Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Secular humanists lead the way in offering open debate?

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Steve Fuller, an agnostic sociologist who has chosen for his subject the debate between intelligent design and Darwinism has come under predictable attack from widely publicised Darwinoid trolls and has responded.

Kudos to New Humanist for having the good sense to actually ask for a response, instead of sitting, fat and contented, like a toad in a hole, spouting … whatever a fat, contented toad spouts.

Given this evidence, I must perhaps revise my opinion of secular humanists. Maybe not all are useless tax-supported sludge, launching government-funded persecutions. Some may actually enjoy a serious exchange of ideas. Well, I like those sorts of revisions. Moving people into the category of “interesting” is always good.

Meanwhile, Steve Fuller has also written a play:

He expects the play to stir up Darwinists, even though its aim was not to “beat (the Darwinists) over the head” or argue that they had to believe in God. He said he was seeking to show that the evidence base Darwin had to work with had “really shifted a lot”.

Writing a dramatic work had been an interesting experience, he said. “(It) requires a different kind of thinking from normal academic work. You have to lay the stuff out much more slowly than you would if you were writing a paper, where someone has the option of rereading.”

Professor Fuller wrote the play, Lincoln and Darwin: Live for One Night Only!, as a “creative” replacement to the usual symposium he would be expected to give in his capacity as president of the sociological section of the BA festival.

He hopes to stage the work at next year’s festival of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

It is hard to imagine that the American Association for the Advancement of Science would be as open as New Humanist. Too much public money, too many orgmen involved.

But, in my view, Fuller’s troupe should go to the AAAS Festival nonetheless, perform the play on the outskirts, and use viral marketing to guarantee a bigger crowd for their show than for the boring establishment sludge.

That would perfectly mirror the intelligent design controversy in North America.

Then all we need is more useless pundettes who flunked Grade Six math freaking out over why anyone supposes that the universe shows evidence of design. Pundette cannot get through her own day without sixteen image assistants/consultants, so that proves her point conclusively, right?

Yuh. Camera Two, dolly in to cleavage.

Also just up at the Post-Darwinist:

Intelligent design and elite culture: Why evidence would not convince many top people that there is design in the universe

Intelligent design and popular culture: Why respect people?

Intelligent design and popular culture: Sherlock Holmes and design

Message to Canadian readers: Make intellectual freedom an election issue

Plants: The assured results of modern evolutionary science …

Darwinian evolution produces new species, right?

Comments
Dave: Denyse: I can accommodate an atheist or an agnostic, and I appreciate any straightforward account of any man’s belief system. What I can’t abide is the radical, foaming at the mouth atheist who postures as an agnostic. On the one hand, he stumps for all he is worth to lampoon, slander, and persecute ID supporters, even using state institutions to put them out of business. On the other hand, he assumes the posture of sweet reasonableness and asks, “Why can’t we all just get along?” Secular Humanists often practice this kind of duplicity, and they put the opposition in an almost impossible position. How, after all, do you call someone to account for this kind of behavior? If you ignore it, you get bamboozled; if you expose it, you get accused of character assassination. Worse, it puts you in the immoral position of presuming to judge another man’s intentions, when it is an almost impossible and also an uncharitable thing to do. If you are wrong, after all, you have done him an injustice. Meanwhile, he continues to deflect, evade, and obfuscate in all intellectual dialogues, ignoring the significant questions and writing fifteen paragraph answers to ones that were never asked. These kinds of people really do get the power precisely because they are so good at talking out of both sides of their mouth.StephenB
September 12, 2008
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Interesting exchange between Grayling and Fuller. Clearly Grayling, as Fuller points out, has a poor understanding of the history between science and religion. See http://dialogueconcerning.blogspot.com for some hopefully correcting information on the topic. Sorry for the shameless plug, but I like this blog and hope readers here would also like mine.jlid
September 12, 2008
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A while back, I was corresponding with a tax-supported cosmologist who has a crackpot, entirely undemonstrable theory about other universes - and he took the opportunity to advise me that the ID guys are liars. Folks like that should be encouraged to walk through the "red gate". Often at a personal level they have "something to declare."steveO
September 12, 2008
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I'd add the academy as something we don't want extremists running either. Imagine raving blebs like Paul Zachery Myers elevated from peons to positions of real authority like university deans and presidents.DaveScot
September 12, 2008
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In my view, the main thing to make sure of is that extremists don't run the government. Most of the rest of us can just learn to get along.O'Leary
September 12, 2008
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I didn't take it personally, Denyse. I'm not a secular humanist in any case. I'm a confused agnostic who doesn't know what to believe so I take everything with a grain of salt and keep an open mind. I understood you to be painting secular humanists with a very wide brush for literary effect. I presume you have to know that, for example, the 70% of the National Academy of Sciences who're positive atheists are mostly very productive scientists who've contributed greatly to improvement of the human condition. I think most atheists are basically good people just trying to get along like everyone else. It's just a vocal few who fit useless tax-supported sludge category. I used a wide brush myself for comedic effect impying that most atheists think theists are out to establish a theocracy, although I'm sure some small percentage of theists would love it. I don't really believe most atheists think that of theists but there are certainly a vocal few who do. What I really wonder is whether there's any hope for a cure between the atheist and theist extremist outliers. If you ask John Davison I'm pretty sure he'll tell you it's an incurable situation because everyone is born that way. The John Cleese video I recently posted, The God Gene, is mocking the "born that way" school of thought but maybe there's more than just a grain of truth to it.DaveScot
September 12, 2008
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Well good, Dave. I wasn't including you in the batch of useless tax-supported sludge - but where I live there are certainly enough of them. A while back, I was corresponding with a tax-supported cosmologist who has a crackpot, entirely undemonstrable theory about other universes - and he took the opportunity to advise me that the ID guys are liars. Imagine that - I have to pay to support this crackpot whose theory is based on things that are about as demonstrable as the fairies at the bottom of the garden, and listen to him announce that people like Bill - who at least do math, for heaven's sake - are "liars". Maybe to that cosmologist "liar" means "He deals in matters that could, in principle, be falsified." The cosmologist, of course, doesn't. That makes him more of a "scientist," I guess.O'Leary
September 12, 2008
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Dear Denyse, You wrote: Given this evidence, I must perhaps revise my opinion of secular humanists. Maybe not all are useless tax-supported sludge, launching government-funded persecutions. Some may actually enjoy a serious exchange of ideas. As an unrepentant scriptural scofflaw I'm happy you understand there are a few of us who keep an open mind and respect your beliefs even when we don't agree. Just for the record I too now understand that not all theists are enemies of science whose most fervent desire is to establish a theocracy.DaveScot
September 11, 2008
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