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Tuesday, 2005-12-20 | Classic Gin
What follows has been transplanted from NewAthens.org where a handful of this generation's best and brightest are finally having it out over Intelligent Design and the recent rulings in PA concerning the teaching of ID in primary and secondary schools. In what follows, I respond to comments made by others. My words are separated from theirs by horizontal rules and a subtle change in font color:
Wuk wrote:"Analytical" may not be the word you're looking for: analysis, as we use it today with respect to scientific or academic inquiry, specifically excludes magical thinking. It may teach some critical skills--something like "thinking outside the box"--but there is nothing that is technically "analytical" about magical thinking.
Intelligent design doesn't necessarily disprove the popular theory, but I believe that if tought objectively alongside evolution theory, it can make our kids smarter. Give them some analytical skills. Kids can look at column A, column B...maybe C and D and so on, and then form their own opinion. Let them look at the facts as we currently know them, not as how we hope to someday prove them.
(PS: I don't mean that pejoratively--I think magical thinking is an important and time-honored way of encountering reality. I do, however, believe in keeping the difference between empiricism and magical thinking always before our eyes. Anything relating to the super- or supra-natural is magical. Analysis is analysis precisely and only because it refuses magical thinking.)
Rashad wrote:This sounds pleasant and everything and, as a professional student of the history of religion I obviously believe that there is some worth to the study of religion, but I cringe when I hear people say anything about religious teachings, morality, ethics or spirituality to children in a school. Maybe I'm an inveterate secularist--a true child of the liberal democratic way--but the idea that children ought to be indoctrinated into a particular scheme of belief is one that makes me uneasy.
I think that Religious Studies should be a requirement in all High Schools, and as a requirement of General college curricula, but one should be free to study any of a myriad of religious teachings, as long as they study something . . . science tells us a lot about the physical world, but nothing about morality, ethics, or spirituality.
The problem with pluralism is that when you put all of these things side-by-side--especially in a primary or secondary school--you must account for the fact that these kids all have a separate life at home. Say you've got a class that's 50% Evangelical Christians who know that the Torah is a symbolic prefiguring of Jesus and has nothing to do with the political history of Palestine and 50% secular humanists who know that history's various, regional metaphysical fictions and fantasies are simply the consequence of thinking magically about concupiscence, death, and the other unavoidable experiences of this life. When you tell this class of primary or secondary students that both of these viewpoints are hopelessly mired in history and that there exists no independent means of verification for their claims and therefore that their dispute can never be adjudicated, you're basically telling them to go home and tell their parents that their teacher tried to convert them to the other side. The Evangelicals tell their parents that teacher wants them to harden their hearts toward Jesus and to go to Hell and the secular humanists go home and tell their parents that teacher wants them to enshrine diversity of opinion above reason and idly "let 1000 flowers bloom" lest some yokel be disabused of his superstition and his feelings hurt.
This is an unacceptable way to run a classroom. Pluralism pisses everyone off--the lefties hate it because they don't get to plant a foot on the chest of superstition and religiosity and the righties hate it because some goofball who is too dense to see the work of the Risen Lord in human history is putting their children in danger of eternal perdition.
The fact of the matter is that the compromise of least resistance is to teach what is empirically verifiable--what is undisputable--and leave the conjecture and philosophy for the philosophy classes. No one should be required to study philosophy (unless he's pursing a degree in the humanities and certain philosophical literature is relevant to his course-work, etc.); requiring philosophy--even in college--is a mistake.
Jeff wrote:As long as we're putting all of our cards on the table, I might as well add that I'm a guy who thinks that religion is historiography with a story.
But then I'm a guy who thinks physics is math with a story.
Robert wrote:This is a good reduction of the debate en masse. Those who, in the hardness of their heart and the desire to appear wise in their own sight, refuse to listen honestly to those whose beliefs and experiences are unlike their own are condemned by Scripture as much as they are by the scientific method.
I, unfortunately, believe that accepting certain truths that are mutually exclusive with documented and readily available emipirically deduced conclusions goes part and parcel with an unwillingness to train one's mind to exercise the methods of critical thinking and to teach others those methods.
Artie wrote:This is what is most troubling to me. To "people of faith" I can only recommend that they consult their own, sacred histories and think long and hard about the historical points of origin for the beliefs they hold. The fact of the matter is that most people have a child's conception of God--He's a huge, humanoid figure who looks like an elderly version of Warner Salman's Jesus. Maybe He sits in a throne. Maybe he's the Jovial deity they recognize from Michelangelo's famous recapitulation of Jupiter/Apollo as God/Christ on the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
Why can the religious zealots admit that they don't know what the fuck is going on, and furthermore that they aren't as qualified as scientists are to figure it out!?!?!? You don't see real theologians trying to attack evolution. Hell even the goddamn Vatican stopped doing that decades ago!
To these people I commend the work of the theologians. Read the mystics--read the historians. Look at the Pseudo-Dionysius--look at the Siras. Read the scholastics. Think long and hard about the early disputatia in Aquinas' Summa. Is there something that answers to the name of "God?" What is the logic of difference? What about the created order demands a supernatural order beyond it? Is there some point at which language, through a precise, apophatic series of negations, participates in a reality beyond this one? What do you believe?
There's a lot of talk about science and religion at loggerheads. The fact of the matter is that complacency and superstition are the two forces battling for dominance. Complacency and superstition are two sides of the same coin: they are very similar sets of childish fantasies that grow, during the course of a life, into phobic terrors of death, disease or cosmic disorder. Complacency and superstition are the two worldviews that are actually in competition. Science and Religion are totally cool with one another--I saw them chilling together last night at the Omega on Ogden Ave.
Artie wrote:Amen. I would actually go so far as to add that civics ought to come much earlier--right after reading and math. I don't care what anyone says about magical imperative or what commitments they've made in private to the gods of their hearth, before we are sinners in the hands of an angry god, we are undeniably members of a social and civic unit. This is not a matter that is open to interpretation, equivocation or disputation: there can be no arguments against the fact that each man's existence as civilie and soce is at all moments and in all places present and therefore meet to be considered as the most important facet of his existence.
Start teaching civics again too while you're at it.
And media studies for crying out loud!!!
Artie wrote:What we should be teaching is the theory that requires the fewest and least divisive substantive (i.e. moral, ethical, metaphysical) commitments. We should do this in order to preserve order. We should preserve order because without order there is chaos. Chaos is undesirable because it is inefficient and wasteful. Waste should be avoided because we can only effect change in this world during a short stretch of time and to waste that small amount of time is to do a great injury to ourselves and our autonomy.
We should be teaching the best working theory. Hell, we should be teaching the best working theories plural. Intelligent design is not one of them.
/.ers wrote:This isn't exactly the dictionary truth. Faith is not simply the acceptance of doctrine or mysticism. The great theologians, starting with Anselm, relish the opportunity to make sense of "the faith" or belief in general and to probe "faith" (i.e. faith as an abstraction, in general) for inconsistencies and other logical lacuna. The great theologians--the great doctors of philosophy--ask almost nothing of their readers in terms of leaps of faith. The mystics do this even more infrequently due to their disinterest in doctrine.
Scientific theories are NOT about faith - in fact, part of the scientific method is to disprove theories, wheras faith is exactly the opposite - simply believing it's true and not challenging it.
Accepting doctrine is, however, precisely what the slashdotter thinks faith is: the acceptance and defense of some position that is presented only to be affirmed and supported and specifically not to be probed or criticised. "Faith" per se is, at all nearly every point in the history of theology, up for debate. If it wasn't, there would be nothing to write about it because if faith means unquestiong acceptance, then there are no questions to ask or answer regarding the super- or supra-natural (cf. Thomas' insistence on quaestio [question] and disputatio [disputation] as the best means for meditating on God).
More /.ers wrote:This is cute and everything, but again, not entirely accurate. ID technically belongs wherever unpracticed and undisciplined conjecture about existence takes place; this is generally not in the philosophy classes, but in the coffee houses and at the cocktail parties. Creationism belongs in a history course or a literature course that is structured around an historical epoch and not a sociology course--creationism is a novelty of history and the direct consequence of certain theological innovations and ought to be studied only as such. Finally, slandering religious Jews and Christians of all denominations is fun, but their holy texts are comfortable in almost any courses as they have been proven time and again to be the motive force behind innumerable historical, sociological, literary, scientific and artistic innovations.
Actually, ID (before it was hijacked by Creationism) technically belongs in a philosophy course. Creationism belongs in a sociology course. And the book of Genesis belongs in a mythology course.
