But not interested enough to talk about them. A quick perusal of Eddie’s last 20 posts uncovers lots of posts about the ID movement, but no arguments or evidence for design…
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Well, exactly. That would be colonialist oppression.
For myself, I would not say that ID “is” postmodern. It surely is not, in the sense that its object is to affirm that there is one objective reality which is going to administer a firm kick in the pants to everyone who does not accept and bow down to it, after they’re dead.
But as others have indicated here, its methods are deployed all the doggoned time, and asymmetrically. Shedinger spends far too much ink trying to let us all know that although scientists all think that their work is strictly and purely objective, it really isn’t – showing, mostly, that he has no clue as to the actual intellectual life of actual scientists. The whole of evolutionary biology is attributed to him to a “Grand Narrative of Triumph” (as expressed in the subtitle of his book) and to the “guild interests” of biologists. He seems to think, like Derrida, that the text is all there is – that one can critique biology without having the slightest clue as to what makes a cell function, how a structure evolved, how an ecosystem works, or how a creature manages its energy inputs and outputs, because biological writings are TEXT and can be critiqued purely as text.
It is clear enough that these people do not CITE Derrida. It is clear that they would never dream of applying the same scrutiny to religious beliefs that they do to scientific findings. But that disparity of scrutiny doesn’t keep them out of the postmodern toolkit. In the same way, they use disparity of scrutiny of other sorts. They’ll point out that if our brains are merely evolved meat, and if this in any way renders our perceptions of reality unreliable, then there is simply nothing we can believe on the basis of what our brains tell us (who, then, are we to listen to? As one wag said recently, “the brain is the most important organ in the body – ACCORDING TO THE BRAIN.”). But they will NEVER point out that this, if true, is as true of our views on religion as it is of our views on evolution.
And, to be fair, this is how postmodernists are, too. When you are a waiter in a restaurant, and a postmodernist comes in for a sandwich, and you ask, “what will you have today, sir?” you don’t get back the response that your question is freighted with presuppositions which flow from colonialist oppression. You get an order for a sandwich, which demonstrates a faith in external reality which the postmodernist would shudder to see someone point out.
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Exactly:
That will never prevent them from offering a failure to do so as a defense. 
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I never denied that many ID proponents were creationists. In fact, I said that in my experience, most ID proponents were creationists. But ID proponents are not automatically, merely by virtue of being ID proponents, also creationists. That is a distinction you haven’t yet grasped.
First of all, I don’t say that, and I don’t know any ID person who says that, so I disagree with your characterization of ID; second, “we don’t know everything, therefore we know nothing” is not what postmodernism asserts. You really should read up on postmodern thought before you start using it casually as a label for other people and things that have nothing to do with postmodernism.
First, I’ve never met an ID post-modernist, so right away your statement gets off on the wrong foot. Second, ID people don’t think that science is essentially a subjective enterprise; they think that science, done properly, can give us objective knowledge about the universe. Their disagreement is over certain claims that people make in the name of science. And that disagreement concerns only questions of origins, and not even all of those. Probably 99% of modern science – the part of science that is not concerned with origins – the ID people haven’t objected to at all. In postmodernism, however, the ability of science – and not just science about origins, but all of science – to get at truth is radically questioned.
And no ID leader known to me has said that “science” as such is the product of atheistic liberals. ID proponents are constantly stressing that modern science began in Christian Europe, that Newton, Boyle, Kepler, Clerk-Maxwell, Townes, etc. were devout religious believers, etc. IDers are concerned that “science” is often invoked as a weapon by atheists and materialists, but they think that’s a misuse.
What your complaint boils down to is that some ID proponents avoid dealing with evidence, make errors, don’t understand the science, or are confused about the science. None of that employs endorsing any post-modern claims about the nature of knowledge. And by the way, none of them thinks that 0 + 1 is -1 (and if they did ever seem to be arguing that, it would be an error in math, not a sign of post-modernism).
Since you apparently have done no reading at all in post-modern literature, I don’t see the need to refute what is an obvious falsehood. If you ever do get around to reading the post-modern stuff, and eventually get what they are talking about, you will doubtless be embarrassed at how uninformed your comments here have been.
Your question doesn’t follow logically from anything I said.
It’s the aggressiveness of first of those, leading to the other three. It’s the pomo part.
This is a good clarification. Two thumbs up.
At the same time, I also think your caricature of post-modernism lacks nuance. I do not intend to make a big deal of this, but it seems worth a mention.
Best,
Chris
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I keep coming back to this comment of yours because it is thought-provoking. What’s weird is that it really seems that Shedinger prejudged his conclusion, and it seems to me that he basically admits that in this passage you quote, and that this explains why he really never spoke to people outside the ID bubble.
If a professor of theology were embarking upon a sabbatical with the object of spending his time studying the history of evolutionary thought and asking whether that history was characterized – as all intellectual history is, to some extent or other – by ideological or self-interested motives, WHY would he have to have so few conversation partners?
I would think that as one began this quest, one might have an idea of the questions he was beginning to ask. And asking those questions of people who had some insight into it would be central to the mission. But this would result in “considerable isolation” only if one were fairly certain that one was going to wind up angering anybody who could help contribute.
If he went off to write a book, and it was only then that he began to do the work he claims to have done, reading evolutionary authors from the time of Darwin onward, he must have had an idea what that book was going to be. And I rather suspect that he had figured that out already: it was going to challenge biology, rather than simply viewing biology through a different theological or philosophical perspective.
Doing that when you’re not literate in biology to begin with is very, very dangerous. And commitment to the idea that there’s a book in it almost ensures commitment to the idea of being controversial. How many readers would like to read a book where the publisher’s summary reads, “X, a professor of theology, came to see Darwinian and neo-Darwinian conceptions of nature as grounded in Victorian triumphialism and the narrow guild interests of biologists. And then he read up on actual biology, and figured out that these things he had been thinking were a load of tosh.”? I suspect that sort of book doesn’t sell.
I think that the seduction of Shedinger is a reminder of just how dangerous the DI is. The DI fellows violate most people’s basic stereotypes about what creationists are like. They don’t have a pinch between the cheek and gum, they don’t sit on a rocking chair on the porch with a shotgun and a pint of moonshine, and they speak in fancy words that make them, to the uninitiated, sound like a bunch of underappreciated intellectuals. People can be, and are, taken in by this, and it calls upon us to heed the words of Mencken:
“The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous.”
Now, this also reminds me of the horrible book “Darwin’s House of Cards” by Tom Bethell. Bethell DID speak to notable biologists, at length. You can practically feel the pain in Colin Patterson’s attempts to explain to an uncomprehending Bethell why there are no species at the branch points of cladograms, a point which Bethell completely misunderstands and repeatedly returns to.
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Totally disagree. Most creationists don’t fit your stereotype. Besides just being a crummy way to treat your fellow citizens, ridicule is well demonstrated to undermine persuasion. It just doesn’t work.
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Why don’t they do any? Why is it all about the narratives?
No, that’s your pomo fantasy.
Their disagreement is with evolutionary biology, which graduated from hypothesis to theory a very long time ago. Their disagreement is with the evidence itself, which you, as a pomo, try to portray merely as competing narratives.
The finding that the ribosome is a ribozyme is not a “claim made in the name of science,” it’s powerful evidence for the RNA World hypothesis that Meyer (and all the ID creationist colleagues who Meyer claims reviewed his book for him) can explain, so Meyer misrepresented the evidence itself; if that was an error, he would have had a design explanation and issued a formal correction.
Do you have an explanation for that evidence, Eddie?
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Perhaps so. I wasn’t pretending to give a full description of the movement, but only to talk about certain key features of it that weren’t compatible with a conservative philosophical position. But at least I provided a definition from a respected source (Britannica). John Mercer didn’t give a definition at all, before applying it to conservative thinkers and expecting us all to accept the application. He still hasn’t given a definition, yet continues to apply the label to ID, to me, and to whoever else is the current target of his ire. There’s no evidence that he’s read anything written by post-modernists or even anything written about them. He’s tossing the term around as a term of reproach, while shedding no light on its contents.
Mencken was talking about how to deal with it, not how to persuade the unpersuadable.
A parallel to this: if the people working at the DI’s (apparently now dead) research arm were committed to doing real science, they would have invited those who disagree with them to visit and give seminars to discuss things face-to-face. Never–they have to maintain the bubble.
The DI even turned down Josh’s request to attend their summer meeting.
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Well, it depends on who the audience is. Nobody really thinks that Stephen Meyer, whose paycheck depends upon his not understanding evolution, can be persuaded. But if it can indeed be routed, crippled, and made infamous, his ability to win supporters can be harmed.
I think this is often overlooked – in the law we have no interest in convincing opponents. The object is to convince an observer of the debate, not a participant therein. If one wanted to convince a creationist, undoubtedly the right tack would be to agree with him so far as you could, and sow cognitive dissonance while so doing. But in a culture war, the combatants are not who you are trying to convince.
As for most creationists not fitting my stereotype, I wasn’t really saying that MY stereotype of creationists involved a pint of moonshine and a shotgun. These days they are not an easy group to stereotype, because the ones who are professionals at it are very good at disguising themselves.
Incidentally, when my law practice was winding down, my last major client was a YEC. Nice fellow. I simply had no reason to argue such things with him – I was passionately interested (and, ultimately, quite conspicuously successful) in vindicating his reputation for honesty and fair dealing, which had been savagely attacked by local politicians to the point that many people thought he should be in prison. If I had a project of convincing him, it certainly would not take the form of ridicule. But if his pastor were holding anti-evolution revival tent meetings, the response to that certainly would.
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All about the texts…yup, pomo.
I’m pointing out your use of the pomo toolkit at every turn, Eddie. The fact that you may not use it in areas outside biology does nothing to rebut it:
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No, that’s not a claim I have ever made. But, hey, since when has what I’ve actually written had the slightest bearing on the things you write about me?
That ID proponents are almost invariably creationists is simply a conclusion that is drawn from an objective appraisal of the evidence. But it’s not one that will be discerned by naively believing every thing they write, and ignoring the subtexts of what they write along with every other piece of evidence.
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Big mistake. I understand the sentiment, but ridicule undermines trust. What that pastor needs is a trustworthy person to offer him a better way. Ridicule him and you won’t be trusted.
Perhaps I am being unclear here. If I intended to convince the pastor, the path would certainly not be ridicule. If I were trying to keep people from going to the revival tent meeting, it probably would be.
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It’s hard to imagine what I would do – surely a delicate task – if I had someone who was a creationist and whom I wanted to liberate. I have some extraordinarily devout friends, including one who tossed out the more conventional Protestantism of his youth in favor of the Orthodox faith and who deeply believes that the liturgies and whatnot are not just symbolic, but are in some way essential. He is not a creationist – but if I re-imagine him as a creationist, and imagine how I would go about this, it would be slow and cautious. My view is that people do not allow you to convince them, but that they may allow you to show them things which they may use to convince themselves. Push hard, and it’s probably over. Ridicule, and it’s definitely over. Ridicule is for people like Meyer, who will never agree to anything, but who can be made embarrassing to stand next to.
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You make it implicitly, every time you use the phrase “ID creationists”. It’s very clear from the context that you mean the phrase to include all ID proponents, not just some of them.
You’ve also explicitly said that Behe and Denton are creationists, and if they, the two most explicit pro-evolutionists in the ID camp, are creationists, then it follows that the less clearly evolutionist members of the ID camp would be creationists, too.
But if I’m wrong, you can show me by an example. Tell me one member of the ID camp who, in your view, is not a creationist. And tell me how you determined that.