I haven't got time to write a critique of Dembski's article, but I'd like to
point out that he misquotes Daniel Dennet.
Dembski writes:
>Daniel Dennett even recommends
>"quarantining" parents who teach their children to doubt Darwinism
>(see the end of his *Darwin's Dangerous Idea*).
Dembski has here conflated ideas from two paragraphs, and created a meaning
which is expressed by neither of them. So you can judge for yourselves, here
are the two consecutive paragraphs in full:
"We should not expect this variety of respect [for religions] to be
satisfactory to those who wholeheartedly embody the memes we honor with our
attentive--but not worshipful--scholarship. On the contrary, many of them
will view anything other than enthusiastic conversion to their own views as
a threat, even an intolerable threat. We must not underestimate the
suffering such confrontations cause. To watch, to have to participate in,
the contraction or evaporation of beloved features of one's heritage is a
pain only our species can experience, and surely few pains could be more
terrible. But we have no reasonable alternative, and those whose visions
dictate that they cannot peacefully coexist with the rest of us we will have
to quarantine as best we can, minimizing the pain and damage, trying always
to open a path or two that may come to seem acceptable.
"If you want to teach your children that they are the tools of God, you had
better not teach them that they are God's rifles, or we will have to stand
firmly opposed to you: your doctrine has no special glory, no intrinisic and
inalienable merit. If you insist on teaching your children falsehoods--that
the Earth is flat, that "Man" is not a product of evolution by natural
selection--then you must expect, at the very least, that those of us who
have freedom of speech will feel free to describe your teachings as the
spreading of falsehoods, and will attempt to demonstrate this to your
children at the earliest opportunity. Our future well-being--the well-being
of all of us on the planet--depends on the education of out descendants."
This passage is frequently misquoted by anti-evolutionists.
Richard Wein (Tich)
See my web pages for various games at http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~tich/
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