The brilliant Tom says in yesterday's post that
The way they treat opposing views as unenlightened is nothing but a dishonest way of not having to answer the criticisms of their position.
Well said. It's not that much different than the pols shouting down their talk show hosts and opponents as a way of never letting a full question get asked.
I too
reject being called unenlightened by people who think less about these things than I do.
How many Americans know that the air and water are cleaner now than 30 years ago? That AIDS is overwhelmingly caused by promiscuous gay sex? That dealing with any real consequences of global warming will be much cheaper and less disruptive than trying to forestall it? All plainly supported by scientific evidence that does not support the political agenda.
I turned on NPR for a few minutes yesterday. The first story was about, surprise, global warming. The next story was about... global warming. An essayist reading from his own work said, just dropped in without any qualification or support, that global warming "threatens to undermine our civilization." Now that is taking enlightenment to a whole new level.
We who are unfairly called "unenlightened" know that what they mean by that is that we don't unthinkingly agree with their entrenched propositions which on investigation are not as authoritative or scientifically supported as I am demanded to believe.
Recommended reading:
DISCIPLINED MINDS by Jeff Schmidt, a Ph.D. physicist, discusses how almost all research is political and how you better report the right findings or your grant funding will dry up fast. When the book came out he was summarily fired.
DARWIN'S PROOF and DARWIN'S GOD by Cornelius Hunter discuss the bad science that supports evolutionary theory and how Darwinism is itself a religion.
Ian Barbour has also written broadly on issues in science and religion.
It's not science *versus* religion. That's a false dichotomy, a cheap way of dismissing your critic without letting him speak. One must study both sides of any issue to really understand it, and certainly to be able to defend one's own position. Anyone who contemplates the subject with any degree of intellectual discipline understands that science and religion are not mutually exclusive, as did history's great scientists who were themselves religious. Science used to be considered the exploration of God's glorious design. The same evidence can support alternate conclusions if one is enlightened enough to entertain them.
One side argues that science with moral bias is not science. What they fail to appreciate is that moral bias invades and informs science on the front end rather than emerging from it on the back end. It is more cause than effect.
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