Evolution, Satanism, and Straw Men

A thought on science and religion from the late Hugh Nibley:

Science represents a high court from whose judgment there is no appeal, the idea (Freud expresses it in his The Future of Illusion) . . . that all other judgments are outmoded traditions; [that] the judges are free from prejudice and bias, and above petty personal interests, if they let the facts speak for themselves; that they suspend all judgment until all the facts have been gathered; that they proceed cautiously and carefully, step by step, making no mistakes, no guesses, never accepting a proposition until it is proven; that to question such a judge is an affront to his dignity and to his high office; that the judges never guess but always know; that they make no pronouncements until they have proven and verified everything; that they begin their investigations by accumulating facts with completely open minds, neither selecting or eliminating as they go; that their procedures and conclusions are in no way colored by any previous experience. That they never trust anything to luck and rarely make mistakes; that their accumulated decisions of the past compose a solid and reliable body of tested and proven knowledge called science; that by following the instructions and example of the judges, our civilization can emancipate itself from the darkness of ignorance; that to accept the decision of the judges as definitive is the mark of an intellectual person; that the knowledge of the judges is so deep and specialized that it cannot be put into ordinary language or understood by the layman but [that] science is a necessary domain of highly specialized experts and so forth. . . .

Well, every one of these propositions is completely false.

Hugh Nibley, “Fact and Fancy in the Interpretation of Ancient Records,” 6-7

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I was involved much of today in filming an interview for a small Interpreter Foundation movie project.  I was very pleased with the way things went.

Mysterious enough for you?  Some good things are coming.

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An interesting and — I think — an important piece by Ben Spackman, well-timed for the launch of the new Gospel Doctrine curriculum year, which will begin in January and which will focus on the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible:

“Many Mormons have forgotten that evolution isn’t a Satanic heresy”

Evolution has, frankly, never been very high on my list of issues or concerns.  But I realize that it’s difficult for some people.

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A few days ago, I posted some reading notes, as a blog entry, under the title of “Sawing off the branch on which it sits.”  My notes elicited expressions of complacently superior disdain in at least two locations on the web.

Why?

One of the stupid mistakes that I committed in my blog entry rested on my total misunderstanding of Richard Dawkins’s concept of “memes.”  It seems that I imagine that labeling an idea a “meme” means that it’s necessarily a bad idea, both false and misleading.

The one weakness in this criticism — which, I confess, seems to me a pretty serious one — is that I neither said that memes are necessarily bad ideas, both false and misleading, nor has such a thought ever crossed my mind.

Nonetheless, those responding to the criticism agreed that my insistence that memes are necessarily bad ideas, both false and misleading, demonstrates me to be embarrassingly ill-informed and incompetent — if not, in fact, merely dishonest.

Another of the glaring weaknesses of my blog entry is the fact that it rests entirely upon the word of Nancy Pearcey, who, to her everlasting shame and mine, is affiliated with Seattle’s Discovery Institute.  Among the problems with this total reliance of mine on Nancy Pearcey is its demonstration that I refuse to engage the actual positions of those with whom I disagree.

Except that there’s a problem here, as well:  My blog entry — albeit very short — doesn’t cite only Nancy Pearcey of Seattle’s Discovery Institute.  It also cites, in addition to Nancy Pearcey, the eminent American philosopher Alvin Plantinga, the late American atheist philosopher Richard Rorty, the vocal American atheist/Darwinist philosopher Daniel Dennett, the prominent British philosopher Mary Midgley, and a fairly well-known nineteenth-century English naturalist named Charles Darwin.  (The complainant himself, almost in the very act of claiming that I cite only Nancy Pearcey, actually quotes me quoting Mary Midgley.)

Finally, the complainant triumphantly observes that, although human thinking is subject to cognitive biases, that doesn’t mean that rational thought is impossible.

This is an important point.  It would clearly contradict my position, if I held that human cognitive bias makes rational thinking impossible.

But I hold no such position.

Unfortunately, the complainant’s triumphant observation has absolutely nothing to do with the point that I actually was making.

As I’ve said before, good criticism can be very valuable.  Sloppy criticism, however — criticism based upon misreading and incomprehension — is worthless.  Even worse, it’s a waste of time.

Except, of course, that it seems in this case to have provided considerable gratification to those making and celebrating it.