The myth that "only creationists use the word Darwinism" is an innovation in folk etymology from the atheist blogs, one I traced back as far as the ignorant opinionating of "Orac" at the "Scienceblogs". I tried to point out to him that entirely conventional Darwinists from his own, appointed "bull dog" and earliest defender, Thomas Huxley to Richard Dawkins used the term to describe their belief in natural selection. It was used by his foremost German associate, Ernst Haeckel and was the word used by another of Darwin's closest associates, Ray Lankester, when he translated Haeckel's History of Creation, a translation that Darwin read and approved of. He expressed no objection to the word used by both to describe his theory of natural selection.
In fact, it was Thomas Huxley who gave the word its modern meaning attached to Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, it having previously been used to describe the belief of those who believed his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin's theory of how evolution happened. A point which Darwin, himself, once noted.
Orac dealt with my documentation refuting his stupid, uninformed and ignorant assertion in the typical neo-atheist manner, he pretended I didn't provide him with the documentation to prove him wrong. Pride goeth before everything else with those self-designated champions of evidenced truth.
I have been through this over and over again but the ignorance issuing from the "skepticism"-atheism industry is well entrenched among the middle-brow and lower levels of thought and I'm afraid such points will constantly have to be repeated to defeat their program of lies.
The media has allowed those guys free reign. I read Michael Shermer consulted as an expert on such things in two allegedly reputable sources this week, when he has a financial interest in misrepresenting anything to do with "skepticism"-atheism. Those inexpert and self-interested guys are the go-to guys on these issues and they constantly misrepresent things in favor of their business interests, the "skepticism" industry from which they derive either fame or fortune, when they haven't worked it to get both. Going to those guys is so much easier than doing research and consulting people who know what they're talking about but who, as academics, have to undergo some level of review and professional criticism of what they say on such topics. And another benefit of doing it the wrong and easy way, they won't have the likes of Jerry Coyne and P. Z. Myers calling out their blog communities on them if they transgress the Index of Prohibited Thoughts of the "skepticism" industry, such as Orac is also a member of.
Update: Oh, I wasn't lying about that. I can document where that exchange happened, at Orac's own blog and with him ignoring my documentation, starting at comment #6, especially note my comment #18 in which I proved that Orac was misrepresenting the truth, with cited quotes, with links. That was seven years ago, and I've had that bit of superstitious lore originating at the "skeptics" postings on the "Science"blogs constantly repeated to me ever since. I couldn't swear to the chronology, but from how I said things there, I believe this comment thread came after I sent him similar documentation, with links, in an e-mail. One which I don't recall him deigning to respond to. Considering the fact that he's almost if not as verbose in his columnage as I am, I don't think it's because he's too busy doing other things to acknowledge factual refutation sent to him in e-mails.
Update 2: I have, since writing that piece yesterday, gone back and looked at Peter Kropotkin's "Mutual Aid" which I don't think I've looked at in decades. In light of my reading of Darwin and his closest associates, especially his most often cited ones in The Descent of Man, Galton and Haeckel, I have to say Kropotkin, in 1902 was already distorting what Darwin said in that book to pretend he didn't say what he did about the consequences of natural selection in the human population. What he says exonerating Darwin in his introduction is, to put it plainly, a lie which predates the post-war Darwin industries plaster saint by about five decades.
If I have the time I will go through the book and look up the relevant citations (Kropotkin seems, like the modern Darwin industry, to entirely ignore his citations of Haeckel and Galton) and may write it up. Oddly, in a quick reading of the first several chapters of Kropotkin's I haven't noticed those two names of people Darwin said, many times, supported him in what he had to say on the topic. It seems to have long been in the interest of Darwinists to come up with a more convenient Darwin when the real Darwin is inconvenient to their promotion of his branch of their mutually held materialist monism. The final triumph of which Haeckel attributed to the theory of natural selection on page 23 of The History of Creation, which Darwin endorsed. Notice at that last link, right before that, Haeckel claiming the devout Christian Galileo and Bruno in his march towards materialist monism, sounding like he could be on a FOX network "science"show, today. [Of course, I mean the Seth MacFarlane-N, dG Tyson retread of "Cosmos".] They're all playing out of the same game book to the same goal, and it's not compatible with anything you'd really want to live in.
Honestly, I give up on the on-line "community," the "reality based community" as it liked to call itself once upon a time (or has that now become a forbidden term full of ironic connotations?).
ReplyDeleteI think it was Berke Breathed several years ago who portrayed the press as a baying pack chasing the latest rumor like hounds on a rabbit trail. It was meant to be a derisive image which we could all feel superior to (and this long before the Internet). We could all see the press was just a gang chasing whatever red flag was waved before their eyes. Now the "on-line community" has replaced the press, with fully as reflexive and un-reflective an attitude as Breathed's comic exaggeration.
"Darwinism" is a forbidden term? I just heard it on a British documentary on PBS last night, used in regard to Hitler's Nazism. "Social Darwinism" itself is a term that predates me, and I'm feeling older by the day, especially when seemingly surrounded by so many young idiots.
It's a funny thing but I get more radical as I grow older, and the world around me seems to be even more conservative and ignorant. The Cosby scandal is back, thanks to Larry Wilson who bravely used it to promote his new show (ratings! Gotta get those ratings!). His logic now is that 35 (a new number! Don't know where he got it) women can't be wrong, but even if 2 are right, Cosby is still guilty.
Of course I can round up 35 people who claim they've been abducted by aliens, and even if two of them are telling the truth....
Whether their abductions are possible or not are beside the point to the logic used; or the logical fallacy engaged, rather, in Wilson's argument. But it's better than Jay Leno's argument that we must believe the women because it's time to start believing women!
Easier than reasoning, I guess; much easier than facing reality, that's for sure.
It's true. The extent to which what's trending on Twitter will get something on even something like NPR shows how dangerous the media is without any sense of basic responsibility, morality or even professional ethics (which seems to go along with everything else when secularism becomes the normal frame of reference in life.
DeleteI don't think I have ever been more radical than I have become in the past several years as I've seen through the fraud of the pseudo-left, in which the majority if not the vast majority are atheists that it might as well be the atheist-left and that they are really not leftists at all because they deny the very basis on which any moral positions can be taken in a way that will make them potent in life, in society and in politics.
I'm ready to junk everything I've done and begin to promote a left based on the prophets, Jesus and his earliest followers and the writings of people who followed on those, elucidating many things about how trying to achieve their vision fares in the cruel, selfish world. I don't think there is a more radical act than promoting the taking of Jesus seriously. It was only when people did that in our history that things really changed, up to and into the 1960s. It was when people were duped into abandoning that foundation out of some flaky sense of fairness to atheists and the such that things started not working for the left.
The idiocy of the term "Bronze Age thinking," besides being historically inaccurate, is telling: it's the 19th century arrogance of Britain, of "superior" "civilized" Man over the "primitive" tribes, the demarcation being Western "reason" and the "Enlightenment."
DeleteAn idea abandoned as definitively as race as the basis for public policy, but still alive among the know-nothings who think they are daring and rebellious because, as my daughter says, they have Daddy issues.
As you say, there is no more radical act than taking Jesus seriously.
Among the thing that has become more obvious to me in encountering atheists online is how truly Victorian they are, right down to a genteel form of condescension and even racism there is just beneath the surface of much of what they say. It's a rare thing for one of them to be honest about that, as Thomas Huxley was in his repulsive essay, claiming Lincoln's Emancipation as a benefit for the "superior" white, former slave owners who would go on to win a struggle with the emancipated black slaves because in a competition of "brains not bites (he really did put it that way!) the black race was doomed due to its biological inferiority. Darwinism made racism a part of science in a way it had never really been before that and eugenics was its major political and legal result. Kropotkin's Mutual Aid certainly didn't win out in that real life competition with Darwin and Spencer's equation of natural selection with "Survival of the Fittest (Origin of Species 5th ed.) except within the mythology of the Darwin industry and neo-atheist revisionism.
DeleteI have to say I'm pretty shocked at what Kropotkin got away with in that book. I don't remember anyone pointing out how entirely incompatible his natural selection was with main-stream Darwinist natural selection as to not be the same thing at all. And that is still going on today as Dawkins, while being a materialist, asserts that free will (which his fellow atheists deny is possible) can free us from the results of natural selection, even as he is one of the most fundamentalist of promoters of that idea.
They've been freed from any requirement of their assertions having either an internal or external coherence or any relationship to the truth by an ignorant, lazy and/or complicit intellectual class. Their assertions don't even stand up under the part-time review I'm able to give it. More typically, they are bald-faced, ideologically motivated lies and lies to cover those lies.
Dawkins wrote a book which brought him fame, and which almost immediately was debunked (I remember shredding its "logic" at the time), and which has now been thoroughly repudiated.
ReplyDeleteAnd he wasn't all that smart about the idea, one he merely promoted in popular science.
When he realized that gig was up, he became a public atheist, and when that wasn't enough, he began bashing Islam (of whom 1.3 billion of its adherents are not from the Middle East/North Africa, but to hear him tell it, all Muslims are Arabs. He doesn't say that, of course, he only strongly implies it; so it's the same racism I grew up with: "I got nothin' against those people, I just don't want my daughter to marry one!").
His fame rests on his ability to appeal to prejudice and ignorance. Of course his arguments are internally inconsistent. Hell, Dennett claimed to have explained consciousness. Notably no one, not neurologists nor psychologists nor philosophers, bowed down before his solution. Mostly they just shrugged and moved on which, again, was almost more attention than he deserved.
I've found, more and more, that religion is not a subject one is supposed to be informed bout, unless one is a religious scholar or philosopher of religion. I have a book with an essay by Richard Rorty, meant to be a discourse with an Italian philosopher (and former Catholic). I had some respect for Rorty, but the foolishness of his assertions in that essay appalled me. I prefer the atheist Derrida, who was Jewish and wrote about a "negative atheology." I don't always agree with Derrida, but he knows what he's talking about, and he understands the work of Kierkegaard.
He's also a student of Heidegger, a philosopher who influenced both Bultmann and Karl Jaspers, to mention two religious thinkers. There is a seven volume work on religious fundamentalism, one volume of which is devoted to Islam. Has Dawkins even heard of it? And he calls himself an Oxford don?
Oxford should disavow any connection to the man. He's an embarassment.