Cornelia Dean: Using Pseudoscience to Proselytize For Atheism

I thought I would provide some quotes from the Cornelia Dean article that was the subject of my last post, and follow them with some comments:

For many scientists, the evidence that moral reasoning is a result of physical traits that evolve along with everything else is just more evidence against the existence of the soul, or of a God to imbue humans with souls.

Great! Thanks for the new evidence. Now let's see the scientific evidence supporting the existence of the soul, or of a God to imbue humans with a soul. Ah, right, that kind of evidence is banned, or deemed "not science." How convenient! These scientists are drawing philosophical and religious inferences from the evidence, and they have every right to do so. Just don't enforce a double standard.

The idea that human minds are the product of evolution is “unassailable fact,” the journal Nature said this month in an editorial on new findings on the physical basis of moral thought. A headline on the editorial drove the point home: “With all deference to the sensibilities of religious people, the idea that man was created in the image of God can surely be put aside.”

Let's see all those experiments demonstrating that man was not created in the image of God. Again, a philosophical inference not demonstrated by any empirical evidence.

Or as V. S. Ramachandran, a brain scientist at the University of California, San Diego, put it in an interview, there may be soul in the sense of “the universal spirit of the cosmos,” but the soul as it is usually spoken of, “an immaterial spirit that occupies individual brains and that only evolved in humans — all that is complete nonsense.” Belief in that kind of soul “is basically superstition,” he said.

Let's see all those scientific experiments demonstrating that belief in that kind of soul is basically superstition. Again, this is a philosophical inference not demonstrated by any empirical evidence. This also demonstrates a great ignorance about the various theological ideas about the soul. More remedial education needed for this scientist.

And now for the King of Darwinian Fundamentalism:

For people like the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, talk of the soul is of a piece with the rest of the palaver of religious faith, which he has likened to a disease.

Finally, pure science. Pope Richard speaks infallibly.

So which of these wise observations can be taught in public schools? According to Cornelia Dean, all of them apparently, since it is all science.

There is no mention of ID proponents in the article. Not even a quote from Francis Collins. They are invisible in this New York Times article, and Dean and her ilk believe they must be banned from public schools. This is stunning hypocrisy and a double standard that reeks of bigotry.

This is more evidence that there is a concerted movement to establish philosophical materialism as the established worldview of the public school system, if it is not already. Needless to say, this would violate the Establishment Clause of the US Constitution.