AC Grayling dissects a new defence of Intelligent Design.
It is sometimes hard to know whether books that
strike one as silly and irresponsible, like
Dissent over Descent, the latest book from Steve
Fuller, are the product of a desire to strike a
pose and appear outrageous (the John Gray
syndrome), or really do represent that cancer of
the contemporary intellect, post-modernism. I
suppose putatively sincere extrusions of the
post-modern sensibility might henceforth deserve
to be known as "the Steve Fuller syndrome". For
this offering by the American-born sociologist is
a classic case of the absurdity to which that sensibility leads.
There is an added thought. Fuller claims to be a
"secular humanist". But having been educated by
the Jesuits, so he tellingingly informs us, he
"knows how to reconcile the irreconcilable".
Indeed! For at the end of these nearly 300 pages
of wasted forest he tells us what science needs
in order to justify its continuation (oh dear,
poor science, eh?) and what Intelligent Design, a
theory he defended before a US Federal Court in
the 2005 Dover Trial, needs to "realise its full
potential in the public debate" that is: how a
theoory trying to bend the facts to prove its
antecedent conviction that Fred (or any arbitrary
and itself unexplained conscious agency) designed
and created the world and all in it, can attain
its full potential in the public debate. This,
note, from a professor at a proper British
university. Well: if this is not proof of the
efficacy of Jesuit educational methods, nothing is.
<http://newhumanist.org.uk/1856>Link
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Posted By johannes to
<http://www.monochrom.at/english/2008/09/origin-of-specious.htm>monochrom
at 9/10/2008 08:48:00 PM
