Their engagement is on youtube, if you prefer your video streaming.
It’s more like one round of a ping-pong match than the full bare-knuckle fist fight we’d like to see, but it’s not bad. Keep your expectations reasonable, and Dawkins did very well.
I’m back! I had a long, busy day at a teaching conference, and got persuaded about a few things — I’m designing a new course for freshmen biology majors for the fall term (“Fundamentals of Genetics, Evolution, and Development”, or FunGenEvoDevo for short), and I’ve been following the pedagogical ideas of Eric Mazur for a while, and this was my chance to go hear him. He said what I wanted to hear about getting basic concepts across to students, which is going to help a great deal in my summer project.
I got back too late to catch Dawkins on the O’Lielly show, though. My wife saw it, said it was good but short and without much of substance. Fortunately, One Good Move was quick on the draw. O’Reilly started right off with idiocy. He doesn’t know how tides work, so he’s got to believe in God. There was the usual weird right-wing history lesson — Hitler was an atheist, the Founding Fathers wanted a god-worshipping nation; of course, O’Reilly’s explanation for why they wanted a Christian nation was that it would pacify the people. Is it good framing to argue for religion because it is the opiate of the masses?
I thought Dawkins was calm, relaxed, and treated the bozo lightly and with good humor. O’Reilly threw out that softball inanity right at the beginning, and you can almost see Dawkins crack up at the clown.
Tomorrow is my day at home before I make my Boston blitz — I might be able to squeeze in a few posts here, along with getting a pile of other work done.
The author of The Lifelong Activist, Hillary Rettig, sent me a lovely quote and a recommendation.
Larry Moran raised an interesting comparison over at Laden’s place. In response to this constant whining that loud-and-proud atheism ‘hurts the cause’, he brought up a historical parallel:
Here’s just one example. Do you realize that women used to march in the streets with placards demanding that they be allowed to vote? At the time the suffragettes were criticized for hurting the cause. Their radical stance was driving off the men who might have been sympathetic to women’s right to vote if only those women had stayed in their proper place.
This prompted the usual cry of the accommodationists: but feminists weren’t as rude as those atheists.
Were the women saying that men were stupid? Were they portraying them as rubes and simpletons? Were they falling into the trap of making themselves resemble the negative stereotypes of women at the time? IIRC, the answers are No, No, and No. Substitute “atheists” for “women” and “theists” for “men,” and the answers are emphatically Yes, Yes, and Yes. It is one thing to be assertive. It is another thing to be gratuitously rude.
Once upon a time, some people on a road were stopped by a wall.
We didn’t mind. It was a good place to stop for a while, and as more people coming down the road stopped at the wall, a community grew at its foot. Most people enjoyed gathering together, so the wall seemed like a fortuitous event, a good reason to rest and celebrate and work together for a while.
The wall wasn’t impassable, of course. Some could still clamber over the pile and continue on their journey, but the wall was a little daunting, and the happy community was so tempting, and few bothered.
Then let Josh Timonen know that you’re interested.
If we were doing this right, though, it would involve ritual scarification and great bloody painful welts, rather than just a t-shirt. You’re getting off easy.
Nisbet and Mooney do it again, with an op-ed in the Washington Post … and I’m afraid they’ve alienated me yet further. I am convinced now that theirs is not an approach that I could find useful, even if I could puzzle out some useable strategy from it. In the very first sentence, they claim that Richard Dawkins gives “creationist adversaries a boost” — it’s the tired old argument that we must pander to religious belief. This is their rationale:
Leave aside for a moment the validity of Dawkins’s arguments against religion. The fact remains: The public cannot be expected to differentiate between his advocacy of evolution and his atheism. More than 80 percent of Americans believe in God, after all, and many fear that teaching evolution in our schools could undermine the belief system they consider the foundation of morality (and perhaps even civilization itself). Dawkins not only reinforces and validates such fears — baseless though they may be — but lends them an exclamation point.
We agree with Dawkins on evolution and admire his books, so we don’t enjoy singling him out. But he stands as a particularly stark example of scientists’ failure to explain hot-button issues, such as global warming and evolution, to a wary public.
John Holbo has devised a wonderfully useful coinage (don’t be afraid to follow that link! It’s only two paragraphs; he’ll have to work it over for a few more weeks to expand it to Holbonian mass) that he applies to Jonah Goldberg’s intellectual evasiveness.
To put it another way, Goldberg is making a standard rhetorical move which has no accepted name, but which really needs one. I call it ‘the two-step of terrific triviality’. Say something that is ambiguous between something so strong it is absurd and so weak that it would be absurd even to mention it. When attacked, hop from foot to foot as necessary, keeping a serious expression on your face. With luck, you will be able to generate the mistaken impression that you haven’t been knocked flat, by rights. As a result, the thing that you said which was absurdly strong will appear to have some obscure grain of truth in it. Even though you have provided no reason to think so.
Hey, that sounds familiar! John Quiggin also notices its utility in the
nature-nurture debate. It’s an easy dance to elicit, too: find someone who’s trying to defend his daily prayers to a personal, loving god against a Dawkins-like assault, and you’ll see heels hammering like machine guns as they try to defend the Big Man in the Sky with philosophical abstractions and appeals to Ineffable Existence. Bring castanets and you could call it a flamenco!
(This post was causing some browsers to crash. Let’s see if browsers are happier if I hide it below the fold.)
A reader sent me a mild ethical problem, and asked that I put it up to get reader input. This isn’t a life-or-death sort of situation, but the kind of low-level, day-to-day aggravation with which we’re all familiar.
