David Brooks and Tom Wolfe on Scientific Materialism

David Brooks had an Op-Ed piece in the NY Times last week that rose to the number one most emailed article, and currently sits at #8 on the most emailed in the last 30 days list. He leads off with this:

In 1996, Tom Wolfe wrote a brilliant essay called “Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died,” in which he captured the militant materialism of some modern scientists.

Brooks makes some interesting points, and some questionable points. I would rather quote from the "brilliant" essay by Tom Wolfe:

Ironically, said Nietzsche, this unflinching eye for truth, this zest for skepticism, is the legacy of Christianity (for complicated reasons that needn't detain us here). Then he added one final and perhaps ultimate piece of irony in a fragmentary passage in a notebook shortly before he lost his mind (to the late-nineteenth-century's great venereal scourge, syphilis). He predicted that eventually modern science would turn its juggernaut of skepticism upon itself, question the validity of its own foundations, tear them apart, and self-destruct. . . .

This, science's Ultimate Skepticism, has been spreading ever since then. Over the past two years even Darwinism, a sacred tenet among American scientists for the past seventy years, has been beset by...doubts. Scientists--not religiosi--notably the mathematician David Berlinski ("The Deniable Darwin," Commentary , June 1996) and the biochemist Michael Behe (Darwin's Black Box , 1996), have begun attacking Darwinism as a mere theory, not a scientific discovery, a theory woefully unsupported by fossil evidence and featuring, at the core of its logic, sheer mush. (Dennett and Dawkins, for whom Darwin is the Only Begotten, the Messiah, are already screaming. They're beside themselves, utterly apoplectic. Wilson, the giant, keeping his cool, has remained above the battle.) . . . .

Recently I happened to be talking to a prominent California geologist, and she told me: "When I first went into geology, we all thought that in science you create a solid layer of findings, through experiment and careful investigation, and then you add a second layer, like a second layer of bricks, all very carefully, and so on. Occasionally some adventurous scientist stacks the bricks up in towers, and these towers turn out to be insubstantial and they get torn down, and you proceed again with the careful layers. But we now realize that the very first layers aren't even resting on solid ground. They are balanced on bubbles, on concepts that are full of air, and those bubbles are being burst today, one after the other."

Brilliant. Scientists who do not understand philosophy, the philosophy of science and epistemology have very little intelligent to say these days on the topic of intelligent design. There seem to be many who fit that category, and who do realize how much their cherished theories rest on "bubbles" of assumptions about what we "know" and think we know.

As Daniel Dennett said:

Scientists sometimes deceive themselves into thinking that philosophical ideas are only, at best, decorations or parasitic commentaries on the hard, objective triumphs of science, and that they themselves are immune to the confusions that philosophers devote their lives to dissolving. But there is no such thing as philosophy-free science, there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination. Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, 1995, p.21.

Darwin, Hitler and Eugenics

The connection between Darwinian theory and Nazi ideology, drawn out in the film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, is still a hot topic in the blogosphere. I wish I had more time to devote to this, and I hope to write a few more posts on this topic.

What has become clear to me in reading comments by various people is that you cannot evaluate this issue unless you have read a significant amount about the history of the worldwide eugenics movement from the late 19th century until 1945, including original sources.

For now, in case it was overlooked because of the title, I simply want to point my readers to my post "Expelled the Movie and the History of the Eugenics Movement" and all the links contained in it.

John Lennon: Imagine is anti-religious, "but because it is sugarcoated it is accepted."

This from an article in Rolling Stone about John Lennon:

The album's title track, in particular, put forth some daring notions -- "Imagine there's no heaven . . . no hell . . . no countries . . . no religion . . . no possessions . . . imagine a brotherhood of man" -- and it did so in a beguiling and haunting way. The song was a prayer, the most radical prayer that ever played widely on radio. "'Imagine,' both the song and the album," Lennon said, "is the same thing as 'Working Class Hero' and 'Mother' and 'God' on the first disc. But the first record was too real for people, so nobody bought it . . . 'Imagine' was the same message but sugarcoated. . . . 'Imagine' is a big hit almost everywhere -- anti-religious, anti-nationalistic, anti-conventional, anti-capitalistic, but because it is sugarcoated it is accepted. Now I understand what you have to do: Put your political message across with a little honey."

"Imagine" is no ordinary song. It is blatantly political and openly anti-religious. It suggests that people imagine the eradication of religion. Can a documentary quote 15 seconds of it (consisting of 10 words) in order to criticize the anti-religious sentiment without violating copyright law? Some say "yes."

Links to Background Posts

If you would like to read more, but don't feel like randomly clicking through archives, you can find a summary of some of my favorite previous posts, with links, here. These posts also give you a good idea of what this blog is all about.

For a discussion of what Darwinian Fundamentalism is, go here.

For a post with links regarding Challenges to Macroevolutionary Theory, go here.

For a post with links to other blogs that deal with the issues of evolution and intelligent design either from a position of skepticism toward macroevolutionary theory or open-mindedness toward intelligent design, or both, go here.