creationists, a quick squiz

creative science

I may have been a little rude in dismissing Dr Carl, and it might have been fun to keep him dangling on the line for a while, since he's apparently quite an important figure in creationist circles. He has an entry in Wikipedia, something I'm never likely to have. He's the manager of Creationist Ministries International, which had its beginnings in Australia, maybe even here in dear old Adelaide. Certainly Dr Carl studied here at Adelaide University, becoming a real medical doctor. He has been promoting creationism [Wiki describes him as a young earth creationist] since at least 1976, when he formed the Creation Science Association here in South Australia. This organisation was apparently based on a US organisation, the Creation Research Society, first formed in 1963. If you want a laugh, check out the Wikipedia entry on this organisation and its internal ructions. These people call themselves scientists though, and what's worse, the Wikipedia people allow them to be so called. Having said that, I don't think Wikipedia's treatment is sympathetic. It simply states their beliefs. Nothing like deadpan humour.

Anyway, Dr Carl's Creation Science Association merged with a Queensland group to eventually become the notorious Answers in Genesis, until finally in 2005 long-standing differences with the US President of AiG, Ken Ham, caused a split. These guys apparently have big problems with each others' literal interpretations of the multi-authored first book of the Bible. Dr Carl is still involved in Answers in Genesis [Aust], and does lots of writing and speaking etc.

Of course, I've since read Dr Carl's last email to me, and I'm miffed that I didn't respond more fully, even though it's essentially a waste of time. Anyway I'll give myself the last word in my next post.

The last post - to Dr Carl

First, a quote:

Those who look tenderly at the slave-owner and with a cold heart at the slave, never seem to put themselves into the position of the latter; what a cheerless prospect, with not even a hope of change! Picture to yourself the chance, ever hanging over you, of your wife and your little children - those objects which nature urges even the slave to call his own - being torn from you and sold like beasts to the first bidder! And these deeds are done and palliated by men, who profess to love their neighbours as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that his Will be done on earth! It makes one's blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty.

Charles Darwin.

These lines can apply equally well, by the way, to the early twentieth century treatment of Australian aborigines and their families.

I don't wish to continue this exchange, because it makes my blood boil that you should continue to insist on a bogus link between Darwin, with his natural empathy for those vulnerable to exploitation and ill-treatment from the ruling class, and the Nazis, with their monstrous rulings upon who was or wasn't fit to live.

It doesn't surprise me that you've unearthed some sociologist who's dedicated years of his life to collecting mountains of evidence connecting Darwin [or 'Darwinism', that endlessly malleable term] and the holocaust. Once a person has decided to lay the blame for something on someone or some group of people, they can always find mountains of evidence to support their arguments. Think of the Malleus Maleficarum, not to mention the hundreds upon hundreds of anti-Jewish tracts blaming the Jews for all and sundry. To quote Mark Cohen [Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages]: 'In size and scope alone, this enormous compilation demonstrates the fundamental, continuous struggle in Christian history to affirm Christianity at the expense of the Jews and Judaism'. The work of your Doctor Wicked, or whoever, would, I strongly suspect, only be another illustration of the delusions that obsessional ideological commitments give rise to.

I've read and seen plenty on the Nazis and their holocaust. They profited from centuries of anti-semitism to single out the Jews for particularly horrifying treatment. Their views on racial purity gained credence, however, from ideas of more recent vintage, ideas promoting racial segregation. The historian Niall Ferguson [The War of the World] puts the case coherently enough:

'In many ways, pseudo-science merely provided sophisticated rationales for those measures. Ideas like 'Social Darwinism', which erroneously inferred from Darwin's theories a struggle for survival between the races, or 'racial hygiene', which argued that physical and mental degeneration would result from miscegenation, came some time after prohibitions [against inter-racial marriages] had been enacted.'

To repeat, I don't find these exchanges useful, and I'm bringing them to an end. It disgusts me that you and your organization will continue to direct people away from exploring Darwin for themselves, and towards your propaganda. I notice that you've ceased to describe Darwin as a racist in these emails, as you know you won't get away with it, but I have no doubt you'll continue to describe him as such to others, whenever you can get away with it. Creationists in general are notorious for making scientific claims, backing down from them when confronted and refuted by real scientists, and then repeating the same refuted claims before a more credulous audience. This has been documented many times over. It's hard to deal with opponents so lacking in integrity.

I will continue to read Darwin, and to recommend him, because he is inspirational, for his inexhaustible curiosity, his ingenious speculations on geography, geology and climate as well as plant and animal species - and of course for his humanity. I can't resist one last quote from him:

'My geological examination of the country generally created a good deal of surprise among the Chilenos: it was long before they could be convinced that I was not hunting for mines. This was sometimes troublesome: I found the most ready way of explaining my employment, was to ask them how it was that they themselves were not curious concerning earthquakes and volcanoes? - why some springs were hot and others cold? - why there were mountains in Chile, and not a hill in La Plata? These bare questions at once satisfied and silenced the greater number; some, however [like a few in England who are a century behindhand], thought that all such inquiries were useless and impious; and that it was quite sufficient that God had thus made the mountains.'

So long live an impiety that gives free rein to curiosity, and produces such results.

I've not read any more of your email. I've had enough. Don't contact me again.

Dr Carl hammers on

Dr Carl decided to try a point by point rebuttal of my previous email, and here it is, though some of it seems to have dropped out - maybe he got tangled up mid-sentence, or the sentence disappeared up its own backside, as some sentences do.

Hello Carl

I'm glad you've seen the light.

Not sure what you've gleaned from my email to suggest that.

Actually, I think my tone has remained much the same throughout this exchange, but it might surprise you to know that unoriginal claims about Darwin as racist and progenitor of nazism do tend to annoy reasonable people.

I wonder if you will ever get to reading the voluminous documentation of the direct Darwin-Hitler link, e.g. from Richard Weikart's book - he is a professor of sociology, I believe, used to documenting his sources.

I hope this email will bring the exchange to an end - unless you respond, because, you see, I always have to have the last word!

Hey, that makes me feel good about you. That's normally a creationist trait. :-) Guess you've got work ahead of you.

One has to ask why it is that creationists get so hot under the collar about 'Darwinism'. Of course it has little to do with racism or nazism and everything to do with the supernatural elephant in the room, or I should say the cosmos. Your god just doesn't have enough of a role to play.

Actually this is a rather naive view. It does not have to do with creation per se, but with biblical history. The facts in Genesis relate intimately to the reality of the Gospel. Just as Clinton said "It's the economy, stupid" one can say of those looking for the motivation behind the modern creation movement: "It's the Bible, stupid". If Scripture taught that there were millions of years of development as God caused pondscum to gradually become transformed into human beings, then the degree or otherwise of the role played by God would be irrelevant.

It should be pointed out that it was generally recognized, among the leading scientists even of Erasmus Darwin's era - before the birth of his grandson Charles - that some form of evolution was going on. The opposite of evolution - or change - was the fixity of species - or no change. The idea - hardly so coherent as to be called a theory - that a creator separately created these endlessly multiplying species, at different times in different places, seemed less and less credible as more fossils were discovered, all with related body plans and classifiable similarities and differences. This along with increasing knowledge and speculation around artificial or human selection, the breeding of pigeons, dogs, strains of wheat, etc, provided increasing evidence that living things evolved, changed somehow. What wasn't understood was the mechanism or set of mechanisms involved. Various attempts were made, from the late eighteenth century onwards, to work out these mechanisms.

Had Darwin never existed, natural selection would still be the cornerstone of modern biology. First, Darwinian evolution is not the cornerstone of modern biology, much as many would like to think this. Skell's paper (which you likely won't bother to read, as your mind is made up) shows how virtually none of the modern advances in biology depended in the slightest on evolution being true. And in spite of your continual conflating of the two, natural selection is not the same as evolution. Natural selection was worked out and formally described by a creationist called Blyth before Darwin (though he later at least part-signed up for the Darwinian bandwagon). This was based on the evidence and common sense. Natural selection is not at all a threat to Genesis history, far from it. In fact, had you seen The Voyage, you would have realised that the 'creation' idea which Darwin say himself as overturning was not biblical creation at all. Fixity of species, with centres of creation, owed far more to Greek philosophers. No-one who took Genesis as history (the way in which the Lord Jesus Christ and all the New Testament writers universally take it) would believe that after a global Flood, the creatures on the Galapagos had been created on the islands. Wallace worked out the mechanism separately, and had he never existed, someone else would have done so. Maybe it would have taken a bit longer, but it was an idea whose time had more or less come. The evidence had to be accounted for.

Natural selection provides an enormously powerful mechanism to account for the changes as well as the connections that so puzzled earlier scientists. And of course the later discovery of genes provided the universal organic material upon which selection could act.

Sounds somewhat confused, Stewart. Genes represent the information upon which selection acts, the medium on which that information rides is largely irrelevant. NS has no creative power; Darwin saw NS acting on random variation (the origin of the variation is beside the point), and he was right. But since any given gene pool has a limit in the amount of genetic information, there are inevitably limits to variation. Hence the modern view of evolution to seek to overcome this limitation is that random mutation

I heard an emeritus Professor of Genetics (Cornell University), a scientific convert to biblical creation, at our major Australian conference in January this year explain carefully how the NeoDarwinian mechanism has been thoroughly falsified by highpowered supercomputer modelling. The program is called Mendel's accountant. The DVD is available. But then, anything which counters your preferred worldview is not likely to be permitted to disturb it. It's easier, no matter what the evidence might be, to dismiss something as 'propagandist'.

I think I've given you a fair go, but I won't be accessing your propagandist website. I did, for open-mindedness' sake, attempt to access the link you provided re Philip Skell's article, but it required a paid subscription and, being poor but honest, I can't presently afford it. I did find out something about Skell's background though. His beliefs seem to have caused a stir, mainly of amusement, in the science-blogging community. I was quite tickled by some of the comments here.

Yes, it's interesting that someone can be an emeritus Professor of Chemistry at an Ivy League university, and yet one's views generate derision when they don't line up with the establishment paradigm. It seems little has changed since the days of phlogiston and Ignaz Semmelweiss.

Without the evolutionary mechanism worked out by Darwin and Wallace - without evolution in fact - we'd be back where we were in the eighteenth century.

That is so irrational as to make one weep. Think of the huge number of advances in any branch of science; now list ten that could never have been thought of by a convinced creationist.

Creationism has no testable theory, it can create no research program, it simply gives up on understanding as far as I can see.

Nonsense. Vague creationism, maybe. Biblical creationism, no way. It posits a specific history in which there are research goals, and a fair bit of research (limited by no access to taxpayer dollars is going on. For example, the recent research of the RATE project which has made highly significant discoveries on the issue of radiometric dating, a program which would not have existed if not for specific biblical creationist expectations. Check "RATE" on the search engine. O, I forgot. Even if you were challenged by actual evidence, it seems all you have to do to prevent being further disturbed is to Google a few more websites and then feel comforted by 'derision'. That's really smart.

Now I'll get back back to my Darwin book. That's what I call stimulating company.

Enjoy.

more close encounters with Dr Carl

Apparently Dr Carl found my remarks a bit on the nose as you'll see. I wonder what he's a doctor of? Divinity, I'd guess. I wonder whether that means a doctor of the divine or a doctor to the divine?

Dear Stewart, as I read through what started off being a civil and interesting email, I assumed I would be wanting to engage in a detailed and civil discussion on the more nuanced view of Darwin in Gould's essay, as it appeared to deserve. A pity then that the latter parts not only showed that you had not even been willing to check out the detailed information on natural selection (which we endorse strongly as a real phenomenon and mechanism for speciation, even) on our site, let alone the evidence (not some rant) relating to the background of the Nazi scene (confirmed by my own mother who grew up in Germany in that era, btw) - or even the items which show that your claims re both the utility/necessity of evolution for science (See Prof Philip Skell in The Scientist 2005, 19(16):10, titled "Why do we invoke Darwin? Evolutionary Theory contributes little to experimental biology") and viral mutation (see http://creation.com/has-aids-evolved) are misrepresentative of the reality concerning our claims.

A pity that the rather ungracious (even perhaps abusive) ending meant that there was clearly little point going on.

Sincerely,

Carl W.

I don't think my remarks were particularly abusive, but anyway, here's my response:

Hello Carl

I'm glad you've seen the light.

Actually, I think my tone has remained much the same throughout this exchange, but it might surprise you to know that unoriginal claims about Darwin as racist and progenitor of nazism do tend to annoy reasonable people.

I hope this email will bring the exchange to an end - unless you respond, because, you see, I always have to have the last word!

One has to ask why it is that creationists get so hot under the collar about 'Darwinism'. Of course it has little to do with racism or nazism and everything to do with the supernatural elephant in the room, or I should say the cosmos. Your god just doesn't have enough of a role to play.

It should be pointed out that it was generally recognized, among the leading scientists even of Erasmus Darwin's era - before the birth of his grandson Charles - that some form of evolution was going on. The opposite of evolution - or change - was the fixity of species - or no change. The idea - hardly so coherent as to be called a theory - that a creator separately created these endlessly multiplying species, at different times in different places, seemed less and less credible as more fossils were discovered, all with related body plans and classifiable similarities and differences. This along with increasing knowledge and speculation around artificial or human selection, the breeding of pigeons, dogs, strains of wheat, etc, provided increasing evidence that living things evolved, changed somehow. What wasn't understood was the mechanism or set of mechanisms involved. Various attempts were made, from the late eighteenth century onwards, to work out these mechanisms.

Had Darwin never existed, natural selection would still be the cornerstone of modern biology. Wallace worked out the mechanism separately, and had he never existed, someone else would have done so. Maybe it would have taken a bit longer, but it was an idea whose time had more or less come.The evidence had to be accounted for. Natural selection provides an enormously powerful mechanism to account for the changes as well as the connections that so puzzled earlier scientists. And of course the later discovery of genes provided the universal organic material upon which selection could act.

I think I've given you a fair go, but I won't be accessing your propagandist website. I did, for open-mindedness' sake, attempt to access the link you provided re Philip Skell's article, but it required a paid subscription and, being poor but honest, I can't presently afford it. I did find out something about Skell's background though. His beliefs seem to have caused a stir, mainly of amusement, in the science-blogging community. I was quite tickled by some of the comments here.

Without the evolutionary mechanism worked out by Darwin and Wallace - without evolution in fact - we'd be back where we were in the eighteenth century. Creationism has no testable theory, it can create no research program, it simply gives up on understanding as far as I can see. Now I'll get back back to my Darwin book. That's what I call stimulating company.

Regards

Stewart

with some degree of annoyance

Here is my response to creationist Carl's latest attempt to convert me.

Hello Carl

If you are so interested in the truth, as you say, I have to wonder why you're so keen to describe Darwin as a racist, and to use your organisation to promote [or demote?] him as such. The theory of natural selection from random variation, properly understood, has no clear racial implications. It has also been the most productive theory in the history of biology - in fact modern biology is unthinkable without it. It has dominated our understanding of everything from the successful mutations of viruses to the overarching complexity and sensitivity of our planetary ecosystem.

Since you mention Stephen Jay Gould, I would strongly urge you to read his essay, 'The Moral State of Tahiti - and of Darwin', in his book Eight Little Piggies, which is a measured and thoughtful treatment of Darwin's views on race. Perhaps you could use your organisation to promote the essay, in the name of the truth you so cherish? Perhaps you could also recommend that people read Darwin's work for themselves, with no 'helpful' commentary from your truth-seeking organisation?

Needless to say, Gould didn't share Peter Bowler's assessment. Here is one quote from the essay: 'I don't think Darwin ever substantially revised his anthropological views. His basic attitude remained: 'They' are inferior but redeemable.' Gould goes on to conclude: 'Darwin was a meliorist in the paternalistic tradition, not a believer in biologically fixed and ineradicable inequality....The meliorist may wish to eliminate cultural practices, and may be vicious and uncompromising in his lack of sympathy for differences, but he does view savages [Darwin's word] as 'primitive' by social circumstance and biologically capable of 'improvement' [read 'Westernization'].

In short, Darwin was a creature of his time - and his class. He was a scion of the aristocracy and a member of the Establishment in a nation which, in his time, possessed the most powerful empire on the globe.It's not surprising that eugenics first arose in Britain [the term was coined and legitimized by Darwin's own cousin, Francis Galton]. It's probably true that the 'scientific' legitimization of a 'hierarchy of races' was given a fillip by particularinterpretations of the Origins of Species, but it was a habit of the period to use science in this self-serving way, to make permanent and 'natural' the political order of the day. This helps to explain why eugenics became so popular in America in the twenties. By that time America had eclipsed Britain as the most powerful nation. And of course in the thirties, Nazi Germany aspired to master race status. Interestingly, Japan, too had a master race complex, without being much infected by 'Darwinism'. But, hey, I'm sure you can find a way to prove that the Japanese worshipped Darwin as a god!

The theory of natural selection is no more a belief system than is the theory of relativity. Nor is it any kind of end game. It has been built upon and developed in ways that would amaze Darwin himself. For example the modern study of population genetics has virtually dealt the death blow to the nineteenth century notion of race, as we have learned that human genetic diversity is less than half of that found in chimpanzees. Race remains a complex and controversial issue, but modern biological science has definitely contributed as much as human experience to the demolition of eugenics as a force in society. And it continues to be informed and directed by the theory of natural selection.

Your claim that this theory caused the holocaust is offensive and ridiculous. Still, when I hear you swear that you're made of truth, I do believe you, though I know you lie.

yours

Stewart

battling the creationists, part two

It's all unexplained here

Continuing on from the last post, I couldn't help but keep on responding. Why oh why. I think because his own response was articulate enough to make civilized argument possible. I decided to forget about the biblical issues and focus wholly on evolution:

Hello Carl.

How interesting to learn that Creation Ministries International has a branch in Australia. No doubt you'll love to see us all CMI-ling.

I've read Darwin's Origin of Species and am currently reading his Voyage of the Beagle, hence my interest in 'Darwin and the Fuegians'. I was naturally shocked, but also sceptical, about the story Darwin recounted of cannibalism in that region, and so I googled the subject and came up with the essay on your website.

I should also say that I've read a smattering of Darwin's other writing, as well as more than one biography, as well as books on the theory of evolution by natural selection, by the likes of Stephen J Gould and Richard Dawkins, not to mention scores of scientific articles. I've listened to lectures, radio programs, TV docos and the like, presenting the subject from any number of angles. By general lay standards I'm reasonably well educated on Darwin and the theory that he and Wallace developed, independently of each other but based on similar empirical data.

I'm also familiar with the charges of racism levelled at Darwin, almost invariably by Christian creationists. They usually quote from The Descent of Man, and I've examined those passages for myself.

Unlike The Origin of Species, The Descent of Man is full of footnotes and references to contemporary and antecedent thinkers. This places it much more firmly in the context of its time than the earlier, more original work. Virtually every 'racist' observation made by Darwin in this work is a gloss on other scientists' 'racist' observations. Darwin tended to call the indigenous inhabitants of the regions he visited 'savages', particularly when discussing them in a general way. So did every other white writer of his time, no matter how scientific.Darwin believed that black-skinned people were inferior to white-skinned people [though probably not 'naturally' so].So did 99.999% of his compatriots at the time. This is not an exaggeration, it's an uncontroversial fact. As you should know, in Australia it was the mainstream view, even fifty years after Darwin's death, that our Aborigines were morally and intellectually inferior to white people, and that they should be 'encouraged' to die out.

If Darwin was racist, so was the whole of western 'civilized' society - an obvious fact that you people seem reluctant to point to. Darwin was a creature of his time. Aristotle thought slaves were sub-human. Immanuel Kant thought women had infantile, untrainable minds. Not even the greatest genius can transcend the prejudices of his or her age.

You point out correctly that Darwin's personal views have little to do with the validity of the theory of natural selection - the most successful and productive theory in the history of biology. The fact remains though that many of your fellow Christians seem determined to personally denigrate Darwin - clearly in the hope that this will somehow weaken his credentials as a theorist. It's also a depressing fact that Christian propaganda groups such as yours have manipulated your way to the top of search lists, thus giving your extremist views a fair greater prominence than your numbers merit. I'll continue to try to do my bit to redress the balance.

Stewart Henderson

This, hopefully, dealt with the issue of racism. Racism wasn't of course a word in Darwin's time. Words arise when there is a need for them, and there was no need for a word for racial discrimination in the nineteenth century, because everyone practised it. Racial inequality seemed obvious then.

But Carl was far from finished. Here's his next response:

Hi Stewart.

I suppose depending on where people are coming from will make a big difference to the gloss they put on things, mostly it's an unconscious thing. But truth matters, at the end of the day.

Certainly society was more racist back then than it is now. But there is a strong case for Darwin's theory anticipating substantial biological differences between the races, hence the comments by Dr Peter Bowler on the Darwin film to which I earlier referred.

Here is the actual transcript, some of this was not used in the movie itself: (NB Bowler is a leading Darwin historian and no friend of creationists):

P (09:00:36:23) … they hoped that they will be able to educate the various races of man kind in the arts of civilisation but there was always this nagging problem of is it going to be possible. And one thing that’s characteristic of the general direction of European’s thought during the 19^th century is there were increasingly harder line taken on that which we see reflected in Darwin himself.

That by the time he writes The Descent of Man in 1871 it’s pretty clear that he by that time shares the growing suspicion or conviction of many Europeans. The non white races simply do not have the capacity to be elevated properly into civilised human beings that they are mentally and morally at a more limited level. In a sense they are stuck at an early stage in the biological evolution of the human species.

(09:01:42:06) So their way of life may offer us a fossilised relic of what our own ancestors lived like in the distant prehistoric past. But now Darwin and many of his contemporaries are beginning to realise that what they needed to claim that they are biologically relics of the past. They are in fact equivalent to earlier stages in the ascent from the apes who have been preserved in isolated locations, preserved with those earlier levels of mental and moral development.

And as leading evolutionist the late Prof. SJ Gould of Harvard pointed out, though scientific justifications for racism were common before Darwin, they increased by orders of magnitude following the publication of his book in 1859. We have in the past also cited secular sources for the fact that the treatment of Australian aboriginals took a nosedive following the publication of the book. And this makes perfect sense, as does the link between Darwinism as strong inspiration for Hitler's views - confirmed in spades recently by academics such as Prof Weikart.

Darwinism-inspired eugenics was extremely common in the US prior to WW2; see http://creation.com/americas-evolutionists-hitlers-inspiration . It's likely that it is the world's discovery of the horrors of the Holocaust which caused racism to become unpopular.

If you doubt any of the above, the references are there on our website in the Q and A section. Of course, as indicated before, if evolution were the correct explanation for all of life's diversity and brilliant designs (a philosophical necessity for a non-theist) then it would merely be unfortunate that it happened to inspire racism, holocaust, etc. - the bad fruits of a belief do not affect whether it's true or not. But it makes it even more tragic and unfortunate when wellmeaning but misguided churchians seek to encourage their fellows to embrace this belief system uncritically.

Regards,

Carl.

BTW, Australia is where this ministry began, not the US. It has been going since the late 70s.

Dr Carl Wieland

Managing Director

Creation Ministries International Ltd (Australia)

creation.com

Well, I wasn't going to leave things there. I must always have the last word. I'll continue this in the next post.

anti-Darwinist agitprop on the net: quelle horreur!

Well I was sitting here minding my own business, reading Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle when I came upon a strikingly sensational passage on the natives of Tierra del Fuego:

From the concurrent, but quite independent evidence of the boy taken by Mr Low, and of Jemmy Button, it is certainly true, that when pressed in winter by hunger, they kill and devour their old women before they kill their dogs: the boy, being asked by Mr Low why they did this, answered, "Doggies catch otters, old women no." This boy described the manner in which they are killed by being held over smoke and thus choked; he imitated their screams as a joke, and described the parts of their bodies which are considered best to eat. Horrid as such a death by the hands of their friends and relatives must be, the fears of the old women, when hunger begins to press, are more painful to think of; we are told that they then often run away into the mountains, but that they are pursued by the men and brought back to the slaughter-house at their own firesides!

I just had to check this out so I googled Darwin and the Fuegians, and came up with this essay, which as you can see starts off okay but gradually transforms itself into an anti-evolution diatribe and a bible-bashing harangue. Now it's probably best to ignore this kind of stuff, but on noting that the article could be commented on, I couldn't resist. This has resulted in an exchange which I reproduce here.

Here's my first comment:

Your article begins well enough but quickly degenerates into godbothering claptrap. What a shame for anyone concerned with the truth! Darwin got it wrong about the Fuegians, but he was never a racist and he would have heartily concurred with Snow's view that their condition was due to their circumstances. He sympathised greatly with those harsh circumstances. You have cherry-picked your quotes because of your typical creationist loathing of the 'arch-enemy', Darwin.
As to the bible as a historical record, it isn't. It's mythology from start to finish. Mountains upon mountains of archaelogical, empirical data have shown the bible to be as unreliable a document as has ever been written, from a historical perspective, but of course you are blind to all that. Go away, and lie no more.

Not I think the most brilliant response ever devised, but hopefully sufficient for the job. But this wasn't to be the end of the matter. I had stirred up the beast. I shortly received this in response:

Dear Mr Henderson/ Dear Stewart

Thanks for your feedback, the comments will be passed on to the author.

You won't be surprised to hear that we respectfully disagree with you. Have you ever read 'The Descent of Man' by Darwin? You could hardly deny his racism, I'm afraid, if you had. That does not mean that you are wrong concerning his general sympathy for the underdog, he was also an abolitionist. If you get the chance to see our Darwin documentary that has been playing at Australian cinemas, or via the DVD version (see the front page of our site for more details) you will see among other things interviews with leading Darwin historians. One of them (very anticreationist) nevertheless makes some very strong statements on the race issue - see also his extended interview on the 'extras' on the DVD.

So, in short, we think you are poorly informed, and also that we do not see "Darwin" as an object to be demonized. The doco treats him with respect and fairness, as even many anticreationists have acknowledged. Of course, the real issue is not what sort of a person Darwin was or was not, but has to do with the validity of, and the evidence for, the notion of microbe-to-man evolution.

Re the Bible and archaeological data - I'm surprised that you would think that. If you search our site, you will find a number of articles on the subject. But then, what one wants to believe definitely influences one's interpretation of the data, and archeologists are not immune from that. Particularly when it comes to assigned dates to archeological sites. It's interesting though that today even such respected secular figures as the archaeologist Sir Colin Renfrew are calling for a revision downwards in the 'standard' Egyptian chronology. When one allows for this (based on such things as coregencies, etc) suddenly all the alleged 'missing evidence' in the appropriate time periods (e.g. the conquest of Canaan, the fall of Jericho, civilizations to match that expected from the accounts of David and Solomon) is there in spades.

Sincerely,

Carl W.

Dr Carl Wieland

Managing Director

Creation Ministries International Ltd (Australia)

creation.com

I'll continue with this interesting exchange in the next post.

irrepressible metaphysics

not my favourite human being

Lesley Chamberlain’s book The Philosophy Steamer, picked up in a cheapie bin a few months ago in our throwaway diamonds and shit culture, reminds me of writers I’ve read [Nabokov, Bunin, Trotsky, Zamyatin], writers I’ve never wanted to read [Lenin], thinkers I’ve heard of, more or less vaguely [Jacobsen, Sorokin], writers I’ve always thought I should read [the Mandelstams, Akhmatova], as well as bringing to my attention such figures as Berdyaev, Frank and Aikhenvald, Russians all, and all profoundly affected by the formation of the Soviet state. It’s much more though than an invocation of names and personalities.

The book is part history, part multibiography, part philosophical meditation. It tells the tale of the forced emigration of a group of intellectuals – writers, poets, philosophers, scientists, academics and activists – in the early twenties, when the hard-headed Lenin briefly held sway after the post-revolution civil war. Most of them were Christians, and that itself seems to have been enough for Lenin, whose materialist ideology was dismissive of all spiritual and metaphysical speculation and argy-bargy. So in the name of efficiency he arranged for their departure from their homeland, the land of their ideals and their reality, an arrogant decision with far-reaching consequences for all of them. Mind you, if they’d stayed, their irrepressible individualism would surely have ‘forced’ the even more ruthless Stalin to knock them over like so many skittles.

There are tragic as well as inspiring individual stories here, but what is most interesting about the book are the larger issues explored. In banishing this small, disparate band of intellectuals, Lenin was seeking to impose a kind of discipline upon his new state, according to Chamberlain’s plausible thesis. As a devotee of Marxian materialism, he seems to have genuinely wished to found a society on ‘scientific’ economic principles, and this would only happen if all those out-dated, spiritually infected bourgeois individuals fell into line. Banishing a few here, imprisoning a few there, and shooting the odd hopeless recalcitrant would surely do the trick. Chamberlain interestingly argues that this ‘anti-metaphysical state’ being pursued by the Bolsheviks was an extreme, and extremely crass, version of what was happening westwards in Europe. She cites Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [published in 1921, and spawning a great deal of interest in the definition and limits of science, and the ruling out of mere metaphysics] as emerging from the same zeitgeist as Lenin’s earlier Materialism and Empiriocriticism [a point she doesn’t push too far]. Both books deal with the nature of reality and how we should understand it, with a particular concern about dividing sense from nonsense. Of course Lenin’s book had a scarily practical political purpose, but the logical positivists who followed Wittgenstein also felt they were engaging in a practical cleaning-up process. The difference being that logical positivism had a mercifully brief heyday, foundering on a multitude of contradictions and methodological problems, and in any case having little impact on the wider cultural community, while Bolshevism turned the Soviet state into a cultural minefield and a political death camp for seventy long years.

The two ‘philosophy steamers’ that sailed from Petrograd in the autumn of 1922 with about seventy intellectuals and their families, formed part of a more general, if trickling, Russian exodus. All they had in common was their Russianness. It wouldn’t even be right to say they had disillusionment in common. Some felt themselves victims of a colossal mistake that would eventually be put right. Others were completely at odds with everything the Bolsheviks stood for. There was plenty of dissension and mistrust amongst them, a fear of spies, rats in the ranks, as well as the usual ideological differences. There was also for some time a sense, heartbreaking in retrospect, that their exile was surely temporary, that they would outlast the ideological nitwits and nitpickers who had hijacked their country. The rise of Stalin no doubt put paid to that dream.

Of course, many maintained and nursed an obsession with the country that formed them. Many had left family and friends behind, and they were generally much more informed about the goings on in the new Soviet Union than were western liberals. Their exasperation at western attitudes was profound, but they suffered the typical fate of exiles – many western intellectuals, especially of the left, simply discounted their views as those of embittered losers in a largely ideological battlefield.

This is an affecting book for anyone who has an appreciation of a lost heritage, and for anyone who has suffered an exile of any kind. It has made me, at least, want to return to the work of two writers I’ve read before, now armed with new knowledge and understandings. They are Vladimir Nabokov, who left Russia with his family in 1919, and Nina Berberova, who left with her poet boyfriend in 1922, though not on the steamer. I’ve just started rereading Berberova’s collection The Tattered Cloak, which I’ll no doubt review later, and I’m particularly interested in reading Nabokov’s The Gift, his last novel written in Russian, and a leave-taking of sorts. The book tells the story of a young Russian writer, Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, who is writing a book about the nineteenth century radical author of What is To Be Done?, Nicolai Chernyshevsky, and his impact. Chernyshevsky was the favourite author of Lenin [who wrote a book with the same title]. Chamberlain quotes this revealing passage from The Gift:

Suddenly [Godunov-Cherdyntsev] felt a bitter pang – why had everything in Russia become so shoddy, crabbed and grey...? Or had the old urge ‘toward the light’ concealed a fatal flaw, which in the course of progress toward the objective had grown more and more evident, until it was revealed that this ‘light’ was burning in the window of a prison overseer, and that was all? When had this strange dependence sprung up between the sharpening of the thirst and the muddying of the source? In the forties? In the sixties? And ‘what to do’ now? Ought one not to reject any longing for one’s homeland...? Some day, interrupting my writing, I will look through the window and see a Russian autumn.

The dependence mentioned here between the sharpening of the thirst and the muddying of the source could well be worth speculating upon, in relation to metaphysics in general. However muddy it all is, metaphysics doesn’t look like evaporating in the near future. Chamberlain opens the third, summarizing section of The Philosophy Steamer with these lines from Barry Stroud’s 2000 book The Quest for Reality:

Sixty years ago metaphysical theorizing was declared meaningless on the sweeping grounds that its results were neither true by virtue of meaning alone nor confirmable or disconfirmable by experience. But metaphysical theorizing of the proscribed kind was involved in reaching that very conclusion. It proved to be essential to philosophy then just as it is today.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of this claim, and maybe that’s the point somehow. Something always tantalizingly eludes us....

where do we get meaning from?

I’m not sure how I can switch from human rights to the meaning of life with any easy dance steps so I won’t try, but I want this blog to be primarily about meaning, which is said by some religious folk to be absent from the lives of the non-religious. A theme worth exploring.

Some religious folk even say that God is meaning. The people who say this tend to be monotheists, perhaps because with them the claim has a neatness to it. To say that the ancestor spirits are meaning, or that Krishna, Vishnu, Shiva, Kali and all the rest are meaning, just doesn’t have the same ring to it. The point, though, is that meaning must come from outside ourselves, according to some, in order to be real. Meaning that’s generated from within, they say, has something arbitrary, shifting and unstable about it. If we invent our own meaning, what’s to stop us from reinventing it according to our own will and whim? Without God to set the meaning agenda, anything is possible.

There are a number of responses that can be made. First, we don’t simply invent our own meaning. It seems to be more a process of discovery than invention. You might even say that discovering meaning is just discovering what it is to be human, to be ourselves. For some, this is discovering our connection with God, or a spiritual connection to a landscape and a set of cultural beliefs and practices, while for others it’s discovering how our human mind or brain works, how civilization emerged, how life has evolved, how the universe came into being. For others again, it’s discovering what it is that gives us our greatest thrill of pleasure, or satisfaction, or contentment.

Second, maybe God itself is an unstable, arbitrary, shifting concept. From our global perspective, this seems particularly likely, because we can do a survey of the hundreds of gods worshipped by humans, most of them extinct, having passed away with the cultures that identified with them. Even the current gods, or supernatural objects of worship, are a diverse bunch, something we tend not to notice, having grown up under the influence of one of the three major, and inter-related, monotheisms. Yet most of us who have travelled or read or seen something of the world know that even Christianity is followed in often bizarrely different ways in different corners of the globe, mixed in with local beliefs and rituals to create exotic hybrid concoctions.

We also note that people who claim to believe in the same god seem to carry away very different meanings from that belief. Some use the belief to justify reaching out to others, regardless of creed, in a benevolent fashion, while others use it to justify hostility to non-believers. In some, belief necessitates a reaching out, while in others it necessitates a more contemplative inwardness. In some, it inspires confidence, while others feel unsettled by it.

In short, we can’t easily see how belief in gods settles or fixes or beds down the issue of meaning. Looking at sacred texts, we find that the deities or their representatives often say contradictory things, or things that seem embedded in a moral system that modern people have long rejected. Many of us instinctively reject deriving meaning from such sources.

musings on rights and their underlying assuptions

not for feeding

So, okay, on the one hand, nobody owes us a living, on the other hand everyone has a right to the basic necessities for survival. How can these apparently inconsistent propositions be reconciled?

My feeling is that both these propositions need to be looked at more carefully. Let’s look at the first proposition, that nobody owes any individual a living. Is this proposition actually true? Is it true in all circumstances?

Clearly it isn’t true in all circumstances. We all agree that children can’t be expected to fend for themselves. The same goes for the extreme elderly, the intellectually and physically disabled, the insane, the very ill and so forth. And around all of these groups there are fuzzy boundaries. There are some obvious questions to be asked – when does a child become an adult, when does an illness become incapacitating, and how much is society willing to expend on the continued survival of a severely incapacitated individual?

Let’s look again at our surfer. Most people would agree that society doesn’t owe her a living because she’s making no effort to fend for herself. That’s to say, we don’t owe all people a living, and particularly not those we feel aren’t playing the game.

Introducing this idea about ‘playing the game’ complicates matters no doubt, and yet it does seem necessary and right. It goes back to what I’ve said about the hidden assumptions in the concept of rights. Rights are provisional, at least in some cases. Certainly the right to food clothing and shelter is.

So what do we mean by ‘playing the game’? The key to understanding this is to recognise the importance of society to individuals. Rights apply to individuals, but all individuals are caught up in a web of relationships, which are in fact essential, not only to their identities, but to their very existence. Those relations involve tacit understandings about co-operation. These understandings can be very complex, as you would accept when they facilitate the construction of languages, religions, cities and business enterprises. None of these would get built if everyone decided to go surfing. It’s the game of social life, interaction, give and take, reciprocity.

It’s probably true to say that describing this reciprocal, interactive, co-operative world, and what we owe to it and what it owes us, is very difficult, far more so than developing a set of human rights for our flourishing. The human rights approach largely assumes reciprocity and co-operation. Often it assumes much more. For example, any claim to a right to education will make assumptions, not only about the benefits of education, but about what an education actually entails. For example, we can talk about a trip abroad being very eye-opening and educational, but trips abroad are unlikely to feature in the kind of education we might feel we have a right to. Often we hear the phrase ‘a right to a basic education’, which is presumably meant to keep the term ‘education’ within reasonable and narrow limits, but again the term ‘basic’ isn’t very clear as a definition.

a few thoughts on human rights

It’s often said that human rights have no grounding, no empirical backing, that it’s rather amazing how much they’ve caught on in the last few decades, especially since the second world war, so now everybody talks about their rights even in the most dubious circumstances. People have become obsessed about their rights. The concept has become reified, even taken for granted. Yet it has nonetheless become one of the most useful concepts of the last century or so, not only in ethics, but also in jurisprudence. It has been of enormous practical value.

Of course the idea of anyone having a right to something – say, sufficient food or water to survive – is quite artificial, but we all understand where it’s coming from. We recognise that not having sufficient food and water causes suffering, and we don’t want people to suffer, and we don’t want to suffer ourselves. In order to eliminate this suffering, we argue that people should have the right not to suffer, and that therefore the rest of us have the responsibility to prevent such suffering, by ensuring that others have sufficient food and water. In fact, if we take this human right seriously, we have a collective responsibility to ensure that we all have sufficient food and water. So the development and enforcement of human rights should bring us together as a community and as a species, right?

But what of those who don’t play the human rights game in quite the usual way? Imagine a person who decides, all I want to do is surf. I love surfing, its great fun, it beats working for a living, it has its poetry, it’s deeply satisfying. I love the summer, I’ll follow the summer around, from beach to beach around the world if necessary, hitching rides from strangers, whatever it takes.

This person doesn’t earn money, she’s too busy surfing. So what about her right to sufficient food and water? Generally the water’s not a problem for her, but getting sufficient food may well be. Is she therefore entitled to knock on the nearest door and say [politely of course], look, my basic human right to sufficient food to survive is not currently being met, so I’m afraid you have a responsibility to provide food for me.

It’s certainly sounds like an ingenious ploy, and if beggars started using it when accosting people in the street, some people might well be impressed enough to open purses that might otherwise remain firmly closed, but the point I really intend to make here is that the human rights concept contains all sorts of hidden assumptions that need to be brought to light.

In the case of the surfer, most of us wouldn’t want to put ourselves in the position of asking for food, even if we felt it was our right to make such demands. But essentially our discomfort would spring from the feeling that we have no such right. Most of us don’t feel the world owes us a living. In fact, many a libertarian would reject the whole concept of rights because they would reject the implied obligations that go with rights. We don’t owe anyone anything, excepting our children until they reach maturity, and nobody owes anything to us.