached — our mental Bastilles, as it were — sovereign reason would take command and, presumably, human perfection would not be long in coming.
from Dawkins site
Think tank: Costly libel suits are stifling science
by Simon Singh, The Times Online
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/article6493564.ece
Last year I published an article in The Guardian about chiropractors who claim to treat childhood conditions such as asthma, colic and ear infection. My views on that treatment clashed with those of the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) and it threatened to sue me for libel.
The importance of stupidity in scientific research
Darwinists might take note.
Review – Science Talk
Changing Notions of Science in American Culture
by Daniel Patrick Thurs
Rutgers University Press, 2008
Review by Taede A. Smedes, Ph.D.
May 19th 2009 (Volume 13, Issue 21)
It is impossible to have this kind of discussion if it is the perspective of Richard Dawkins that is defining the terms of the debate. Darwinian fundamentalism is far more stupid than anything to be found in those economically deprived groups whose only failing is lack of education.
As a European, I am fascinated by the apparent paradox that exists in the US concerning views of science. In the words of Richard Dawkins (quoted by Thurs), it is “bafflingly paradoxical that the United States is by far the world’s leading scientific nation while simultaneously housing the most scientifically illiterate populace outside the Third World” (2). This extremely stimulating and exciting book by the historian of science Daniel Patrick Thurs tries to make clear where the complex and ambiguous relationship of Americans with science comes from. Thurs looks at several historical case studies of public debates over the scientific status of certain ideas: phrenology, Darwin’s evolutionary theory, Einstein’s relativity theory, and UFOs. Thurs concludes this book by giving a brief look into a more recent controversy: Intelligent Design.