The Affliction of Comfort

Today marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species.  To mark the event, Ray Comfort (a.k.a. The Banana Man) of Living Waters Ministries distributed free copies of the book . . . last week sometime.

The edition of the book in question contains a strategically abridged version of Darwin's text with a 52-page introduction by Ray Comfort himself, drawing a direct connection between Darwin and Hitler and warning readers (*yawn*) of eternal hellfire, and so on.

Comfort has been a bit cagey about the whole thing, and the complete text of the introduction was recently removed from his website.  Before the big day, last week, Comfort stopped answering questions.  This from an article posted on the website of Living Waters Ministry:

From now on I will refuse to answer questions about the book or its contents," Comfort said, "because there is such a deep-rooted anger in the atheist world about this publication.

"They desperately want to stop us," he said, "and I don't want to give away any further details regarding the campaign."

Angry? Is he kidding?  I'm delighted! I managed to find a PDF of the introduction through another website.  I plan to spend a diverting hour or two playing Name That Fallacy.

It'll be like shooting fish in a barrel.

Death and Taxes

From time to time, I discuss the problem of evil - or, The Problem of Evil - with my students.

This week, it was in the context of a special topics course on the Darwinian Revolution and its philosophical implications.  Trying to bring them to some insight into pre-Darwinian ways of thinking, I had them read a few selections from Leibniz on the principle of plenitude - sorry, the Principle of Plenitude - and the Principle of Sufficient Reason, followed by the First Epistle of Alexander Pope's Essay on Man.

Two lines from Pope provide a deft summary of Leibniz, and help to solidify the idea of the Great Chain of Being.

. . . all must full or not coherent be,
And all that rises rise in due degree.

The Sentiments Trap

Teaching environmental ethics this summer, I've found a new wrinkle in an old argument.

In a number of early articles in defense of Aldo Leopold's land ethic, the philosopher J. Baird Callicott appeals to a theory of moral sentiments to connect facts and values: from descriptions of ecological relationships he hopes to derive prescriptions as to how we should make decisions about environmental change, with moral sentiments as the middle term.

I've long had doubts about this move, and I've taken up the matter in a number of papers I've had published. The most basic problem is that, while the moral sentiments view introduced by Hume and cultivated by Darwin offers important insight into human moral experience, on its own it seems to undermine the very possibility of ethical deliberation.

Theory and Practice, Man, Practice!

I'm continuing to develop a thread introduced here some time ago regarding the possibility of a theoretically informed moral imagination. I've written in earlier entries about Newtonian imagination, Darwinian imagination, and even hinted at thermodynamic imagination. I could add ecological imagination, climatological imagination, sociotechnical imagination, and any number of others.

The question is: How and to what extent can scientific theory shape ordinary lived experience? It's an interesting question for phenomenology, and I'm working on a paper along those lines, now. My interest is not just theoretical, however, but practical. What I want to know is how and to what extent scientific theory can influence what we attend to, what we value, what we expect, what we hope for, what we foresee, and ultimately what we do.

Magisteria

I've now started reading Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell, and already the book has allowed me to make explicit a useful distinction toward which I have been fumbling.

I think part of my concern about possible dogmatism at the heart of atheism comes down a sense that the natural sciences, whatever their evident power, are necessarily limited in scope. The empirical, quantitative methods of the sciences simply cannot tell us or explain everything that is interesting about the world. To the extent prominent atheists like Dawkins assume the question of God's existence or non-existence can definitively be settled by the natural sciences alone, they seem to have fallen into the dogmatic ideology of scientism.

Life Without Newton

It's bad enough that most Americans don't believe in Darwinian evolution. Far worse is that many of us - at least in daily practice - seem not to believe in Newtonian mechanics. This thought occurred to me today as I watched yet another car pull out directly in front of yet another fast-moving bus.

The driver of the car seemed in that moment not really to believe the First Law of Motion, to wit:

Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.

Happy Darwin Day!

Today is the anniversary of the birth in 1809 of Charles Darwin, and also the anniversary of the publication in 1859 of On The Origin of Species. Someone, somewhere decided to dub this "Darwin Day" and to encourage celebrations, discussions, public presentations, etc., etc.

Of course the really big party will be two years from today, on the bi- and sesquicentennial.

In observance of the day, I offer the following news story from Agence France-Presse, the link for which was first sent to me by a colleague some days ago. The original story is dated February 2, 2007.

Missionary Trouble

The other day I was in my home office when the doorbell rang. I looked out of the window and saw two older women in their Sunday best (it was a Saturday) coming up the driveway. I recognized them as half of a team of missionaries who come through the neighborhood every month or so; the other half of the team, being fleeter of foot, were already on the doorstep.

I ignored them. I returned to my computer, sat there working quietly, and ignored them.

Just last week, my valiant spouse wasted nearly an hour of her time in conversation with missionaries on our doorstep - whether it was the same group, I don't know. I was unwilling to follow her example.

It's not that I'm afraid to talk to missionaries. It's that I can no longer be bothered with them.

Intelligent Design and Philosophy, cont'd

On reflection, I think there's an easier way to characterize the problem with the supposed "philosophy" course in California that is set up to assault the "philosophy" of Darwin.

The point of "teaching" ID in a philosophy class would not be to get students to either accept or reject ID as such, but to help them gain some critical perspective on the broader debate over the place of ID in public schools. This would involve looking carefully and thoughtfully at the existing debate over science and religion, its history (going back to ancient times, if necessary), and the assumptions that underpin the arguments of various advocates on various sides.

Intelligent Design and Philosophy

Advocates for "intelligent design" have found a new tactic: since they cannot seem to pass legal muster in their efforts to get ID into science classes, at least one teacher has taken the suggestion of the ACLU and others that ID might be taught as part of a philosophy course.

The problem is that the teacher in question doesn't seem to have the slightest idea what philosophy is, or what it means to teach philosophy.