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Apologia Report 12:33
September 7, 2007
Subject: New book considers Intelligent Design "dead science"
In this issue:
ATHEISM - USA Today writer fears secularists have lost an open mind
ETHICS - LifeSite accuses U.S. News & World Report of sanitizing its profile on Margaret Sanger
ORIGINS - new anti-creationism book echoes outcry against the approach used by today's "militant secularists"
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ATHEISM
One of the rewards of spending years in apologetics is that of learning when not to be lured into fruitless exchanges of opinion. The current wave of anti-religion publishing by atheists brings this to mind. While there is much about the engagement to note, there is also much to avoid. Once you decide to weigh in, it's sometimes preferable to let a spokesperson with an opposing worldview make your point. USA Today's Tom Krattenmaker does this nicely in his "Columnists' opinions" blog post, "Secularists, what happened to the open mind?" [1]
Krattenmaker specializes in religion in public life and is a member of USA Today's board of contributors. He reports that as "atheist writer and religion scholar Jacques Berlinerblau recently put it, 'Can an atheist or agnostic commentator discuss any aspect of religion for more than 30 seconds without referring to religious people as imbeciles, extremists, mental deficients, fascists, enemies of the common good ... conjure men (or) irrationalists?' ...
"Berlinerblau suggests that [Christopher] Hitchens and other in-your-face atheist authors are becoming the 'soccer hooligans of reasoned public discourse.' ...
"Berlinerblau, a Georgetown University professor and author of The Secular Bible: Why Non-Believers Must Take Religion Seriously [3], says he has made little headway in persuading his fellow atheists to try understanding religion in its full complexity and to make alliances with moderate religious believers around issues of mutual concern."
But the above remarks do not represent Krattenmaker's main reason for writing. They merely highlight the angst that some in both camps feel over the monumental diversion that has taken place as the players speak past each other. What Krattenmaker most wanted to say is that "Many of the leading voices among atheists and the 'unreligious' reveal a disdain for religion that can only damage today's dialogue. Speaking with people of faith, instead of about them, would enrich both sides of this philosophical divide." Hear, hear!
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ETHICS
"Major U.S. Newsweekly Offers Sanitized Version of Racist Margaret Sanger" by Elizabeth O'Brien -- refers to an August 5 story on the U.S. News & World Report web site, "The Passions Behind the Pill" by Katherine Leitzell [2], which "omits any reference to the main ideology that fueled [Sanger's] life's career" according to O'Brien, who writes for LifeSite, a Roman Catholic news service based in Canada.
Sanger was a "rabid racist who wanted the complete eradication of the black population," notes O'Brien. You'd never know it from the U.S. News piece, which O'Brien explains is a historical account that "portrays the heroic struggle of a woman seeking to empower female victims of social circumstance." O'Brien finds the reporting "highly skewed, entirely omitting the racist motivation behind [Sanger's] vehement commitment to birth control, abortion and sterilization."
Instead, U.S. News quotes Sanger as saying that her motivation was "to help poor women have fewer children to be brought up." The newsweekly, says O'Brien, "fails to mention the fact that this warrior for women's so-called rights was also connected with the Nazi fascist regime with which she shared her ideas on eugenics in the 1930s. In fact, she changed her organization's original name from the Birth Control League to Planned Parenthood in order to better maintain the illusion that her goals were much more family 'friendly' than the publicly condemned Nazi policies. ...
"[R]eferring to the black communities in the Southern United States as a 'dysgenic horror', [Sanger] also believed that black people were subhuman and must be eradicated. ...
"Sanger advocated not only the widespread use of contraception, but also the legalization of abortion and sterilization in order to wipe out those who were considered 'unfit' for normal human society." <http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2007/aug/07080709.html>
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ORIGINS
Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith, by Philip Kitcher [4] -- sympathetic reviewer H. Allen Orr summarizes that "Kitcher considers creationist claims and uses them as a springboard for discussing subtler issues. ...
"Abusing Science [5] was arguably Kitcher's most important book to date. A critical examination of the so-called scientific creationism prominent in the 1970s and 1980s, Kitcher's study deftly deflated the creationist balloon, pointing out its many absurdities as well as its disingenuous use of the scientific literature. 'Scientific creationists,' he showed, 'offered dubious geological and physical objections to the dating of fossils, among other things. They also had a habit of quoting biologists out of context, thereby manufacturing false crises within evolutionary biology. There seems little doubt that Abusing Science played a part in the demise of scientific creationism. ...
"Kitcher hopes to accomplish two things in Living with Darwin. One is to survey various versions of creationism and to recount the arguments against them. In doing so, he hopes to present a positive case for Darwinism and 'to formulate it in a way that people with no great training in science, history, or philosophy cold appreciate.' Kitcher's other goal is more ambitious and - given the current noisy debate over science and religion - perhaps more important. He hopes to get at just what it is about Darwinism that's so threatening to religion. ...
"[T]he history of creationism is characterized by cycles involving the elaboration of a theory, its wholesale collapse, a lull of decades, and, ultimately, the elaboration of a radically different theory - one that, without quite saying so, rejects all earlier varieties of creationism. Invariably, this newer theory makes claims that are considerably less ambitious than those of its predecessors. ...
"The simplest and earliest type of creationism was based on Genesis.... This species of creationism was committed to the literal truth of the Bible. ...
"The second creationist position concentrated on the origins of novel kinds of organisms. ... [N]ew species might appear in the fossil record because, now and then, God creates them. ...
"The final creationist position, anti-selectionism, is concerned not with evolution per se but with the mechanism Darwin offered to explain this evolution - natural selection. ...
"Anti-selectionism - which denies that natural selection can do all that biologists say it can - is the principal objection to Darwinism put forward by the current intelligent design movement. ...
"Kitcher's survey of creationist thought is superb and his conclusion unequivocal: all three creationist positions are hopelessly flawed. They are dead science."
As for Kitcher's second objective, "to get at just what it is about Darwinism that's so threatening to religion," Orr finds that "Although Kitcher's taxonomy of faith highlights several important distinctions, it isn't entirely clear that it accomplishes all he thinks it does."
Orr identifies something in common with the item on Atheism at the beginning of this edition of AR. "Despite [his] somewhat ambiguous conclusion, Kitcher's treatment does in fact identify one significant difference between spiritual religion and secular humanism, in practice if not in principle: tone. Kitcher is acutely sensitive to this issue and makes it clear that he's deeply disturbed by the rhetoric of some militant secularists:
Often, the voices of reason I hear in contemporary
discussions of religion are hectoring, almost
exultant that comfort is being stripped away and
faith undermined; frequently, they are without
charity. And they are always without hope.
"Too often, the New Atheism forgets to make its humanism humane. ...
"In a time of strident pronouncements on the intersection of science and religion, Kitcher has introduced a calm and humane voice. We Darwinians could do much worse than to listen to it." New York Review of Books, Aug 16 '07, pp33-35.
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Sources, Digital:
1 - <http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2007/08/secularists-wha.html>
2 - <http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/070805/13pill.htm>
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Sources, Monographs:
3 - The Secular Bible: Why Non-Believers Must Take Religion Seriously, by Jacques Berlinerblau (Cambridge Univ Prs, 2005, paperback, 232 pages)
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/052161824X/apologiareport>
4 - Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith, by Philip Kitcher (Oxford Univ Prs, 2006, hardcover, 208 pages)
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195314441/apologiareport>
5 - Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism, by Philip Kitcher (MIT Prs, 1983, paperback, 213 pages)
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/026261037X/apologiareport>
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