So you haven’t seen Flock of Dodos yet? It hasn’t been shown at a theater near you, and you don’t get Showtime? Well, finally, you can just get it on DVD and watch it at home.
I confess that I really don’t know much about this fellow, Steven D. Smith. He’s a lawyer, and he seems to be firmly in the Intelligent Design creationism camp, and that about exhausts my knowledge of the man.
As Steven D. Smith, Warren Distinguished Professor of Law, University of San Diego, says: “The mainstream science establishment and the courts tell us, in censorious tones that sometimes sound a bit desperate, that intelligent design is just a lot of fundamentalist cant. It’s not. We’ve heard the Darwinist story, and we owe it to ourselves to hear the other side.”
I already don’t like him. He’s inaccurate — we don’t refer to IDists as fundamentalists, for the most part; we know they’re not, and we also know that many of the fundamentalists don’t like them very much — and he uses the term “Darwinist,” which throws up another big red flag.
So when Brian Leiter suggested I might find his critique of Smith amusing, I was game … but now I must also confess that I find most of the dissection of Smith’s legal philosophy and his argument that jurisprudence is heading for extinction a bit beyond me. At least, that is, until I hit this paragraph, and discovered what was amusing.
[U]nder modern conventions, academic discussion is supposed to be carried on in secular terms, meaning, for the most part, the terms of scientific naturalism and of common sense everyday experience. In attempting to explain some happening or phenomenon, it is perfectly permissible for modern scholars to refer to religion—or to people’s beliefs in God. By contrast, actual appeals to God, or to anything that looks metaphysically suspicious or exotic, are out of bounds. As a result of this drastic narrowing of the range of admissible argument or explanation, claims or positions that would once have been framed forthrightly in theological terms now must be translated into more secular terms—or else abandoned.
Oh. So Steven D. Smith believes that a sign of the decline of the significance of jurisprudence is that lawyers can no longer invoke the authority of a deity in their arguments and be taken seriously. No wonder he’s on the side of Intelligent Design creationism! Since their only argument is a claim to the inside track on what’s going on inside the mind of their divine Designer, the fact that the law doesn’t treat testimony about what God told the witness or lawyer as the literal Ultimate Word really scuttles their case.
Maybe in the next Dover case the creationists can subpoena the burning bush to get around this narrowing of admissibility.
Whenever I spot some old thread suddenly getting a surge of new comments, I can guess what has happened: a creationist or two has come to visit. That’s happening right now on this very short article that mentions the peppered moths; we’re up above 200 comments now, and it seems to have very little to do with moths anymore. Instead, we’ve got a creationist complaining about the absence of transitional species and the Cambrian ‘explosion’, with a little quote-mining of Richard Dawkins. You commenters are taking care of him ably, but there are just a few things I want to mention, and a few questions I want to ask of the creationists.
It’s been a regular gay social whirl here at Chez Myers; we’re having a party tonight, and last night, we had visitors from the Great White North, or “Ottawa” as they quaintly called it: Eamon Knight and Theo Bromine, familiar names to old hands at talk.origins. And they brought Canadian beer! I encourage all Canadians to feel free to swing south and stop by, as long as they follow suit. (It’s a beer called Maudite, appropriately enough, and I just got a close look at the label: 8% alcohol! Hide the lampshades, I’m going to be dancing tonight!)
Unfortunately, while they were gawking at the Big City of Morris — impressed, I’m sure, by the absence of large trees, polar bears, and glaciers — Canada got a little crazier. Or revealed some long-hidden lunacy.
John Vanasselt, with the Ontario Alliance of Christian Schools, said there is no reason why Ontario shouldn’t join other provinces that make room for religious beliefs within the public education system.
The alliance’s 78 schools already teach evolution in science class, but it is taught on par with creationism, he said.
It sounds to me like Mr Vanasselt has just made a case for removing state support from Canadian religious schools.
Don’t let this stop you all from visiting me, though: really, there’s no causal relationship between saying hello to that evil atheist in Minnesota and having your home transported back into the Middle Ages!
Hey, look, everyone! Canada
has
creationists! Ha ha!
If you look at a map and notice how that big peninsula Toronto is on is protruding into the US, and note that that penetration has been going on for hundreds of years, I guess it’s not surprising that they’d catch a nasty disease.
Scott Lanyon, director of the Bell Museum, has an article on two disease we should worry about, VHSv and EAS.
Personally, I think VHSv is the worst. It’s a virus that causes hemorrhagic septicemia in fish; just from the name you know it’s bad, involving blood and sepsis. My most horrible experience raising zebrafish was the time hemorrhagic septicemia swept through my colony and I had to euthanize every animal and bleach every last bit of plumbing to eradicate it. This disease has been detected in waters of Wisconsin, and it’s definitely not good.
EAS may not be as dramatically gory and lethal in its effects, but it strikes humans directly. It’s Evolution Avoidance Syndrome, and it causes the brains of scientists and journalists to seize up when circumstances are appropriate to discuss evolution in public. Apparently, we want local fish populations to develop, acquire, improve or have arise resistance to the hemorrhagic septicemia virus; we can’t possibly suggest that evolution might be at work.
Next time you hear the tornado-in-a-junkyard argument (almost as common as the why-are-there-still-monkeys argument!), remember this rebuttal:
Creationists seeking to argue against evolution often liken the evolution of complex organisms by natural selection to the building of a DC-10 by a hurricane blowing through a junkyard. Their conclusion? Since such an event is staggeringly unlikely, a special sentient hurricane must have built the plane deliberately.
That’s going to be handy!
Especially since some of the creators of these ideas seem to have confused “theory” for “brain fart”. The latest example: Zygote Theory!
Gather ’round, children, and dear old Unca Jack will explain to you how the dinosaurs went extinct. It’s not how you think. There were no meteors or comets, no egg-eating mammals, no saurian pandemics. It’s because so many plants died in the great flood.
