Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

NOTICE: A few corrective remarks for some hostile scrutinisers from Anti Evo etc.

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I have noticed that the usual hostile scrutinisers at some objector sites are back on their Saul Alinsky, dismissive mockery and well-poisoning tactics.

(I suppose they have not liked the situation where in recent weeks we have had some useful and reasonably civil exchanges here at UD under living room rules, giving the lie to their drumbeat accusations of censorship. They also probably do not like the balance on the merits after several thousand comments in several recent UD threads.)

I have therefore responded to some of the most recent specific remarks here.

I strongly suggest, too, that such need to check a good legal dictionary before presuming ignorance on the part of design thinkers, and that they need to acquaint themselves with current legal trends before spouting off their ill-informed contempt.

Let me be explicit, by linking a video by the UK’s Christian Legal Society on some of the troubling social implications of the radical secularisation and neo-paganism that are now going on across our civilisation.

I suggest such would do well to heed the warning given by Plato speaking in the voice of The Athenian Stranger in The Laws, Bk X, 2350 years ago:

Ath. . . . [[The avant garde philosophers and poets, c. 360 BC] say that fire and water, and earth and air [[i.e the classical “material” elements of the cosmos], all exist by nature and chance, and none of them by art, and that as to the bodies which come next in order-earth, and sun, and moon, and stars-they have been created by means of these absolutely inanimate existences. The elements are severally moved by chance and some inherent force according to certain affinities among them-of hot with cold, or of dry with moist, or of soft with hard, and according to all the other accidental admixtures of opposites which have been formed by necessity. After this fashion and in this manner the whole heaven has been created, and all that is in the heaven, as well as animals and all plants, and all the seasons come from these elements, not by the action of mind, as they say, or of any God, or from art, but as I was saying, by nature and chance only. [[In short, evolutionary materialism premised on chance plus necessity acting without intelligent guidance on primordial matter is hardly a new or a primarily “scientific” view! Notice also, the trichotomy of causal factors:  (a) chance/accident, (b) mechanical necessity of nature, (c) art or intelligent design and direction.] . . . .

[[Thus, they hold that t]he Gods exist not by nature, but by art, and by the laws of states, which are different in different places, according to the agreement of those who make them; and that the honourable is one thing by nature and another thing by law, and that the principles of justice have no existence at all in nature, but that mankind are always disputing about them and altering them; and that the alterations which are made by art and by law have no basis in nature, but are of authority for the moment and at the time at which they are made.– [[Relativism, too, is not new; complete with its radical amorality rooted in a worldview that has no foundational IS that can ground OUGHT. (Cf. here for Locke’s views and sources on a very different base for grounding liberty as opposed to license and resulting anarchistic “every man does what is right in his own eyes” chaos leading to tyranny. )] These, my friends, are the sayings of wise men, poets and prose writers, which find a way into the minds of youth. They are told by them that the highest right is might [[ Evolutionary materialism leads to the promotion of amorality], and in this way the young fall into impieties, under the idea that the Gods are not such as the law bids them imagine; and hence arise factions [[Evolutionary materialism-motivated amorality “naturally” leads to continual contentions and power struggles; cf. dramatisation here],  these philosophers inviting them to lead a true life according to nature, that is, to live in real dominion over others [[such amoral factions, if they gain power, “naturally” tend towards ruthless tyranny], and not in legal subjection to them.

We can hardly say that we have not been warned of the matches we are playing with as a civilisation, in good time! END