Thursday, February 01, 2007

Teaching I.D.

I agree with this. We shouldn't have to teach Intelligent Design in schools. It's a worthless theory whose sole point is to bolster a priori belief. The Flying Spaghetti Monster underscores the point. Why not, if you're religious, simply say you have faith and call it a day? The answer, of course, is that any knowledge and understanding that challenges the a priori belief becomes an enemy. It's not enough to provide one's own explanations and understandings; one has to defeat one's opponents. ID sets up a new and rather ludicrous battleground.

But the way to teach a richer understanding of evolution is to engage history and that history involves religion and the role the method of authority has played in contrast to the developing method of science. Unlike the Richard Dawkins-es of the world, I don't fly off the handle when it comes to religion. It seems to me a bit like homophobes or former cigarette smokers - those who deny the practice the loudest are often the ones who most desire the satiated orifice. Perhaps Dawkins is a closet supernaturalist.

One of the problems is a latent positivism running through criticisms of Intelligent Design. Look, ID is unimportant. It's not science, and its proponents are disingenuous. It'll pass. But the fact that people hold onto very powerful values won't. This includes people like Dawkins. Positivism still reigns among scientists. Among philosophers, it has long been viewed as untenable. It suggests a strong distinction between fact and value, denying value questions a serious place at the table of inquiry by arguing that there's nothing true or false we can say about them, and that that's of the essence of saying anything important. Objectivity is defined in the sphere of "fact," and value simply, categorically, doesn't belong in that realm.

The history of thought, however, is a history of the interrelatedness of fact and value. When one examines evolution as a theoretical explanation of empirical reality part of its potency derives from this history, from what came before and how revolutionary the evolutionary viewpoint really is. ID proponents, bless their hearts, want to use that understanding of the world - an understanding that imbues all modern science - in the service of old-timey values. Dawkins, et al., want to use it in the service of a different set of values (let's say scientism). Neither lives up to the revolutionary potential of evolution, which is still, in many ways, in its infancy.

Why not explore that history?

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's similar to the call by some, like Herman Daly and Ramon Lopez (Univ. of Maryland economist), for colleges to again teach the history of economics. By understanding the historical debates, a better understanding of the present state of the art/science can develop.

ON DAWKINS;
A very funny episode of South Park concerned a future world where three warring nations called themselves "atheist" but had developed their atheism into three competing religious orthodoxies, complete with a common prophet: Richard Dawkins.

Reading "The Selfish Gene" way back when I was an undergrad was probably one of the major turning points of my academic career. It opened my liberal Christian eyes to the incredible potential in the theory of evolution [which I had never doubted, but had never really thought about much either]. The course, which was probably my favorite back then, used evolutionary thought to ponder cultural institutions of both the more noble (e.g., marriage) and more ignoble (e.g, murder) variety

However, having skimmed through his new book over the holidays, it now seems like Dawkins has stopped wanting to explore, hypothesize, falsify, and teach. Instead, he seems more concerned with pontificating and being "right," creating an orthodoxy which bears no disagreement, as Helmut and the South Park writers have noticed. P

MT said...

I think you've just proved Snow's two-culture theorem. I have no idea what you're talking about in that paragraph about values. Seriously. Relatedly, perhaps, I'm totally on board Dawkins' anti-supernaturalist crusade, and couldn't care less to read or hear yet another rendition of his thoughts on evolution, wonderful way with words though he has. Anyway, if you could just translate for me your values point, helmut, I'd be happy to refute it.

helmut said...

I'm not supernaturalist either. A waste of time, in my view, and an especially poor basis for telling others what to do. But Dawkins as much as the ID folks seems to ring out the old positivism line that fact is the only thing we can say anything interesting about. That lines conflates value with supernaturalism. This is false. Some people do, but they're wrong. But to conflate the two is equally wrong. I think this is part of what is backwards in ID thought, but also with Dawkins. He ultimately makes a value claim about the position he urges, which thus loses its factuality. This is part of the dilemma one faces when one goes positivist. Better, I think, to understand that there's no clear ontological line between fact and value - simply an analytical distinction - and that even so-called hardline naturalist science has no way of coherently avoiding its own imbuing of fact with value.

MT said...

Isn't it a reasonable platform to assert both "my opponent's platform makes no sense" AND "you'd do better to vote for me"? That's what Dawkins seems to be doing, to me. Implicitly also he's saying "Let's not pretend there's a campaign going on."

MT said...

If only phlogistan had offered a chicken in every pot.... Actually, I'm sure it did, but oxygen's advocates ultimately impressed more.

Maybe a commonality for scientist crusaders is that we've all cherished hypotheses that we've reluctantly surrendered to an opposing one, and so we respond to religious beliefs with an intensity others reserve for cheaters. You could also call us immature. Righteous, yet immature.

MT said...

i.e. why ought I to see Dawkins as dabbling in a very general question or process of valuation? What's wrong or philosophically naive about viewing Dawkins' sideline as political decision-making in the historical and social context in which he finds himself?

As I'm inclined to see things, a belief is just an unconscious bet, whether about the importance of eating fruit or what's for dessert tonight. Believing for a reason is betting on reason, and that some show of it reflects the real McCoy.