Discover GOP Opprobrium

[teapeebubbles]

At least a few conservatives know why this line of thinking is dangerous. One of them attacked Stein recently in the National Review Online.

John Derbyshire doesn’t hold his fire. He makes a distinction between old-style creationists, whom he portrays as sincere but deluded people overwhelmed by religion, and advocates of “intelligent design.” That latter, he says, are simply dishonest. Derbyshire body-slams them.

“They overhauled creationism as ‘intelligent design,’ roped in a handful of eccentric non-Christian cranks keen for a well-funded vehicle to help them push their own flat-earth theories, and set about presenting themselves to the public as ‘alternative science’ engaged in a ‘controversy’ with a closed-minded, reactionary ’science establishment’ fearful of new ideas. (Ignoring the fact that without a constant supply of new ideas, there would be nothing for scientists to do.) Nothing to do with religion at all!”

Most satisfyingly, Derbyshire understands the unique contributions of science, a stance rapidly being abandoned by conservatives everywhere in their eagerness to collect votes from the ignorant.

The scientific method is one of the crowning achievements of Western society. Derbyshire correctly notes that Stein’s movie, which blames evolution for the Holocaust, is a type of blood libel on Western Civilization.

Derbyshire lists the achievements of the West in architecture, art, religion, music and law.

“And there is science, perhaps the greatest of all our achievements, because nowhere else on earth did it appear. China, India, the Muslim world, all had fine cities and systems of law, architecture and painting, poetry and prose, religion and philosophy. None of them ever accomplished what began in northwest Europe in the later 17th century, though: a scientific revolution. Thoughtful men and women came together in learned societies to compare notes on their observations of the natural world, to test their ideas in experiments, and in reasoned argument against the ideas of others, and to publish their results in learned journals. A body of common knowledge gradually accumulated. Patterns were observed, laws discerned and stated.”

Bingo. Stein’s dumb argument, which he is busy eagerly peddling to Religious Right ignoramuses, is more than just misguided. It is a repudiation of much of the best of Western thought. What an odd thing for a so-called conservative to do.