Darwin’s Doubt, by Stephen Meyer, published last year in June, a review of the evidence in favor of intelligence design, was a smash hit.
Then it was at once savaged by the intellectual establishment.
But the book, which exposes the holes in the dogmas of the evolutionary establishment, has put the recent l GORILLA-GOD dichotomy in libertarian theory (also known as the brutalist-humanitarian, thin-thick, absolutist-contextualist pseudo-debate) into the proper Sunsteinian context.
[Cass Sunstein, termed Obama’s Information Czar, authored books and papers advocating that groups of anti-government conspiracy theorists be infiltrated to diffuse the most extremist of them with misinformation and division.]
“Darwin’s Doubt” also brought the real gazillion pound gorilla in the room, GOD, into the context.
Now, it becomes easier to understand what was behind the puzzling effort to intimidate traditionalist voices in the political debate – the recent attack by the former Mises Institute vice-president on so-called “brutalists.”
Could it be that the cracks opening up in the materialist intellectual establishment are sending reverberations elsewhere?
Science is increasingly undermining the materialist perspective and the accompanying scientistic (as opposed to scientific) perspective of the social- sciences. This scares some members of the left, whose grip over the intellectual establishment has always relied on its being regarded uncritically as the party of science.
But books like “Darwin’s Doubt” and new discoveries in particle physics suggest that science is not leftist.
The public debate is changing….and God is no longer the provenance of hicks and charlatans.
God is the context denied both by the absolutists of the evolutionary establishment and the absolutist neo-Jacobins of the humanitarian-interventionist establishment.
It is that humanitarian-interventionist establishment that Sunstein represents. And it is from its partisans that infiltrators are drawn to muddy and dilute any exposure of the government’s own conspiracies.
That might explain why certain people have gone on a counter-offensive, culminating in the Brutalist trope ..a trope that was received with a tidal wave of derision that apparently has had no effect on the author(s). They’ve simply reiterated their assertions more cleverly, but with the same unwarranted self-righteousness.
This parallels the modus operandi of the leftist reviewers of “Darwin’s Doubt,” most of whom didn’t actually address any of the arguments made in the book…..but simply launched into ad hominems:
“……. you might expect that if your own incivility was the cause of someone’s turning away from a viewpoint you want to advance, then you’d try to win them back by being civil and making a respectful, strictly fact-based appeal. If so, then you’re not Nick Matzke. That’s not how Darwin-defenders think. When confronted with the reality that their style of argument is actually turning people off, Darwin lobbyists often double-down on the nasty rhetoric, evidently thinking the problem was that they weren’t harsh enough to begin with. Thus Matzke wrote in response to Miller:
“If one is already familiar with the science, it’s pretty annoying to see someone like Meyer come in, do a totally hack job which misunderstands or leaves out most of the key data, statistical methods, etc., and then declare that the whole field is bogus. That’s why critics are annoyed. And, it’s annoying to see other conservative evangelicals blindly follow in his footsteps. Sometimes I think an intelligent design person could say that the idea that the moon is made of rock is a Darwinist conspiracy, and you guys would believe him.
So ID proponents are conspiracy theorists who might say the moon isn’t made of rock? And Pastor Miller follows those crazy people? Nick Matzke must think that the best way to bring people over to your side is by demonizing and bullying them –– the more, the better.
Pastor Miller had a fitting response:
“Actually, Nick, I read Meyer, and you’re misrepresenting him through flippant rhetoric rather than simply engaging the facts. You and I both know that he didn’t “declare that the whole field is bogus.” And your insistence on mischaracterizing his work is a sign that you’re not confident that the facts alone discredit him. As opposed to folly, following the motives and methods of debaters gives you real psychological insight on what they’re trying to accomplish, and the scientific enterprise has always prided itself on its objectivity, something we haven’t seen from you.
I have the sense that you are actually a brilliant mind. Balance it with character and humility and you’ll have far more credibility. I personally would be glad to hear what you have to say if I didn’t have to wade through the disrespect.”
This recalls the old saying, “When the facts are on your side, pound the facts. When the facts aren’t on your side, pound the table.” People know this intuitively. Pastor Miller was discerning enough to see how Nick Matzke’s disrespect and table-pounding showed that Matzke’s viewpoint has a problem with the facts.”
Hello. Two points: Firstly, I have not read this book (yet), but if you have read it, Lila, what does it say about mutation as the explanation?
And Secondly, most people have not understood Darwin’s contribution to evolution. These are the Neo-Darwinians, as George Bernard Shaw chose to call them. This is what Bernard Shaw observed in his book of plays: BACK TO METHUSELAH, A Metabiological Pentateuch
Begin Quote
That was the secret of Darwin’s popularity. He never puzzled anybody. If very few of us have read The Origin of Species from end to end, it is not because it overtaxes our mind, but because we take in the whole case and are prepared to accept it long before we have come to the end of the innumerable instances and illustrations of which the book mainly consists. Darwin becomes tedious in the manner of a man who insists on continuing to prove his innocence after he has been acquitted. You assure him that there is not a stain on his character, and beg him to leave the court; but he will not be content with enough evidence: he will have you listen to all the evidence that exists in the world. Darwin’s industry was enormous. His patience, his perseverance, his conscientiousness reached the human limit. But he never got deeper beneath or higher above his facts than an ordinary man could follow him. He was not conscious of having raised a stupendous issue, because, though it arose instantly, it was not his business. He was conscious of having discovered a process of transformation and modification which accounted for a great deal of natural history. But he did not put it forward as accounting for the whole of natural history. He included it under the heading of Evolution, though it was only pseudo-evolution at best; but he revealed it as a method of evolution, not as the method of evolution. He did not pretend that it excluded other methods, or that it was the chief method. Though he demonstrated that many transformations which had been taken as functional adaptations (the current phrase for Lamarckian evolution) either certainly were or conceivably might be due to Circumstantial Selection, he was careful not to claim that he had superseded Lamarck or disproved Functional Adaptation. In short, he was not a Darwinian, but an honest naturalist working away at his job with so little preoccupation with theological speculation that he never quarrelled with the theistic Unitarianism into which he was born, and remained to the end the engagingly simple and socially easy-going soul he had been in his boyhood, when his elders doubted whether he would ever be of much use in the world.
End Quote
Read the rest in the Preface to the plays. You can find it on gutenberg.
Only on reading this new book, Darwin’s Doubt, by Stephen Meyer, can one decide if this fellow actually understands Darwin’s contribution to evolution or not. That does not mean that the new knowledge accumulated over the past 50 years has not shed light on the mechanisms. Mutation is one of the. But “Darwinians” import to Darwin what Darwin himself did not say. Darwin remained silent on the question of God himself, for instance. As Shaw notes above: “but an honest naturalist working away at his job with so little preoccupation with theological speculation that he never quarrelled with the theistic Unitarianism into which he was born,”.
Indeed, Darwin himself was not the “Darwinian” that most people then, as well as today, evidently are!!!!
I’ll read this new book — your highlighting it is appreciated. What I say above does not necessarily detract from your own general points however on the state of being. Also, if I may be permitted to offer kudos, lately, your productivity is impressive…. Thanks!
Best wishes,
Zahir Ebrahim
Project Humanbeingsfirst.org
Hi Zahir,
Thanks…I should maybe clarify in the post above that I have not fully read the book.
I heard someone from Hillsdale college talk about it, so I briefly scanned one chapter of it..about the fossil record. It is NOT book that one should scan. There is detail.
So my post is only a comment on the reaction to the book…to show that much of what purports to be debate is nothing of the sort – it is censorship and ridicule from the keepers of modernist faith.