What do Design Detection and Nazis Have in Common?
| July 12, 2008 | Posted by Dave S. under Intelligent Design |
Perhaps someone can explain to me what the science of design detection has to do with Nazis, the Holocaust, or Hitler.
I sure can’t think of anything. Help me out here.
It’s things like this that undermine ruin the effort to get ID accepted as good science. It gives our critics the ammunition they need to convince people that ID is nothing more than a tool being used to promote social reform.
Science has left the building once the Nazi card gets played. As far as science is concerned it doesn’t matter if Hitler and Darwin were the same person. The only thing that matters is whether his theories can stand up to scientific scrutiny.
It’s a crying shame that people just can’t seem to drop this obsession with Darwin and Nazis. If we can stick to the science we can win this thing. Evolution solely by unintelligent causes doesn’t have a leg to stand on when put under the microscope of math & physics. The only legs it has are the ones we intelligent design proponents give it when we wander off the reservation of science and reason and start waving our hands in the air shouting that Darwinism is evil, Darwin led to the holocaust, and Darwin is killing God. Those are not scientific arguments, they never will be scientific arguments, and if we keep doing it we’re never going to get ID accepted as scientific argument. Period. End of story. Keep it up at your own peril and don’t say I didn’t warn you.
128 Responses to What do Design Detection and Nazis Have in Common?
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PS: The gremlins, sadly, are still with us.
Hello Kairo. Some people think that Darwinism is purely a scientific question, and, because of this, the activities of prominent Darwinians should not be examined too closely. Neither should evolutionary scientists be examined in the light of history. Such examination, they argue, does not help to determine the truth or falsity of Darwinism. However, it is a little odd to press the notion that a certain group of scientists — Darwinians — are so far above reproach that they cannot be examined this way. Furthermore, many of us have already rejected Darwinism as a science long ago. We view it more as a social ill than a scientific hypothesis. So it is only natural to subject Darwinism and Darwinians to historical scrutiny. And to us, the argument that historical scrutiny does not prove evolution right or wrong and therefore no one should examine too closely the activities of Darwinians in the past, is just silly.
On this page you will find sufficient reason to open up and pursue the historical examination of Darwinism, Darwinians, and their role in the social ills of the last 150 years.
Vladimir
Thanks.
Your just linked is especially intersting when it discusses the contributions of key figures linked to Darwin. I note here (I will now use double square brackets for blocks, given the busy gremlins]:
[[Galton: "I take Eugenics very seriously, feeling that its principles ought to become one of the dominant motives in a civilised nation, much as if they were one of its religious tenets." - Galton, Memoirs
"[Eugenics] has indeed strong claims to become an orthodox religious tenet of the future, for Eugenics co-operates with the workings of nature by securing that humanity shall be represented by the fittest races… The first and main point is to secure the general intellectual acceptance of Eugenics… then let its principles work into the heart of the nation, which will gradually give practical effect to them in ways that we may not wholly forsee.” – Galton, Eugenics, its Definition, Scope, and Aims.
It strikes me that the Jews are specialised for a parasitical existence upon other nations” – Galton to de Candolle, 1884 (Pearson’s Life and Letters of Galton, vol.2, pg 209). ]]
–> Rather interesting, no?
Now, I have long understood, through Lakatos’ extension to Popper, that research programmes have cores and surrounding belts. Core theories and ideas have in them a considerable worldview level element, and the belt of surrounding models and subsidiary theories and approaches serves in part as a belt of protective armour.
Lakatos therefore spoke in terms of progressive and degenerative paradigms/programmes.
He highlighted the importance of predictive success, and of situations where in effect a research programme begins to find itself making ever more ad hoc patches to meet onward eme3rging observations. Beyond a certain point, things break down as they did with Ptolemaic astronomy.
In the case of the grand scale evolutionary materialist research programme, the materialism is obviously a worldview and hte narrative of cosmological then planetary then chemical then biological then socio-cultural evolution is a chain of deeply worldivew-tinged explanatory models. And, the rot reason why inference to design once it might cut across the chain of evolutionary models just outlined, is forbidden, is because of the begged worldview level question. (Newbies, kindly cf. basic discussion here.)
As my excerpt from my always linked APP 6 just above shows, I believe that evolutionary matrerialism has run into serious trouble when it sought to explain mind [and morals] on reductionistic materialistic grounds. Indeed, that is precisely what Provine implied when he asserted that there is no free will and there is no ultimate foundation for ethics. For, with no power of responsible choice there is no foundation for reasoning and knowing, much less choosing to do the right.
Such “reasoning” immediately cuts its own throat. It CANNOT be correct, given the basic facts of our experience of the world as thinking, choosing, reasoning, knowing, morally bound creatures.
But, if we turn evolutionary materialistic “Science” into a god, then we lose our ability to think straight: Per logic, if one accepts error as truth, then if one sees real truth, one is often inclined to reject it as contradicting what one knows.
Next, given the undermining of morality, and the easy excuse for ignoring the plea of the powerless, it fosters the sort of thinking and behaviour that easily become tyrannical. In short, through its worldviews core, “science” can easily become a component of an ideology that may reveal its inner incoherence and dangers.
Worse, given the etymology: “Science = knowledge,” those who do not know enough to understand just how provisional scientific knowledge claims historically and philosophically are, can then become absolutists who in zeal for “science” become blind to the errors and abuses they carry out.
I guess over in Russia — as I recall — you know all about that already.
GEM of TKI
KF & all,
Here are some resources that conclusively rebut any claim that Hitler was a Christian. Note that they are from Cornell’s School of Law. They are PDF files.
Relationship of the German Churches to Hitler (they were against him.)
The Nazi Master Plan: The Persecution of the Christian Churches (they wanted them gone).
Trib:
Thanks, as always.
Quite significant; and indeed, I did not know of the direct, in-office involvement of church delegates in Admiral Canaris’ Abwehr opposition movement, specifically Muller [who by "luck" survived], and Bonhoffer [also one of the key figures of Barmen], who of course did not survive.
Your linked articles are a test for the sincerity and seriousness of any who still retain the idea that Hitler’s nightmare was a product of his attachment to the Christian Faith.
Vladimir also gave a link which on following up, I ran across an old work by William Jennings Bryan. (Thanks, Vladimir.)
On reading it, I see that in his view the trends in the Nazi era were prefigured by the influence of Nietzsche et al in the WW 1 era, as reflected in Imperial Germany’s propaganda. This much despised, caricatured and dismissed man — BTW, I have gained significant respect for him on now being able to directly read his writings — raised some very, very serious points that 86 years later sound all too prophetically relevant.
I found this bit of a gem in the preface:
[[The special reason for bringing to the attention of Christians at this time the evil that Darwinism is do-ing is to show that| atheists and agnostics are not only claiming but enjoying higher rights and greater privi-leges in this land than Christians; that is, they are able to propagate their views at public expense while Chris-tianity must be taught at the expense of Christians . . . . Is there any reason why atheists and agnostics should not be compelled to do likewise? . . . The question in dispute is whether atheists and agnostics have a right to teach irreligion in public schools—whether teachers drawing salaries from the public treasury shall be permitted to undermine belief in God, the Bible, and Christ by teaching not scientific truth but unproven and UNSUPPORTED GUESSES [NB: Bryan points out just how many hundreds of times Darwin acknowledged that he was more or less supposing or guessing ("hypothesis" is a 50c word for "guess") in his key works, noting that for instance he used "we may well suppose" over 800 times in his two main works] which cannot be true unless the Bible is false.]]
Nearly ninety years later, the point still stings.
Similarly, in the main text, p 20 [pdf 27] Bryan notes:
[[Darwin does not use facts; he uses conclusions drawn from similarities. He builds upon presumptions, probabilities and inferences, and asks the acceptance of his hypothesis not-withstanding the fact that connecting links have not hitherto been discovered" (page 162). He advances an hypothesis which, if true, would find support on every foot of the earth's surface, but which, as a mat-ter of fact, finds support nowhere.]]
Again, nearly ninety years later, the point still stings. And, on reflecting on how a principal means of rejecting the inference to design is the imposition of a question-begging “redefiniton” that in effect science on origins must only infer to chance +/or necessity, we see the same issue still operates.
Last, on looking back in my vaults, I also ran across this summary. It is of course by a “Creationist,” Bergman, but raises such serious issues and documents such serious points that it is sobering reading indeed, reading that demands to be answered, not dismissed.
GEM of TKI
KF, my pleasure as always.
I like your link:
Here’s another link to covers of a German women’s magazine during the Nazi era. Note the one for December 1943.
Ah Trib
The Bryan article is well worth the reading; in many respects, it seems almost more relevant today than 86 years ago.
And, the Nazi Women’s mag is revealing!
The 1943 December cover is almost comically revealing: “Winter Solstice” issue indeed!!!
(I also don’t like the play on the Creche, with the idealised, growing Master Race family. The conjoined Soldier’s sacrifice on the plains of Russia panel suggests a very different version of “blood atonement” to me too . . .)
This is all so blatantly post-Christian.
GEM of TKI
PS: Looking a bit closer at the sun figure at the foot of the image, it looks a lot like a swastika, with four curly gas surges to me . . . cf the swastika upper left corner. (Note too how most of the rest of the sun is with linerar rays, but there are these four large prominences, all flaring out the same way as in the swastika, all noticeably kinked. No star on the top of the tree too!