Wednesday, March 28, 2007

The Way of Objective Reflection


PZ Myers effortlessly smacks down a clueless creationist who insists that “Mutations have NEVER produced additional DNA structures. NEVER!”

In response, Slacker Ninja makes an eloquent point:

I'm trying to rid myself of this idea of 'winning' or 'losing' an argument. When someone has the intellectual honesty to look at what their 'adversary' had been saying, discover and admit that they've been mistaken, we all win.
In other words, you “win” as long as you learn something, or improve your understanding of something you already knew. (Or already believed, in the absence of compelling reasons not to believe it.) Seems reasonable to me.

Then again...if what Kierkegaard's Johannes Climacus called “the way of objective reflection” leads me to “discover and admit” that the War on Terror is a necessary evil given the demonstrable threat of Islamic extremism, do we all win?

Depends on whether or not I’m correct, I guess.

Time will tell. Probably.

My diabolical insinuations aside, I agree with PZ’s summation:
I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that Mr McEwen is a decent, sincere person in addition to being a fervent believer in his religious dogma. However, he has been consistently misled. His sources have lied to him. And he is working hard to propagate those same lies to more people. That’s the real tragedy of creationism, that it is a fabric of outright dishonesty that persuades good people to do wrong, all in the name of their religion.
Amen to that!

In other news, Brian Doherty at Reason Online calls Milton Friedman “the last century’s most energetic and effective advocate of liberty.”

(Illustration: “Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism” by William Hogarth.)

4 comments:

olvlzl said...

I think it was in the Guardian where some insufficiently hagiographic obit writer pointed out that the one and only thing Friedman had done that has stood the test of time (other than his own mythology) was the work he did for the government during the early 40s where he helped institute witholding taxes.

I agree with Myers too, which doesn't at all surprise me.

That said, listening to Richard Dawkins tonight on Terry Gross, he has an astoundingly naieve grasp of probability and its applicability to questions of religion. I mean, for a biologist who works at Oxford, it's just amazing that he could entertain such bizarre ideas. For me, it just reinforces the Gould side of that disagreement. Probability cannot be applied to questions like that because there isn't a sufficient definition of the number of possible outcomes or, more traditionally, there isn't even a way of deciding how many different outcomes there could be. Just shocking it is.

Phila said...

Olvlzl,

I'm probably being way too ironic for my own good here.

I agree, as I almost always do, with PZ. But I also believe (as do you, I think) that these particular complaints against religion are equally applicable to all sorts of other fervent beliefs, from libertarianism to Dawkins' brand of "rationality."

juniper pearl said...

if what Kierkegaard's Johannes Climacus called “the way of objective reflection” leads me to “discover and admit” that the War on Terror is a necessary evil given the demonstrable threat of Islamic extremism, do we all win?


perhaps a war on terror is necessary, but if so, i doubt that it's this one.

Phila said...

perhaps a war on terror is necessary, but if so, i doubt that it's this one.

The whole concept is fraudulent, in my view. The only purpose of a "War on Terror" is to make speaking out against it as difficult as possible.

We're already supposed to be monitoring and intercepting terrorists; it's one of the things governments and law enforcement agencies are supposed to do as a matter of course.